It was announced on Thursday that Blizzard Entertainment would be releasing a major new update for Diablo 2: Resurrected, which would make significant balance changes and fix numerous bugs in the classic click-and-kill action-RPG. This is the first major balance update to Diablo 2: Resurrected in more than 11 years, and it addresses some nasty bugs that players have been experiencing since the game’s original release in 2000.
For example, there have been a couple long-standing bugs in Diablo 2 that have either completely wiped out your character’s mana — rendering some classes effectively defenseless — or dealt excessive damage — specifically to fire-enchanted monsters — to your character. The following is taken from Blizzard’s extensive patch notes:
It was discovered that some unique monster packs with mana drain were draining significantly more mana than was intended. This was fixed.
The issue where fire enchanted monsters were dealing excessive damage in Nightmare difficulty has been resolved!
The developers of Diablo 2: Resurrection stated last year that they wished to address bugs such as the one described above, which are the unexpected results of miscalculations in the game’s code and have long irritated players.
In a Q&A video session, Andre Abrahamian, a former game designer at Blizzard Entertainment and the lead designer for Diablo 2: Resurrected, stated that the team in charge of the Diablo 2 remaster wanted to fix “things that are misinforming players,” but that they wanted to leave “quirks” in the game that could benefit players or that had become part of the game’s meta as-is.
Blizzard has also made significant changes to the balance of all seven classes in Diablo 2: Resurrected, which can be found elsewhere in the update. Each and every aspect of a class appears to have been touched by the team, from attack animations to combat skills to tooltips specific to a particular class.(The Whirlwind skill D2R XBOX Series runewords the Barbarian class has been fixed, which will undoubtedly please that class’s players.)Those tweaks have been in testing since Blizzard released patch 2.4 to the game’s public test realm in January, according to the company.
In addition, new Horadric Cube recipes, new Ladder-exclusive Rune Words, and a slew of other quality D2R runes for sale improvements are included in Thursday’s update. The latter includes a new graphics emulation mode called “Legacy,” which provides a variety D2R items and classic visualization options. According to Blizzard’s patch notes, they are as follows:
In contrast to the original legacy game, GDI emulates the software rasterization of the original legacy game without applying any filtering.
“Glide” emulates the hardware-accelerated backend of the original legacy game, using bilinear filtering to achieve this.
‘Resurrected’ makes use of the Glide emulation, but with additional fixes in place to address an artifact that would occur with the original Glide rendering, as seen in the trailer.
