Diablo IV fans feel Blizzard’s action RPG has an XP problem, in that players feel like it’s hard to level up in a timely manner. Fortunately, the studio says it’s willing to hear that criticism out and make changes. In a “Campfire Chat” stream featuring members of the dev team, Blizzard explained that it is working on buffs to the current dungeon XP scaling following backlash to changes it made earlier this week that made grinding harder.
What is the problem with XP in Diablo IV?
Previously, players were fighting powerful elite monsters that gave higher-than-average experience and decent loot to farm experience points, especially for secondary characters that fans wanted to level up fast. But elite monsters weren’t intended to provide an easy farm, so Blizzard decided to standardize their spawn rates across the board, thus removing some of the best ways for players to grind XP. The outcry was immediate, prompting the developer to consider balance changes to the more difficult Nightmare Dungeons to make up for it.
Now, the team says it plans to buff experience in higher difficulty Nightmare Dungeons (thanks, Wowhead), giving players a quicker means to grind XP after it lowered the density of elite monsters throughout the game. These had become a go-to source for XP until a hotfix earlier this week standardized their spawn rates, and players weren’t happy about it.
Obviously, the big concern players have here is that the XP grind is now substantially worse. But in general, there seems to be a sentiment that Diablo IV’s numbers are scaled in such a way that there isn’t really a great, time-efficient way to level up in the game anymore. As of this writing, there’s a 7.6k upvoted thread on the game’s subreddit of fans expressing frustration with the state of experience scaling for any other enemy type (thanks, IGN). Before this patch, elite monsters spawned frequently enough that they were one of the quickest ways for under-leveled players to level up, but now that things are more “standardized,” players are looking for a new way to grind levels and coming up short on options.
“Seriously, what are you doing [Blizzard]? Why do [you] think so many people keep running dungeons? It’s because xp everywhere else is bad, it’s that simple,” Reddit user AudioRejectz writes in the thread. “World bosses, hell tide, [Nightmare Dungeons] all need their xp [buffed]. It’s so frustrating having you make it increasingly more difficult to level, especially for solo players.”
Diablo IV will implement fast travel to Nightmare Dungeons
Whether the increase in XP in Nightmare Dungeons will help things in a meaningful way remains to be seen, but alongside these changes, Blizzard says it will be implementing a new fast travel system with Nightmare Dungeon Sigils to let you get to and from them much quicker. So if the numbers do go up, it might make for a faster way to grind in the future, even if elite monsters aren’t showing up like they used to.
This was an issue for Diablo III, as well, in that players found the grind tedious until Blizzard introduced Rifts, which were short dungeon runs that helped players grind for experience and loot. Diablo IV has no such alternative, which is why players are frustrated with losing one of the most reliable ways to level up. Though from the looks of the subreddit, some folks already thought Diablo IV was being stingy with its enemy spawns.
