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Hello Diablo community, welcome to another Diablo 4 Campfire Chat. My name is Adam Fletcher, I am the Associate Director of Community here for Diablo. I'm joined here by Joe Shelley, Game Director of Diablo 4, and Mr. Joe Paipora, the Associate Game Director for Diablo 4. We have a lot to talk about today. Obviously we have this Campfire Chat because we do want to talk about the patch that just released this past week, which is patch 1.1.0. We've seen a ton of feedback, we've heard a lot of feedback, and so we do want to go through a lot of the points of feedback that we've been hearing and at the same time the patch itself. The biggest thing to kick us off here, I think we want to obviously acknowledge everyone's feedback in regards to reducing player power. We know it is bad, we know it is not fun, and it's something that we ourselves know that it's not the greatest play experience for players out there. We do want to explain why we ended up doing it within the actual patch, and then of course we also want to talk about what we were trying to achieve specifically with this patch and with the changes that players ended up seeing. And then separately we do want to also talk about how we don't plan on doing a patch like this ever again. We have most definitely heard the feedback from the players on that front, and we do want to talk a little bit about our philosophy, our own internal statements that we were setting for ourselves for future updates for the game itself. And then of course we do want to also talk about how we can talk better and communicate with the community better in regards to patches and updates coming to the game and what we can do to improve on that. So I know that the first thing we do want to talk about though, as I said, was talking about why we ended up doing this in this patch. I do want to throw it over to Mr. Joe Pipewra over here to talk a little bit more about that. Sure. So I know that we've talked on stream before about our intentions for Diablo 4 being a game about choice. And part of that is ensuring that the various class options feel like they've got a place in the meta experience. And that kind of goes to some of the changes we've made in 1.1. Now Adam already called out that we've heard the feedback with regard to the patch, and we know that reducing player power is never a good experience in general. And I want to talk through some of the things that brought us to where we are today in terms of decisions we were making and why. So a few of the really big changes that were made as part of 1.1, first really I guess to cool down reduction. So we changed the amount of CDR that players can get as part of the affix ranges and items that are rolling for them as they're going through the experience. CDR is one of the, if not the most powerful stat in many ways in Diablo 4. And the reason for it is obvious. When you're able to get CDR to a certain point when using certain class mechanisms, you're able to get effectively instantaneous active skills. So that can give you unlimited resource, it can give you unlimited movement speed, give you unlimited damage resist. And it begins to dwarf the effectiveness of other options when you start trying to take these things into account. Now, we know that blasting through content with those things is really fun, so it feels really, really painful to have to take some of those things away. And we certainly don't relish the idea. That was the original thinking for these sorts of bits. One of the reasons why we think that these builds are very prevalent at the moment is based upon the nature of some of the end-game content we have in Diablo 4. In particular, thinking about Nightmare Dungeons, especially. The reality is that Nightmare Dungeons are dramatically over-tuned from where they actually need to be based upon the role they fill in the game itself. So Tier 100 Nightmare Dungeons are excruciatingly difficult for most classes to be able to actually get through. And as a result, it begins to winnow the opportunities and options that players have when they begin to engage with content at that tier, such that you really do require, you need to lean on very, very specific builds, very specific setups, with access to things like near-instantaneous cooldowns for some skills, in an effort to actually make it through those spaces. And that was never really the intent of that content. And we see that. Players are using Nightmare Dungeons as ways to level up their glyphs, ways for them to gain experience and loot as they're progressing up. It's largely like a level-up system that you're progressing with once you get into World Tiers 3 and 4. But they've taken on an outsized role as sort of this new end-game chase opportunity for players who are looking to really challenge themselves. And we love that we have, we want that kind of content, and we want that experience for those players. And we feel like we have done a reasonably good job of that with Uber Lilith in the game. But we don't feel that Tier 100 Nightmare Dungeons fulfill the same role at all. Just the nature of the content type doesn't actually work well as that kind of pushing opportunity. So one thing we actually plan on doing, and we'd hope to get out as part of this release, we're going to get out very, very soon, is we're making a reduction in the difficulty of some aspects of Nightmare Dungeons to kind of retune some things. And the goal here is to say that, you know, we think that roughly where you are with a Nightmare Dungeon Tier 70, that's kind of where we actually want the difficulty to be for a Tier 100 as players are going through the experience. So there's still a thing to push for, but it's more reasonable. And as part of this exchange, we know that players really like kind of blasting and pushing hard for these sorts of things. They feel like big achievements. We are going to be looking at creating a new content type, a new end-game content type that's going to be more directly meant to address those sorts of players and give people more things to chase. That's part of the commitment to the live services, to make sure that we're always adding new things like this for players to go and try to kind of chase after to kind of maximize and use their builds in fun and interesting ways. So that's another really big thing. Next, we made a number of changes to sorceress skill, like sorceress builds in general that sort of ended up having a net impact of really reducing their effectiveness with some of their most powerful builds at the moment. And the goal at the time was to try to bring their builds back in line with one another so that they could start trying to bring everything up at once as opposed to having these things as they are. And this actually leads to a really good conversation about the idea of balance in general. I said before that Diablo 4 is a game that is about choice, and that remains our goal. That's our guiding light. We're trying to make decisions on balance and design in general. And sometimes we don't always get it quite right, and I think that we see that with some builds that are just simply not performing to the level that they need to be because they just don't have the right interactions with the kind of content or skills that you actually really want to use to get through the game. This is an example of when we're thinking about our goals in terms of creating this balanced experience where there's lots of interesting choices for players to engage with, we cannot make balanced decisions