Diablo 4 Update 1.1.0a patch notes: Season of the Malignant

Published , by TJ Denzer

Diablo 4’s Update 1.1.0a has been released, coinciding with the launch of its first season. Season of the Malignant will be upon players in just a couple days, but the update sets the stage with a multitude of buffs, nerfs, bug fixes, quality-of-life updates, and much more. What’s inside of Update 1.1.0a? Well, we’ve got the patch notes here for that. Check it out.

Diablo 4 Update 1.1.0a patch notes

Blizzard Entertainment launched Diablo 4 Update 1.1.0a and its accompanying patch notes on July 18, 2023. This one’s a doozy. The patch notes actually came late because they were over 6,600 words and needed to be localized for global release, but now they’re here for your viewing pleasure and you can see what’s going on with your favorite classes, equipment, farming, and more just below as Season of the Malignant prepares to launch:


New Unique items and Legendary Aspects

New Unique items and Legendary Aspects have been discovered in Sanctuary. Use them to enhance your characters in the Eternal or Seasonal Realm. These Unique items can be obtained from World Tier IV and the Legendary Aspects can be obtained from any World Tier.

6 Unique Items

General

Developer’s Note: Ahavarion Spear of Lycander is an extremely rare drop. We wish you luck in recovering it from the armies of the Burning Hells.

Barbarian

Druid

Necromancer

Rogue

Sorcerer

Developer’s Note: The Azurewrath and Fleshrender Unique Items have flat damage effects, which scale with power. For example, at 820 Item Power, Azurewrath deals between 3359-6718 damage.

7 New Legendary Aspects

General

Barbarian

Druid

Necromancer

Rogue

Sorcerer


Bug Fixes

Accessibility

Challenges

Cooperative Play

Dungeons

Gameplay

Barbarian

Developer’s Note: We recognize this adjustment is a significant decrease to the Hammer of the Ancients Barbarian build, but we do not want its strength to be reliant on an underlying bug.

Druid

Necromancer

Rogue

Sorcerer

General

Helltide and the Fields of Hatred

Items and Aspects

Monsters

Quests and Events

User interface and User Experience

Miscellaneous


Loading Screen Updates

We've added more dynamic loading screens with the release of Season of the Malignant. This includes adding more assets to the loading screen, such as your player character.


Gameplay Updates

General

World Tier

Developer’s Note: We like where World Tier II has landed overall but are increasing its reward pace to better align with its difficulty.

Developer’s Note: We want to give players a better sense of their power progression and mastery over the world while still challenging themselves with structured End Game activities.

World Tier III Example:

World Tier IV Example:

Experience

Developer’s Note: We have observed that the experience bonus rewarded for killing higher level monsters escalates too fast when compared to the relative challenge involved. We still want to reward players for taking on this challenge by encouraging them to participate in powerleveling together instead of one player killing enemies while another member of their Party waits at the dungeon’s entrance.

Helltide

Developer’s Note: We're looking to increase the danger in Helltide's risk-reward gameplay by making the monsters a bit more challenging and the Tortured Gift of Mysteries harder to open.


Balance Updates

Developer’s Note: As our community continues to battle the Burning Hells, the builds emerging from new players have shocked and delighted us. We've chosen to focus Season of the Malignant’s balance updates on clear itemization disparities over redesigns of Class features. The Class changes are largely focused on numeric increases to Skill Upgrades and Legendary Aspects that players haven't yet found compelling. Additionally, we're changing Critical Strike Damage Paragon Glyphs to empower all damage—instead of only Core Skills—to enable more build strategies.
There are also a few Class stat decreases on sources which grant extreme amounts of damage, healing, or Unstoppable. In general, we prefer build-specific changes to be bonuses instead of decreases, but we feel these changes are necessary for the overall health of the game. Diablo IV is a game that is continually evolving through its Seasons, thus the adjustments we make will evolve with them.

General

Aspects

Items

Monsters

Miscellaneous

Item Affixes

Developer’s Note: Many Affixes are too efficient and are outshining alternatives. We’re looking to refine the outliers, improve the number of meaningful choices on competitive slots, and increase the overall flexibility of items. We know these changes will reduce the total amount of possible power a character can possess, so we'll be monitoring how these changes affect players’ ability to conquer expected milestones throughout the Season.

We’re increasing the availability of the Affixes below to make them easier to include in different builds.

Developer’s Note: The Core Stat bonus on Weapons has been overperforming, so we're pulling back on this bonus.

Developer’s Note: Cooldown Reduction affixes often felt mandatory due to their raw power. We imagine Cooldown Reduction will remain a highly desirable stat, but the penalty for not prioritizing it won’t be as harsh.

Developer’s Note: We're seeing Critical Strike Damage and Vulnerable Damage often viewed as a hard requirement for a build's success in Diablo IV. We believe this is a step towards allowing more builds to flourish and will continue to make changes in support of this goal.

Developer’s Note: Disparities in inherent affixes can rule some Weapons out before the rest of their stats are even rolled. These are receiving harsher reductions than their normal affix counterparts to increase Weapon flexibility.

Developer’s Note: Damage Bonus to Crowd Controlled Enemies was overperforming relative to the ease of activating it versus stricter, Crowd Control type-specific affixes.

Developer’s Note: We have seen that skillful players are frequently slaughtering monsters many levels above their own. We want to support this, but the current situation is beyond what we believe is correct for the long-term health of the game. To chase this goal, we're shifting power to many offensive Affixes from defensive Affixes. We know this will make our end game content more deadly, particularly for those chasing our pinnacle boss, an encounter not meant for the faint of heart. Overcoming the pinnacle boss will take every ounce of grit you can muster and all tools at your disposal. We will continue to evaluate feedback from the community and make changes to our combat mechanics.


That covers the Diablo 4 Update 1.1.0a patch notes. Season of the Malignant launches on all platforms in just a couple days, so stay tuned for any further updates and get ready for a whole new kind of heck, right around the corner.