Surprise Diablo 4 hotfix coming today will reduce difficulty of Nightmare Dungeons

Diablo 4
(Image credit: Blizzard)

As part of an effort to address the multitude of complaints over Diablo 4's most recent update, Blizzard is nerfing the difficulty of Nightmare Dungeons to make them easier for a wider array of classes and builds to complete.

"We're making a reduction in the difficulty of some aspects of Nightmare Dungeons to kind of retune some things," associate game director Joe Piepiora said as part of today's campfire chat stream. "Roughly where you are with a Nightmare Dungeon tier 70, that's kind of actually where we want the difficulty to be for a tier 100 as players are going through the experience. So there's still a thing to push for, but it's more reasonable."

"We're actually planning on rolling that out in a hotfix, specifically," associate director of community management Adam Fletcher added a bit later in the stream. "That is something that we actually plan on rolling out later today."

You can expect more concrete details on what those difficulty nerfs will look like when the hotfix goes live later today, but Piepiora spent several minutes explaining the team's philosophy on Nightmare Dungeons, admitting that at the highest tiers they're "dramatically overtuned" and "excruciatingly difficult for most classes to be able to actually get through," forcing players to rely on specific builds in order to make it through.

The devs believe that Nightmare Dungeons are better suited as a more general way to grind than they are as proper endgame tests of your build. That's why their difficulty is being nerfed here. But Piepiora says more endgame content types are in the works to help fill the needs of the most hardcore fans. "We are going to be looking at creating a new endgame content type that's going to be more directly meant to address those sorts of players, and give people more things to chase. That's part of the commitment to live service, to make sure that we're always adding new things like this for players to go and try to chase after and use their builds in fun and interesting ways."

After admitting that many of the recent changes are "not fun," the Diablo 4 devs made a whole lot more big promises after the Season 1 fallout, promising faster leveling, fewer nerfs, and a whole lot more. 

Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.