without accounting for the way that players are going to feel about those things we're playing those classes. If our goal is to create an ultimately balanced experience without regard for how much fun the player is having as part of that exchange, that would be a failure on our part to not think about things. So we have plans that I know that we're going to talk about a little bit later to address this more clearly. But understand that we've heard this, and we have plans in the very near future to address these sorts of things. Another bit that speaks to this is the change that was made for vulnerable damage. I think that there are a lot of players in the community who dove deep into a lot of our systems in Diablo 4 and see that vulnerable damage is a really outsized role that it plays in terms of a lot of build making. To the point where it feels that you'll get to certain parts of content, and creatures need to be vulnerable in order for you to feel that you can damage them. This is something that we're very aware of, and we made a reduction as part of the 1.1 build that reduced player damage in general because most players rely on many, many builds, I should say, rely on vulnerable damage to kind of spike in lots of different kinds of content. This is something we also need to talk about. Vulnerable damage is far more potent right now than we actually want it to be in general across the game. I think I've talked about this before. We need to bring these things back in line. This is a more complicated conversation than simply just saying we can take a bonus damage to vulnerable creatures number and reduce it by 40% in terms of the amount of damage you can get across different sources, and have that be the way that we solve this problem. Really, I think we all know that the ultimate problem with damage to vulnerable creatures is the fact that it is multiplicative stacking on top of the base vulnerable damage, which is already multiplicative on its own. This is the reason why the stat plays such an outsized role in a lot of player builds. We're going to need to move that to an added place, but we can't do that without making a number of other adjustments to critical strike damage, to the way that overpower damage is both calculated in Delta creatures, and the availability of these things across various builds. There's lots of builds that rely on vulnerable and their balance around the idea that the damage is also multiplicative, so a number of their balance and tuning changes will need to be made in order to be able to bring vulnerable back in line with some of the other options we have out there. This is how we're thinking about these things moving forward. We want to start trying to be a little more inclusive of all these decisions when we begin considering which of these balance adjustments we want to make, rather than being in this iterative place where we're making small adjustments to a number of different things along the way, with an end goal in mind of where we actually eventually want to be. We want to be trying to consider what the experience is going to be like from moment to moment, rather from update to update and release to release, to get things in a better spot. While we do believe that having our season role gives us the opportunity to reset our meta and change a lot of things, that obviously has an impact on internal players, the way that they perceive the characters they're still playing in that space, and it can be disruptive for players if they found a particular play style that they're really excited about. I know that Joe, you're going to talk about some of these things in a minute, so this is an awkward handoff. I just want to make it really, it's a very awkward handoff, I'm sorry. I want people to understand that we do hear the things that they're saying. We do plan on making changes in the near future, and just kind of thinking philosophically about how we want to address these things moving forward. With that, I guess Joe, would you like to share about your thinking? Yeah, so I think it's a great point, a great lead-in here. As Adam mentioned, we want to talk about, we kind of talked a little bit about how we got here. We want to talk about what we're going to do about that. I think one of the really good points you made is like, vulnerable is, for example, vulnerable is like a must-take stat, right? And it would be better if it wasn't a must-take stat. But more of a build option. The game will be better when that's the case. But if along the way to getting to that, the game is less fun, then we're not fulfilling our obligation to players, right? That's right. So I want to talk about our mission statement for the live game. And I think we have a, yeah, perfect. So there are four parts to this. We're going to start with the first part. We want the live game to always have a wide variety of viable builds to discover, to put together, to acquire the items for, and to optimize across all five of our classes. Second point, every season should introduce new items and powers that keep the game fresh and increase build variety. Moving on to the third point, the live game should also have continually evolving end game content. And that content needs to have high monster density for powerful builds to mow down, and it needs to have activities that challenge your build. And, you know, you were just talking about how while Nightmare Dungeons, I'll get to the fourth point in a second. While Nightmare Dungeons are technically challenging your build, they're challenging your build in some ways that are not very fun, right? Like being CC'd all the time. Yes, that's correct. Going through 20 tiers of Nightmare Dungeons where every monster can one-shot you, and if you get clipped by one bit of chill, you're permanently snared, right? Or got completely frozen. These are not things that the Nightmare Dungeons system is doing particularly well right now in terms of making challenging content. Right. So I think that's why it's so important, your call out, that we plan to introduce additional content that fulfills that part of the mission statement to challenge your builds. If we can go back to the screen. I got kind of side-tracked, but I think it was really important. And, of course, ultimately what we're trying to do is make the game more fun for players, right? Players are at the heart of everything that we're doing, and if the game is not more fun for players, and we're not making the game, if players can't believe that as the game evolves it will get more fun, then we're not accomplishing our goals either. Right. And so the other point I want to go to here is a change that, you know, Adam was talking about, how do we make sure that the next time we do a patch, we don't have, this doesn't happen, right? And so I want to talk about a, we call it a key process improvement. Key process improvement, that's like a weird jargon term, a change that we're making that will help us avoid this situation. So I think we have a slide for this. When we make, and this goes, again, this is right along what you were saying here. When we make changes to increase build diversity, our goal, going back to the mission statement, is we want to have a wide variety of viable builds, right? So when we make changes that have the ultimate aim of increasing build diversity, we need to pair those changes with compelling alternatives. And that means that there are some builds that will be overpowered, and we can't nerf those overpowered builds without providing compelling alternatives for players to