On Thursday, Blizzard Entertainment released a huge new update for Diablo 2: Resurrected, a patch that made significant balancing adjustments and corrected several issues in the timeless hack and slash action-RPG.
Patch 2.4 for Diablo 2: Resurrected is the game's first major balance update in over 11 years, and it fixes some nasty bugs that players have encountered since the original game's release in 2000.
Notable fixes are two long-standing Diablo 2 flaws that would have totally wiped away your character's mana, thereby rendering some classes defenceless, or delivered excessive damage, notably fire-enchanted enemies.
There are some essential changes to the game's difficulty that may alter the future speedrun records, but don’t fret since the game’s quirks are still here so the meta won’t be changing and Diablo 2 enthusiasts may sleep in peace.
“Fixed a bug in which unique monster packs with mana drain drained far more mana than was intended.”
“Fixed a bug at Nightmare difficulty when fire enchanted monsters did too much damage.”
Last year, Diablo 2: Resurrected creators stated that they sought to solve issues like the one described above, which are the unanticipated effects of miscalculations in the game's coding and have long irritated gamers.
During a Q&A video session, Andre Abrahamian, former Blizzard Entertainment game designer and lead designer for Diablo 2: Resurrected, stated that the team in charge of the Diablo 2 remaster wanted to resolve "things that are misinforming players," but leave "quirks" that could benefit players or that became part of the game's meta as is.
Blizzard has also made significant balancing modifications to all seven Diablo 2: Resurrected classes in the update.
From attack animations to combat skills to class-specific tooltips, the team looks to have touched every facet of classes (Players of the Barbarian class will definitely be ecstatic about a patch for the Whirlwind skill). Those changes have been in the works since Blizzard released patch 2.4 to the game's public test realm in January.
Thursday's update also adds new Horadric Cube recipes, new Ladder-exclusive Rune Words, and many quality of life improvements.
The latter incorporates new "Legacy" graphics emulation, which provides a number of vintage visualisation settings. Blizzard's patch notes explain them as follows:
- 'GDI' emulates the original heritage game's software rasterization and does not use any filtering.
- 'Glide' emulates the original heritage game's hardware accelerated backend with bilinear filtering.
- 'Resurrected' employs the Glide emulation along with additional patches to solve an artefact that would happen with the original Glide rendering.
