Getting daily patches from developers is usually welcomed by the gaming community. However, Blizzard may have been a little too eager this time around, much to the chagrin of gamers.
Blizzard has released a total of nine hotfixes for Diablo 4 since the game came out last week and most of the patches have nerfed the elite monster spawns for the most popular and wildly efficient farming dungeons in the game. Naturally, fans aren't too happy about seeing their go-to dungeons neutered almost every day.
The most recent hotfixes for Diablo 4 have included balancing updates for popular dungeons. The patch includes tweaks to the spawn rates of Elite monsters in dungeons. According to Blizzard, the devs are working on making the density of elite monsters across dungeons in the game.
"We are standardizing the density of elite monsters that spawn in dungeons to ensure that no particular dungeon is clearly more efficient to run through than others," Blizzard said of the fixes.
Many took to Reddit to express their disappointment with Blizzard’s approach to fixing the imbalance in spawn rates. Specifically, players would've preferred for Blizzard to buff the Elite monster density and spawn rates in less popular ones than nerfing the ones frequented by players.
Blasting through hordes of monsters is one of the most satisfying activities in Diablo 4 and seeing fewer mobs in dungeons is really frustrating.
Running Nightmare Dungeons has, by far, been the most popular endgame activity in Diablo 4 as players are trying to get to the best possible items in the game. There have been a number of choice dungeons in the game that when farmed correctly nets players millions of XP per hour and a handful of legendary items.
Other endgame activities like Helltides, The Tree of Whispers, and hunting open-world bosses haven’t been popular with players. Even less popular is the PVP arena which has seen less than 500,000 players killed in the game’s first week. The Butcher killed ten times more players in the first week with over 5 million.
Ruins of Eridu in Hawezar is still the best pure XP dungeon despite being nerfed. While it isn’t as effective as it was pre-patch, it still nets the most XP out of all the Nightmare dungeons in the game.
Players looking for the best legendary and unique loot can head on to Iron Hold in Hawezer. The monsters in the dungeon drop about 2 legendary items per run (around 2.5 minutes when done correctly) which totals to about 48 high-tier items per hour.
Players looking for a balance of loot and XP will look to Forsaken Quarry in Fractured Peaks as the best Nightmare loot cave.
Blizzard's commitment to supporting Diablo 4 is commendable but the recent nerfs slow down the grind, which turns them from being fun to do to a boring chore
If the studio ever wants players to take on other content, buffing less efficient dungeons is the way to go. The faster the grind, the more players explore other activities in the game like PvP.