pursue. That's right. It means that things like, when we identify that there are a few individual, like meta builds or stats that are really, really powerful within preseason or within a season, that until we have created those other options and redesigned things around the nature of these and made sure that we've lifted up other options and brought everything in line, we're not going to move on those changes. There's going to be always situations where there are extraordinary outliers that we're going to want, they're usually relying on actual bugs that we need to address. But when it comes to trying to bring things back in line with one another, we want to be able to make sure that when we make those decisions, we have a bevy of other options and alternatives available for players to engage with at the same time. So if player seed is taking a toy away, that we're giving lots of other toys, we're lifting up other toys to make them more viable as part of the exchange. Yeah, and that those toys are equally exciting. Yes. So let's go to the second point of this here. When we make changes like this, it's important for us to make them at predictable times, and Adam's going to talk a little bit more about our communication strategy here in a bit. The start of a season is an especially good time for meta changes to happen because there's a big refresh, everyone is rolling new characters, and there's new seasonal content. And changes like that will also appear in Eternal at the same time. And the third point here, as Joe alluded to, there are certain situations, we saw a case where we had a skill that could do 10 to the 37 damage. In cases like that where the damage is literally breaking the game or crashing the servers, we'll still react to those situations, but that doesn't change the first point here in terms of allowing builds to be overpowered. And I think one of the things that's important to recognize and state is that ultimately, ARPGs, or some people call them hack and slash games, are about power fantasy, right? And they're about us inviting players to break the game to some extent, not to crash. There are lots of ways to interpret the word break. And find fun toys that we've made, do crazy things with them, and we need to make sure that we aren't trying to punish players for doing that. Because ultimately, that's the playground we built. We built a game that's like, go find crazy stuff, and we need to make sure that when players take that invitation, that we're not punishing them for that. Yeah, and I know when we were talking about at least the Nightmare Dungeon stuff beforehand, and we can go into it in a little bit more detail once we get to the stuff that might be coming down the pipe here, the one thing I think that I wanted to really highlight on was, obviously we did this patch and we made these changes and we brought character power down, like player power down, essentially. That in itself was also supposed to be paired with these Nightmare Dungeon changes that Joe was actually talking about earlier. And it's something that we've learned throughout this process as you guys were talking about that, we have ultimate visions for something that is further down the line, and doing that all together at once during those moments, as opposed to doing them over time and whatnot, just leads to a better experience overall for players. And that's something that we most definitely will be doing as we build out future updates and patches and so forth. Of course, a key component to this is how we communicate to players, and there has been a lot of feedback in regards to like, hey, it would have been great if we knew some of these changes were coming down the pipe, and it's a hefty amount of patch notes, we could have digested this over a few days beforehand or a week beforehand. So one thing we do want to commit to right now is that we do plan on going forward, always providing patch notes and communicating these patch notes through streams like this, through campfire chats or developer update live streams beforehand, well beforehand, like at least a week before the actual update hits, no matter the state. Because I know sometimes we're still trying to maybe potentially squeeze in a few different things into patch notes and stuff like that, up until the last second, just on the nature of production of how we are. But I will say we do plan on sharing those, no matter what, to the community going forward, from here on out, through a stream or written through blog or something like that beforehand, well beforehand, before players can actually get into game and actually try it out on their end. So at least we can hear feedback and you guys can actually digest the information beforehand. In fact, we do actually have, of course, future updates here that we do want to talk about here really quickly, but one thing that we will commit to right now is that next Friday, so exactly one week from now, we'll be back on a live stream, because we'll start with that live stream, where we will be talking about our next patch that will be coming to Diablo 4. We'll talk a little bit about some of the details here, but we'll go into more detail next Friday specifically. But we will be back on here to go through the whole entire patch notes with everyone beforehand, so everyone has a better expectation of what they're going to be seeing in the actual update, and they can talk to us through chat, through social media, through Reddit, through our forums, etc. beforehand, before the actual patch hits. So we will get times and remind everyone, of course, throughout the week, that we will have another Campfire Chat to talk about patch 1.1.1, since we just shipped 1.1.0, 1.1.1. But we do want to talk a little bit about patch 1.1.1 today, just because there are some items that we are aware of, that we know will be of interest to players, specifically when it comes to things that they've been asking for, and at least it gives you guys a little bit of an early preview of some stuff that's coming down the road. I think one big thing that everyone has been talking about, as of late from this current patch, is some of the Sorcerer and Barbarian items and stuff like that, and how we've obviously tuned a lot of classes down, and there's questions of, hey, is there any changes in the future for those two? Yeah, we're taking a long look at a lot of the Sorceress and Barbarian aspects that aren't being utilized very well right now, and trying to lift a lot of those back up. So there's going to be a wide range of legendary power and unique item improvements for these two classes in particular. We're taking a look at a lot of things, but we're really honing in specifically on Sorceress first, and then also getting a lot of Barbarian updates in there at the same time. And again, this is for 1.1.1, so the very next patch in the cycle. Yeah, and we expect that patch, obviously if we're having a livestream now next Friday, we expect that patch here in the next couple weeks or so, so at least you guys can get an early preview on it. Yeah, and on that Friday we'll be talking a lot about the specifics of all of those changes, and hearing what the community says. Yep. And in fact, the Nightmare Dungeon items that we were just talking about just now, we're planning on actually rolling that out in a hotfix specifically, and that is something that we actually plan on rolling out later today. So we'll have more information on the Nightmare Dungeon changes that we talked about earlier that will be coming out later today via hotfix. Another big