The ‘Spin 2 Win’ spiritborn build was capable of killing anything in Diablo 4 with the press of one button, but it turns out there’s one enemy it couldn’t stand up against: Blizzard. A bug fix in a patch coming on October 17 will hit the brakes on the fastest build in the game and require everyone to go back to using more than one button. Truly the end of an era.
“Spiritborn’s Evade could be cast more rapidly than normal depending on the input method and speed,” the developer note reads in the Diablo 4 patch 2.0.3 notes. “It is now normalized to the standard Evade cast rate in all scenarios.”
In other words: You can’t spam evade so fast that it looks like your spiritborn is permanently mid-leap. And because the primary source of damage in the build came from the electric feathers that shoot out when you evade, your damage will probably be cut in half. RIP to anyone who centered their character around a build that was clearly broken; so broken in fact that it would cause the server to lag when more than one spiritborn was around, which turned multiplayer events like world bosses into a slideshow.
Admittedly, I was one of these people. But I know a broken build when I see one, so I spent the weekend pivoting to something else. The good news is that it only really required finding one specific weapon to get it going. Most players should be able to use a lot of the gear they’ve earned for one of the many other extremely powerful spiritborn builds.
“We have mentioned before that if a build ends up impacting the experience of others, we may make changes immediately, and this is one of those instances,” global director of community Adam Fletcher wrote on X.
In addition to the evade build nerf, the patch will fix a long list of bugs preventing people from finding enough crafting materials and items, as well as speed up the seasonal event. The big portal demon you have to chase down for the new seasonal potions felt like a glorified loading bar and should move much faster than before.
The patch notes say nothing about the other major bugs with the new spiritborn class, like one that can multiply your damage by upwards of 50 times for simply having a lot of bonus health. It’s not lagging the game, but it’s definitely dealing trillions of damage, far more than any other class, and it’s pretty obviously not supposed to be working like that. It’s secretly fueling almost every popular build right now, though, and I suspect Blizzard doesn’t want to completely kill the fun for its brand new class.