[Update #2]: Following the disastrous Season 1 update, Diablo 4 devs have announced many major improvements.

[Update]: Diablo 4's Season 1 has now arrived, and it's unfortunately quite underwhelming.

While Diablo 4's moment-to-moment gameplay is highly enjoyable, the game currently suffers from a serious lack of balance as the vast majority of skills are so numerically weak that they're basically unusable. For example the Sorceresses' Incinerate, a gigantic beam of fire, does such little damage that it takes multiple seconds of standing still and focusing on a single basic, white-tier enemy in order to bring them down. It's astonishingly bad, and it's far from the only such ability.

Still, despite these types of issues I continued playing as I firmly believed that the Season 1 update would sort out this mess and make it so each class has a plethora of unique and interesting builds to choose from. Unfortunately, it would appear that my faith was misplaced as Blizzard has chosen to double down on all of the nonsense.

In other words, the freshly released Patch 1.1 has not only nerfed player power and survivability across the board, but also slowed down leveling, nerfed cooldown reduction, made Helltides grindier, and as an added bonus, also dished out some extra nerfs to most of the popular builds. There are some buffs mixed in here as well, but increasing a massively underpowered spell's damage by a couple of percent is hardly going to make much of a difference, especially in the face of such sweeping nerfs.

Needless to say, the community response to the update has been overwhelmingly negative, and rightly so. This doesn't feel like an exciting update that's supposed to bring everyone back for Season 1 to try out a brand new character. It feels more like a rerun of everything we've already done, except we're all now weaker, more vulnerable and slower than before. I can only hope Blizzard reverses course and releases a sizable update early in Season 1 in order to fix some of this, because this is a really poor showing.

Whatever the case may be, I'll make sure to let you know once the next big update goes live. Until then, you can check out the patch notes and look at the full extent of the nerfs over at the Diablo website.