thing that we've talked about in patch notes, because we've toned it down, and we had mentioned to players that we did plan on bringing it back up, it is monster density in Nightmare Dungeons and Helltide, so I know that you guys had some plans and so forth related to that. Yeah, so going back to the mission statement I mentioned earlier, a key part of the live game is having high-density areas for players to mow down. Yeah, a key part of ARPGs, right. Of which Diablo IV is one. That's true. Pardon my grammar. And so we're going to be increasing the density in Nightmare Dungeons substantially, and we're going to be increasing the density in Helltide as well. Now, with the Nightmare Dungeon changes across the board for Nightmare Dungeons, all Nightmare Dungeons will get more dense. The Helltide change, there are certain areas of Helltide that are extremely dense, like the Tar Pits, for example, is very dense. Areas like that probably won't get more dense, and part of what we've been doing here at the same time in terms of these density changes is making sure that we're making performance improvements, like looking at player skills that are taking a lot of time on the servers, getting those into better performance so players have better frame rates and stuff, and fewer stalls, and all these kinds of things that make the game more fun to play. And this also helps us increase the number of more monsters, more players, more stuff going on, and we know that the density in Nightmare Dungeons in particular needs to go up, and so we've been working on that to make sure that we can accomplish that. So density in Helltide will go up, not uniformly. Density in Nightmare Dungeons will go up uniformly, and these will be substantial increases. Yep, which I know players have been talking about constantly, wanting additional density on this. Rightly so. And a big topic right now is inventory concerns we've heard from players. I know we've talked about gems and so forth actually becoming materials in Season 2, which to help out with some inventory concerns specifically, I know you guys have information at least in regards to stash and what might be coming in 1.1.1. Yes, so certainly the gem change is still coming in Season 2, like you said, but we need more stash help now, right? And so in 1.1.1 we're going to be adding an additional stash tab for players so they can store more aspects, more Malignant Hearts. This has been an ongoing conversation every week inside the dev team of, do we feel that we're ready to do this yet? Do we feel that we're ready to do this yet? The density conversation and the stash tab conversation. The engineering team's been working really, really hard to be able to make these adjustments possible for us. And there's more that we're doing. This is now a never-ending conversation of what else can we do, what else can we be doing to try to improve the experience? But we've definitely heard these two concerns and we're just really happy to be able to bring them in as early as 1.1.1. Yeah. Oh, and I should mention that along with this stash tab, we're making a small change to Elixir stack size. We're going to bring that up to 99. So that'll help a little bit. Awesome. Obviously, with new starts to Seasons, and if we do have these types of changes that occur within the patch that may change, whether it's the meta or the balance of specific things, there's been questions related to respecs and how that has been pretty expensive on people's own personal economies with gold and so forth. I know we have respec changes that are also coming with the game itself. You guys probably know more specifics on the numbers. Yeah, I mean, this really goes back. Joe was talking about our commitment to choice earlier. But I think it also goes back to when we say in the mission statement, we want to have a wide variety of viable builds. Great, but if you can't switch between those builds, then it still feels punishing. So we're going to bring respec costs down by about 40%, quite a bit. Yeah, so it should help out with people that want to switch over to a different build and so forth, or they do have to adjust over to another build. They get the option of actually being able to do so, or have an easier option of being able to do so. And that will be in 1.1.1 as well. And that will be in 1.1.1 as well. And then I know, lastly, one big thing is as players progress through the game and the leveling curve goes through, especially post-70 or so, we've been looking at the player journey and how they've been getting up to 100. I know there's some changes that you guys are looking at in terms of experience and so forth. Yeah, I mean, the short version is we want to make leveling from 50 to 100 faster by adjusting XP. I don't know if you have more. Yeah, I was realizing I was talking earlier about the changes we made. Obviously, we also made the change to XP gain when fighting creatures above your level. I failed to mention this, discussing it. So the original intent for that was we found players basically sitting at fighting creatures three levels above them and never felt like they were really challenging themselves beyond that. We wanted to stretch that out a bit further, but that went from a 25% bonus to a 15% bonus. And we knew that density changes were coming online, so we thought about this a little bit. I read a lot of feedback afterwards in particular that just made it sound like people thought that we were just trying to make the game take longer, which wasn't actually the goal, but realized that the 25% to 15% change did constitute a nerf result. That is the thing that we're thinking about as well. We are not trying to slow down the game. No, and to that point, we have a vision for how long we want the game to take for players. We realize that it's taking a little bit longer than what our vision was originally for a lot of folks that are leveling up, particularly when they get to certain parts of the game, like when they're World Tiers 3 and 4. So we are looking to really readjust the XP rates for those areas because we aren't looking to have you hit this absolute brick wall when you hit level 70 or something. There's not these moments where you feel like you just can't, or 75. We don't want you to have this feeling that you just can't make meaningful progress and we're just artificially holding you back. But it's never been the vision or the goal. It ended up working out that it wasn't... The players weren't earning XP at the rate that we had originally expected is what it really came down to. So we are making changes in this regard to bring this down a bit. And you've seen, certainly we did things like increase the XP bonus for Nightmare Dungeons a while back quite substantially. And Whisper Completion, Helltide Chaos. Now, notwithstanding that, there are changes to XP related to addressing the power leveling case. Because we don't have... Group up, have fun with your friends power leveling each other. The only case that we think is not very fun is the case where one person is standing at the entrance to the dungeon and the other person is having all the fun killing monsters. And so, when we look at the balance of the XP changes in 1.1.0, we think that additional changes need to be made to make the game faster, especially between 50 and 100. Yeah, we want level 1 to 100 to feel like an achievement, but not like a job. So we want to make some adjustments to make sure that it feels fun. Very achievable, obviously, within the season timeline. But yeah, we are going to make some adjustments. We'll be