Diablo general manager Rod Fergusson has polled Diablo 4 players on whether Blizzard should tone down the absolutely borked Spiritborn class, and well, the overwhelming sentiment from the community seems to very much be no, it should be left alone.
ICYMI, Diablo 4 added its first new class, Spiritborn, as part of the recent Vessel of Hatred DLC, and while the response has been largely positive, it’s also far too easy to exploit using bugs to pump out stupid big numbers. The last I checked, Diablo 4 players were stacking bugs to make Spiritborn builds whose damage outputs were in the quadrillions. At the time, a player analysis estimated the Spiritborn class to be “literally 100,000 times stronger than any other class”.
Well, Blizzard has finally acknowledged the situation, with Fergusson sharing what he specified is a “non-binding poll” to Twitter asking, “Should we fix the Spiritborn so that it’s closer in balance to the other classes OR should we leave it as it is because you’re having fun?”
He added, “No, I’m not offering [to] ‘break the other classes’.”
At the time of writing, 63.1% of players want Blizzard to leave the Spiritborn class alone, and 36.9% want some sort of fix. Blizzard is wise to put its feelers out before making any balancing changes, as it’s admitted in the past to a lack of internal testing that led to some pretty universally maligned ideas and features. Balancing in live-service games in general seems like a really tricky thing to get right and is so often the source of the sort of widespread backlash Blizzard is used to by this point, so it makes sense that they’d be careful not to mess with anything without making sure it’ll go down well.