The Ball Lightning Wizard is the latest representative of the overpowered builds. A recurring problem?
Not every build is equal to all others. Time and again, resourceful Diablo 4 players discover combinations of items and skills that are simply better than average. The Ball Lightning wizard has been up to mischief in the second season for some time now.
But although such power was never intended for player hands, Diablo general manager Rod Fergusson doesn’t mind it (anymore).
We’ll explain to you what has changed his opinion in the past few months and how Blizzard will proceed in the future.
Let them have fun
Link to YouTube content
In the above interview with colleagues from Electronic Playground Network, the Diablo 4 chief developer looks back on the first six months of live operation of the action role-playing game – and draws interesting conclusions on the subject of balancing. Because in the future, Blizzard wants to take things more slowly:
Sometimes you focus [als Entwickler] on balance instead of fun. The aim here is to achieve the greatest conceivable degree of fairness, so in the end everything should be roughly equally powerful. Such moments of superiority are fun in a Diablo. The moments when you feel like you’re cheating or trying to outwit the developers by taking advantage of an exploit. This can be really, really fun.
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Diablo 4 – post-test with Season 2
And here comes the change, because where Blizzard often patched almost hectically in active operation at the beginning of Diablo 4’s time in active operation in order to get closer to what was perceived as the optimal balance, the team is now proceeding differently:
We now want to accept and welcome that. In the second season, the ball lightning wizard is ridiculously strong, but we watch and live by the motto: Let them all have fun, we’ll worry about it later.
In short: At some point Blizzard will address such unintentionally efficient builds, but as long as they don’t negatively impact the game for others, the developers seem to want to take a lot more time than they did in the early days.
How would you respond to Rod Fergusson’s statements? Is he right about the more relaxed approach to balancing or would you clearly disagree? Do such builds disrupt the game or should Blizzard let them be looted regularly for a while before patching? Or should these builds not even reach the live servers? Feel free to write us your opinion in the comments!