talking about more probably next week. Yeah, very soon. So again, we'll be back on stream next Friday to talk about all the details of the changes, including the Barb and the Sorcerer changes that Joe had mentioned, along with other changes that we are preparing right now for the patch itself. That patch itself is supposed to be hitting in the next couple of weeks. Obviously, if we're doing the stream on Friday, it means it's coming pretty darn soon after that stream. But we did want to make sure that we got in front of players to actually talk to them about everything. And we plan on doing that going forward if we ever have one of these larger patches that actually makes some pretty significant changes within the game. We'll either get in front of you guys via stream or we'll end up posting about them earlier so that you guys get a better idea of what's to come for those. I know that we do want to take some questions, a bunch of questions actually, from chat and so forth. I know one big question that has always kind of come up has been about leaderboards and so forth, and the expectation of when those might be coming in. I know that ideally we're aiming for Season 3 for the leaderboards in itself. I don't know if you guys have any additional information or additional insight onto those from your end. Yeah, so one thing that's really important to us for leaderboards in Diablo 4 is that we don't think that tying this directly to Nightmare Dungeons or content type exactly like that is going to make a lot of sense because of the variety of the nature of the system. So we want to make a content type that kind of partners directly with leaderboards so that you can be judged in this kind of more even playing field when you're going through that experience. But that is content that we are actively in development on and are excited to try to get ready for Season 3. So we're going to be making... Yeah, I'm sorry, the short answer to this is, yeah, instead of our competitive feature, we are making a specific content type that goes alongside that you're judging yourself against, and we're looking for Season 3 for that. Question from YouStupidWalrus is, Uber Uniques, what's the future? They mathematically don't exist, so I don't think it's a good waste of resources of them anymore. Sorry, I was really distracted by the walrus. Can you read the question again? Uber Uniques, what's the future? They mathematically don't exist, so I don't think it's good to waste resources on them in the future. Yeah, that's a good question. So Uber Uniques are designed to weigh that they are a huge spike of power, and we're receiving feedback, and we understand the feedback on some of them. But they represent a huge spike of power and as such are not expected to be part of builds necessarily. One of our goals underlying is we don't want players to feel that one of these are mandatory that you must find in an effort to bring your build online. From the ground up, we kind of made the decision to say, it is okay, we want players to find these, but we don't want them to expect to find these, which is a difficult place to balance in terms of drop rates when you're thinking about these. Now, right now, I believe that they are exceedingly rare, and we do want them to feel very, very rare, but I suspect that as we start moving into future seasons, we do want to find more ways for players, more opportunities for players to get chances at these, and I imagine we will talk about that soon. But I would suggest that the current drop rates are probably not going to be the drop rates forever. We'll probably make those a little bit more common, a little more likely to be found as time goes on. A big topic that I'm seeing just pop up in chat and so forth, a lot of comments about crowdfunding, crowd control, and if there's any plans or ways that we're looking at addressing crowd control here in the future. Yeah, as I mentioned earlier in the stream, or I think we both talked about it, we think that when you have high density of monsters on screen, and you have a lot of elites, the crowd control, the tools that you have for crowd control are not, need to be better, basically. And some of that is going to be adjustments to things that feel unfair, and some of that is going to be adjustments in terms of your tools. I think that we'll be able to, you know, this is something that we'll be able to speak more to in terms of specifics about how we're going to address that, but we agree it's a problem. A question from IK Rekote. I tried. I'm so bad with names. I'm sorry. When will loadouts be added? It's a feature that the UI team is very excited about, and something we've talked about a bit internally. We don't have a timeline for the idea of loadouts just yet, but it is something that we're continuing to actively talk about. When we have more information to share in terms of like when something like this could potentially be added to Diablo 4, I'm sure that we'll talk about it. Barago, Barag0, says, what is the timeframe on 1.1.1? It doesn't seem very clear. Is it before the middle of the season? How long do I need to wait for Sorcerer and Barbs to have their changes and be playable? It is much sooner than mid-season. As I said, it's only like a couple weeks away, and by a couple weeks I mean like very, very soon. Like if we're doing a stream on Friday, I would expect it within a couple days after the stream. We have to provide some... if we say anything too specific today, production will choke us out. So we have to be very careful about the language we use, but yes, very soon. Only because with patches themselves, of course, we're on a lot of different platforms and everything, and of course those go through certification. If a certification gets pushed back or whatnot, then we obviously need to readjust schedules, so it's hard for us to actually put a specific timeline until that actually occurs. But very, very soon. BoldBeast79, are there any plans for some changes for experience between, say, level 75 to 100? This is actually something that we just commented on, but the journey feels a bit dull, there are several events, but only nightmare dungeons to provide challenge, world bosses, Helltides, and Whispers are a good idea, but just too easy. Yeah, so we talked about... I guess there's two real parts to this. Are we making changes to the XP progression for players while they're moving through World Tier 4 in this case? And the answer is yes, we are going to be looking at making changes to that, and we'll talk more about that soon. And then secondly, do we feel that there are the right number of milestones for players to engage with? Enough goals to consume while you're also just leveling up, enough content to do as you're leveling up in these world tiers? And I think the answer is no, we know that there's more things that we need to add to the game, particularly for World Tier 4. But really, just once you get into World Tier 3 and 4, just find more opportunities and more content and new things for players to do as they're leveling up through those spaces. And we do have plans for those things, and we do have thoughts on stuff we want to add in Season 2 in particular, and some things we're looking to continue to talk about moving forward. But yeah, we recognize that there's more, we would like to add to that journey to create more variety. And more moments of challenge as well while you're progressing, not just at 100, but all along the way. Podoc24 says, what are your plans to adjust loot drops? This, I'm going to add on to his question after