Update: Blizzard has confirmed The Umbracrux's unique power has been re-enabled presumably now that a fix has been implemented. Pretty quick turnaround!
Original story follows...
Diablo 4 developer Blizzard has temporarily disabled the Umbracrux Unique and confirmed it was responsible for the game-breaking Season 5 exploit that was dishing out millions of free XP.
For some context, players identified the bug shortly after Diablo 4 Season 5 went live last week, with Reddit users sharing videos of them leveling up dozens of times in an instant after beating certain Stronghold bosses. In one case, Reddit user Neamins shared a video of them beating the Stronghold boss Nilcar, Forgotten Bishop, and leveling "from 29 to 63 in one second."
For a minute there it was unclear exactly what was causing this bug, but it seemed at the time that all of the players who had successfully triggered the XP burst were Rogues, seemingly pinning the cause of the bug on that specific class. However, Blizzard has now confirmed the culprit to be the Umbracrux itself, which is of course only available to Rogues.
"The team was made aware of an issue where players were able to obtain a significant amount of experience while killing certain bosses with ‘The Umbracrux’ Unique equipped," said Diablo global community development director Adam Fletcher in a forum post.
Fletcher said the Unique has been disabled while Blizzard works on a fix for the XP bug, confirming that we won't be able to spawn shade totems with the dagger temporarily. We'll still be able to find and equip the weapon, but the Unique power will be disabled until a fix is implemented, so you probably won't want to use it. You've got to to wonder how this seemingly unrelated ability was ramping up XP gains so hard. Video games: how do they work?
"Once we have a finalized fix, we will re-enable this and communicate this out to players," Fletcher said, adding that a "final fix" should be coming "soon."
The Diablo 4 Season 5 patch notes certainly didn't mention this.
