Diablo 4 PTR testers have been tinkering around with the new Season 9 Horadric powers for a few weeks now, and Blizzard has identified and heavily nerfed a combination that was giving all classes the ability to speed farm by endlessly teleporting around the map while blasting enemies down in droves.
The power combo doesn't appear to be super widely known, but a video from Rob2628 effectively breaks down how it works.
Diablo 4 Season 9 essentially lets you craft your own spells with the Horadric Spellcraft system, and it works by letting you pick a base spell, or Catalyst, and then modify it with Infusions that change the type of damage you deal and add various effects.
To achieve Diablo 4's Season 9 teleporting trick, you would've wanted to use Propulsion as your Catalyst and Floaty Bubble and Bloody Charm as your Infusions.
Put simply, Propulsion sends out a powerful mana blast that "executes non-boss enemies." Simple enough. Meanwhile, with the Floaty Bubble Infusion, you'll blink over to the center of the mana blast's AoE, and then Bloody Charm resets your cooldown so you can chain attacks and teleport seemingly endlessly. It's a lot like a homebrewed version of Path of Exile's Flicker Strike melee attack, and similarly, any class can use it.
It wasn't long before the Diablo 4 community took notice, rightly predicting an incoming nerf. And right on schedule, Blizzard has also now taken notice with a nerf specifically to the Bloody Charm's ability to reset Propulsion's cooldown. Per the new patch notes, the combination will now simply result in a five-second, 70% movement speed buff upon successful executions.
The Diablo 4 dev team hosted a livestream today where they addressed the nerf (timestamped here). "This effect caused you to be able to teleport effectively infinitely in a lot of builds," said systems designer Aislyn Hall. "It was transformative, and so transformative to the point where it was actually stomping on build identity, in many cases.
"We really want you to experience the full breadth of what different characters can offer in Diablo 4. We don't want it all to be condensed down to one thing."
Added game designer Charles Dunn, "When you're playing a different class and different build, you want your gameplay to feel meaningfully different ... the Horadric Spellcraft is kind of a compliment on top of what you're already doing. It's a unique utility, it's an interesting wrinkle to your build. And on the PTR we found that this particular teleport Propulsion interaction was basically eclipsing everything else."
The tight-rope Blizzard has been walking between reasonable balance updates and nerfs in the name of simply killing fun has been a constant pain point both for the studio and for the Diablo 4 community since the game's launch two years ago. This change obviously only affects the PTR branch at this point, so it won't have quite the ripple effect that a nerf like this would have on the final build, and hey, that's precisely the point of a public test realm.
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