I read it. It feels very frustrating to grind for days without ever seeing anything close to an upgrade, or finding the right aspect. Even worse, when you finally do it, and it's a terrible roll. I'm also going to modify that and mention target farming, which has also been a topic within the community. I'm not sure if you guys want to have any plans and so forth for that. So I think there's a couple parts to this as well, right? There's the idea of, I grind for a long time to get an item, and the item is not an upgrade. Particularly, again, when you're in World Tiers 3 and 4, where you start dealing with sacred items and ancestral items, where you're kind of dealing with this larger bucket of iPower range, this can certainly tend to be true. Unless you're looking for specific kinds of affixes, you're looking for particular kinds of rolls, right? So there's a couple things. One, we know we want to try to reduce the difficulty of comparing and looking at a number of different items all at once, and trying to get a better sense of that. These are things the UI team is very passionate about, and conversations are ongoing in terms of how we want to achieve that. Things like loot filters, object, things like that. There's the idea of how does the progression of itemization feel, particularly in World Tier 4, while you're leveling up there. And the systems team has ideas on things they would like to include. It's too early for us to say exactly, to really lay them all out just now. But there are ideas and things we want to do to improve the feeling of progression through the ancestral tier, since you feel like there's more thresholds and there's more opportunities to get upgrades as you go. And then lastly, there's this idea of target farming. So legendary aspects of the game are really important. So legendary aspects are a place I think that we can afford to do more. We know that players are looking for certain aspects, they're trying to find certain things. They're trying to find particularly unique items, I think is often the case. They want their tapestry, or whatever it is they're looking for, they're looking for that thing. We do have plans in Season 2 right now to have more content you can try to target farm in order to find certain unique items. And I think there's a natural extension of that to figure out what's the right way for players to be able to find an easier method of getting into some of the aspects they might be looking for as they're progressing through. So that is something that the rewards and systems teams will be thinking about and hoping to be able to talk about soon on stream. Yeah, and I do want to note, I know we have an update here coming for 1.1.1, which we've just talked about in the next couple weeks. There are going to be other patches before Season 2 and so forth with additional changes. Yes. And items that we just haven't noted and I just want to clarify specifically on that. We do have more patches beyond 1.1.1 before Season 2 to address a lot of feedback that we're receiving from players and a lot of opportunities for us to actually do so. Can we get some sort of matchmaking system to help with partying up with random people or group finders? I know we had talked about group finders before. I know this is something that the team has obviously received feedback about, like helping out with the social systems and so forth within the game. It is being evaluated, I know, and the teams are looking at it. We just don't have an exact timeline of when those are actually coming in specifically from that end. Are there going to be changes with armor? Sorry, I forgot. Andy from Man was the last question. Beanpop10 says, are there going to be changes with armor regarding survivability? Hardcore is almost unplayable on Sorcerer with one shots from corpse bows due to low innate armor. Yeah, I think survivability, especially on Sorcerer, is something that the changes that Joe was talking about that we'll be talking about in more detail next week is one of the things we want to include in that. We recognize that. Yeah, we also identified there are a few outstanding monster types and abilities that are killing players a little more frequently than we expect. We're looking at creatures that explode when they die, for example, claiming an awful lot of lives. Creatures that can chill, claiming an awful lot of lives. Or charging creatures, we've also learned. Charging creatures, yeah. I've seen a lot of reports about that, and I know, and you're about to say. Which I think have been nerfed like twice now. Well, there's a bug fix on the beast charge in particular, where beast charge could deal damage even if you interrupted the charge or the beast died. Oh, I see. Well, that's a good bug fix. So, we're identifying some of these really, really difficult nightmare dungeon affixes, or ones that claim a disproportionate amount of player lives as part of that. And we're looking at those all at once. Sorcerer's survivability is absolutely an issue, and we're going to be talking about it more in the 1.1.1 conversation next week. But there's also this idea of there's a lot of things out there that are just doing a lot of What feels to the player in the moment pretty cheap, like unfair, like I sort of just died, don't really see what happened. So, we're looking at more of these situations and trying to figure out the right places to make adjustments. We don't want the game to be easy. We don't want you to be able to walk through every encounter. We want the game to feel deadly at times. We want you to feel like you have an opportunity to kind of evade or deal with those situations. In regards to someone, Zeus DNA says, we'll be seeing the hotfix notes before the hotfix comes out today. Yeah, we'll get the notes up. The deployment hasn't started and it's not starting until later this afternoon, but we'll get the notes up so that players can see it, and we'll be mentioning it so that players can actually read through them and so forth. This is a pretty large hotfix in terms of items that we're actually fixing and the nightmare dungeon stuff that we had just talked about. Templar Knights asks, Question, can we change the codex in such a way that we can upgrade the values with founded legendary items? This could reduce the demand to stash, avoid aspects laying around, easier adopting player tier balance changes, but we still want to find items and increase codex values. So, we know that one of the key things that players are carrying in their stash right now are lots and lots of aspects. And we're talking about ways to address that. That's an interesting suggestion. I think it's sort of going toward the same direction here, which is how can we address the case where your stash is completely full of aspects? And certainly having an extra stash tab will not hurt that problem, but I think there's more that we'd like to do in terms of the aspects. Yeah, it's certainly something we've been discussing internally for a while. I think part of this is just how much fun is it to be able to extract an aspect from an item and be able to maintain that role? And then how much is that fun, so fun, that it's worth? Some of the inventory pressure that comes about as a result of that. That's a conversation we've had within the dev team. We're going to continue to talk about it, but we know that there's definitely a lot of improvements we can make to the codex of power, for example, to be embracing some of these other affix extraction systems. A question from DRJ16. Has the team considered how certain nerfs