After the two Diablo IV Open Betas, Blizzard has confirmed it will rebalance the game before the final test.
Game Director Joe Shely and Associate Game Director Joseph Piepiora recently spoke to IGN in an interview talking about rebalancing the game before Server Slam. One of the changes they are making is the Necromancer which was reported to be quite overpowered in the previous Diablo IV Open Betas, especially their Skeleton Summons. The summons was “tanky” and could take on enemies all on their own. Now, Server Slam will get the summons nerfed.
According to Piepiora, the summonable army is now less tanky this time around. “We do want players to be interacting with summoning their skeletons and dealing with corpses as part of the routine of playing a necromancer,” he said. “That’s part of the mechanical mastery of playing a necromancer is managing these skeletons and mages and golems as you’re playing. So we do wanna make sure that players occasionally need to re-summon in various fights.”
If you wonder if the necromancers will stay the same, worry not as they have been buffed too. “To be clear, the necromancer did get buffs as well, as part of their Book of the Dead feature, a number of attribute stats on those effects actually improved,” Piepiora clarified. “We wanted to make sure that there was an interesting wealth of choices for players to makes and that’s the core of a lot of our balance fundamentals.”
While the skeletons have been nerfed, the necromancers have been buffed too in some ways. No need to worry about the new changes making the necromancer getting weaker because they can still carry one with the fight. At least this time around, they are not overpowered.
Diablo IV launches on June 6, 2023 on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. Server Slam starts on May 12, 2023.