Hi everyone, It's only been 2 days since the release of Diablo 4 and I'm already tired of keeping up with the class balancing. It has been minus two (-2) days since the release. Sorry, 2 days from the start of Early Access for the high paying players and 2 days from the official launch. Class balance adjustments!

The patch was released just a few hours later, and a quick overview of the notes shows that the Barbarian, Rogue, and Sorcerer received some nerfs, the Druid received some buffs, and the Necromancer received almost only buffs.

Most notably, the damage reduction per skill rank of the Barbarian's Challenging Shout was halved, the damage reduction per shadow per skill rank of the Rogue's Dark Shroud was also halved, and the Sorcerer had his Shimmering Teleport damage reduction was reduced by 2 seconds. Several other Barbarian skills were nerfed, and their notable item, Devastating Grips of Goal, was completely knocked to the dirt: Whirlwind's explosion damage was reduced from 50-70% to 16-26%. Meanwhile, 15 of the 16 adjustments against the Necromancer increased its power.

Blizzard is very clear about the reason for the patch, stating in the notes: "We want players to feel truly powerful, but some class builds and synergies are outside the realm of what is reasonable for the health of the game, so we have reduced. As an example, we generally want to avoid creating situations where a player can survive unjustifiably large amounts of damage for extended periods of time.

I also found this bugfix very interesting: "Fixed an issue where sorcerers would use Deep Freeze and be affected by other effects that would freeze them, causing them to be permanently stunned." [10

The patch was announced in a note posted last night on Blizzard's forums by community manager PezRadar, about two hours before the patch itself was launched. A warning was given to those playing in hardcore mode: "Since there is a new update and some players are playing in hardcore, we wanted to give you all a heads up about these changes in advance.

I understand that the nature of the game being a live service makes these adjustments feel urgent to many, but I for one hope this is not the pace of balance updates we can expect from "Diablo 4." Patches to adjust how skills work every two or three days will get tiresome very, very quickly when characters start acting differently every time you log in. I can only hope that this damage reduction must have been a really pressing issue that only Blizzard's back-end stats can show.

The complete set of patch notes can be read on Blizzard's website.