like weapon cooldown reduction are so much more impactful for certain classes than others? Yes. The team is definitely aware that some of these changes disproportionately affect, like the vulnerable damage change disproportionately affecting, like cold swords. We're definitely aware that some of these changes disproportionately affect some classes and builds more than others. And this goes back to my earlier point about when we're going to be making changes like this moving forward, that we know we're going to have an overall effect of reducing certain effects down, or rather reducing certain powers or affixes or whatever it is, down to a place where we want people to use the baseline to build from for other parts of the game. That when we do those things, it's going to affect these different players in different ways, and they're not going to enjoy that if we've ruined their build in order to try to weed the garden and get things into a better place. Ultimately, we're going to be trying to do a lot more situations where if we're going to take a thing away, we're going to update something where it's no longer going to be as valuable as part of your build. We want to provide a lot of other options as part of that, make sure we don't leave the build with a gaping, like giant hole in it as a result of the change that we made. So this is going to, again, it's going to mean that moving forward, when we're making like larger scale balance and tuning adjustments, we're going to do those a little more slowly as a result in order to make sure that we're embracing all of these other, like, components to give a lot of options all at once when we make a change. Yeah, it goes back to the change we had on the screen before, right? We're going to provide compelling alternatives when we make those kinds of changes. That's a punchy way to say it. Punchy way. Kenny Wah says, Question, why did you guys increase the cast time on stuff like leaving dungeons? Feels like you're trying to slow down the game by making us waste time for something that might feel useless. We can look at that. We can continue to evaluate that change. It's a fairly small difference. I know that in an ARPG, small amounts of time can be meaningful. We did add the reset dungeon button back in. It does require that you're outside the dungeon, and so there's kind of a loop there. Loki5123 asks, Are you going to add more than six or seven items a season? Are there plans to add more? The feeling is they feel like they want more items per season than are actually added in. We've always said that we wanted to take in the feedback from the players as we got these seasons out the door. So season one, we add the 32 Millenium Hearts, which I think are pretty cool. We're going to be looking at the balance of them to lift them up and make them a little more exciting in some places. But broadly, we're pretty happy with what they generally are. Then we have our Uniques and our Legendary items that we added with the season as well. I think if we see that there's a lot of interest in trying to get more of these, we can start trying to think about how we can inject a few more Legendaries into the game with each season, or a couple more Uniques potentially into the game with each season. But we want to continue to see what the feedback looks like. This is a good example of people asking for more, so good to know. Separately from that, are you guys looking at potentially reworking or redoing some things? Patch 1.1.1 is in that vein of trying to get these things into a slightly better place. We do want to go back over our existing Legendary Power Library and identify the ones where they can afford to be lifted up with redesigns and changes to the way that some parts of them work, so they better fulfill the stated purpose in terms of where they're supposed to sit in builds. There's going to be a lot of opportunities for that along the way as well. The only way we inject new fun into the game isn't going to just be through the Season Mechanic, it's going to be through the addition of brand new Legendaries and Uniques, but also going back over the existing Legendary Powers after we see players use them a little bit more, making adjustments accordingly. Question from PandaMalicy and MorMrah. Same question actually, what's your plan for resistances? Right now they feel like a wasted stat. Do we have any changes to resistances that might be changing sooner or later? Resistances fall in one of those categories where we need to make a change to the way that players use resistance to mitigate damage from certain sources. It's going to be a far-reaching change when we actually go through and make this, which means we want to be able to take the time with it and do it properly. Right now we plan to put that into Season 2 as part of a larger rework. You can look forward to more information as we get a little bit closer to Season 2. Shadow Mun, sorry. Can campaign bosses be added to the pool of dungeon bosses that we encounter? I feel like campaign bosses are underutilized. I think there could be more opportunities to fight some of those campaign bosses in the future. I can't comment further on exactly how that will look, but I agree with that sentiment. Sounds good. Joe has often said this, so we definitely want to make sure we find the right ways to bring act bosses in. This is actually a question. PartyCannon30, hi there guys. Thanks for the information. My question is about crashes on PlayStation 5. Is that a known issue? We are aware of some issues on consoles, specifically Xbox, PlayStation, that may be having crash issues from their side. I do want to note, I know with 1.1.0, there was a bug fix towards a specific memory leak that the team was trying to identify and find. They actually did find it and it was addressed there. There was actually an additional fix in 1.1.1, because I've seen a lot of questions, whether on Reddit and so forth, about PC performance and so forth, and even on just performance in general, that will be addressed there. I know that the team, the engineers here, are still actively troubleshooting and figuring out specific situations that players might be running into. Of course, if you have more information on those, please post in console bugs on our forums, and give as much information as possible. Because a lot of those repro steps on our side are sometimes really difficult, and it helps our teams out, helps our QA teams out, to be able to see if they can actually repro the same type of issues that players are having. Do you guys plan on introducing more ways... I'm sorry, this is Mr. Lele... I don't want to butcher that. Do you guys plan on introducing more craft slash modify gear? Currently, only gold has value, and only one stack can be rolled. More ways to craft and modify gear? Yes. We do want to add more options for players to modify the items they're getting. What we have really at the preseason, and now in the Season 1 stay, is still a very baseline experience in terms of item modification. We are looking at more opportunities in the future to allow players to do more with their items. So yeah, that is a plan for the future. The Almighty Striker says, why do the Necromancer minions take ability slots? It could be easily a different button. How many Necromancer minions have beaten Uber Loweth? Lots of questions about, you know, is there... We already answered the drop rates for Uniques and so forth. That was the second part of the question. But I guess the question mostly is about Necromancer minions and ability slots. Also, I saw other questions related to companions, whether they're Druid companions with wolves or Necromancer minions, if there's any changes or plans for those to actually potentially get a little bit more tweaked up. Yeah, this is something we do care about. One of the things that... that sounded dismissive. Yeah, we care about a lot of things, but go on. I was just trying to get to another point, which is... There's some really cool stuff in some of the Blinked Hearts that affects this, in terms of, like, kind of getting credit for additional abilities. Yeah. And we do care a lot about the number of... the sort of, like, ratio of ability to number of slots that it takes up and making that as optimal as possible. Yeah, that's right. We want to make sure that if you're going to play a Necromancer and you're going to summon skeletons, that you are going to be... I mean, that takes up... that's the weight of an ability. You know, like, it's the same as having an active. You know, you want to... you need to, like, play with it. It's going to take a little bit of space in your bar. You don't get that in addition to a bunch of other things. If you don't want to have skeletons on your bar right now, the idea would be to sacrifice a lot of those skills in order to give you that extra space. And in terms of the, like, the viability of, like, minion builds in various parts of the game, there are some builds that are able to, like, get pretty deep into content, obviously, but there is... I think there's still room for improvement in terms of, like, minion survivability and other conversations along those lines. That is something that's still happening. And then there was the other conversation, the question about Druid companions, right? Yeah, kind of similar to Necromancer minions, and people were asking, like, can that ever be a viable thing? Yeah, I think possibly. We see players... actually, there are a few players that run, like, literally all three companion skills and use that as part of the build that they'll go after for their Druid. And I think that there's likely room here to do more with companion skills. Whether it rises to the full level of, like, a complete, like, spec, I think is going to be interesting, but I think there's... I know that there's people on the team that are very excited about trying to explore more of this side of the Druid over time. But we don't have as many... There aren't as many interconnecting points for the way that you interact with your companions right now and the way that, like, the skeleton army does for the Necromancer in terms of ways that you modify them and do more with them. So there's... I think there's some groundwork we need to do to, like, provide a lot more options there, but something that the team's interested in. I'm going to do one last question here, which is, will there be better loot tables for, like, treasure goblins, any alternate goblin types specifically for those? Yeah, I think we loved how many... You know, D3 has, like, all kinds of... All kinds of goblins. There's, like, 10 different kinds of goblins. 14, maybe. It's been a little while since I looked at that data in the editor. But we think that there's lots of room for there to be more fun goblin types in the future. And in terms of the treasure goblins have a tendency to provide, actually, I had a conversation with the lead designer last week talking about this. We are going to be buffing, like, legendary drop chance, for example, from items that will appear from treasure goblins. We do want them to feel a little bit more exciting when the moment they drop. Awesome. Cool. Well, I know we talked about a lot today. I just want to recap some stuff that we had mentioned today. Obviously, we've been hearing a lot of feedback regarding the patch, and we're telling you guys now that we completely hear you loud and clear. We don't plan on doing patches like this ever again, where we're not going to be essentially removing the fun and the player power from players drastically like this. And if we ever do that for any type of class, like a build or whatnot, we'll make sure that there's always some really good alternatives for players to actually be able to try out a different build that will also be boosted way back up to kind of help out and give other options for players to actually kind of jump into. And we will ourselves do a better job, of course, communicating back to the community. Again, what we're saying now is that we will be getting patch notes in front of the community way earlier in advance, whether through a campfire chat or through, like, a blog of some sort or any type of communication, so that you guys can get a better chance of looking at patch notes beforehand, seeing any type of changes that might be coming down beforehand, because I think communication is key here. I think you guys not seeing what we were planning on doing and us kind of giving that vision really, really affected a lot of the response from you guys. And I think if we just provided that over to everyone and gave a little bit more of a heads up, I think it would have helped a whole lot there from that specific situation. Well, keeping in mind... Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead. I was just going to say, I think that's absolutely one part of it. And you were talking about it in a more full way, but I want to really make sure I hit on... Like, one of the really great points of feedback that we've been seeing is, like, why can you nerf things today and then buff things far in the future? And so what we're saying is, not only is there a change to communication, but we're also going to pair changes like that together so that we don't have exactly the situation that players have called out as unfair. Yep. Most definitely. And of course, with 1.1.1 coming really soon, we are committing to another Campfire Chat next week, next Friday. Probably the same time, we'll confirm. More than likely it will be 11 a.m. next Friday. We'll end up posting about the details over the next week, just as a reminder to the community. And there we'll actually go through all the changes that we just talked about here into greater detail. Joe, I know, will end up providing greater detail changes on the Barbarian and Sorcerer adjustments that we're going to be making based off of community feedback. And then, of course, we'll also be talking about just essentially everything in the patch notes for that. Patch 1.1.1 will be coming out in a couple weeks with us having a stream next Friday. I anticipate it being very soon or shortly after the stream specifically. And again, we do have a hotfix today that we will be rolling out this afternoon. We'll be having notes related to that hotfix here really soon. And there's a lot of changes in there, including the Nightmare Dungeon changes that we talked about today. So again, thank you guys for the feedback. We most definitely hear you loud and clear. It's something that we wanted to address, and it's something very important for the team here for us to actually address the community and talk to you guys more about it and also change some of the ways that we were doing specific items or specific processes. So we really do appreciate the feedback. Of course, continue providing feedback to us. It's really important for the game itself and for us to make a better experience for the players out there. So thank you guys again for tuning in. We'll see you next Friday for the next Campfire Chat to talk about patch 1.1.1 and all the changes that are coming up. Really appreciate it.