Blizzard Entertainment rolled out a major new update for Diablo 2: Resurrection Thursday, a patch that made sweeping balance changes in and fixed several bugs in the classic click-and-kill action RPG. Patch 2.4 to Diablo 2: Uprising is the first major balance update to the game in more than 11 years and fixes some nasty bugs that gamers have faced since the original game was launched in 2000.
It is worth noting two long-standing mistakes with Diablo 2 it would have wiped out your character’s mana completely – rendered some classes effectively defenseless – or given too much damage – namely fire-enchanted monsters. From Blizzard’s comprehensive patch notes:
- Fixed an issue where unique monster packs with mana-drain drained much more mana than intended
- Fixed an issue where fire-enchanted monsters did too much damage in Nightmare difficulty
Diablo 2: Resurrection Developers said last year that they wanted to fix bugs like the one above, the unexpected results of bug calculations in the game’s code that have long annoyed players. Andre Abrahamian, former game designer at Blizzard Entertainment and chief designer of Diablo 2: Resurrectionsaid during a Q&A video session that the team in charge Diablo 2 remaster wanted to correct “things that misinform players”, but leave “quirks” that could benefit players, or that became part of the game’s meta as they are.
Elsewhere in the update, Blizzard has made significant balance sheet changes for everyone Diablo 2: Resurrection‘s seven classes. The team seems to have touched on all aspects of the classes, from attack animations to combat skills to class-specific tooltips. (Barbarian gamers will no doubt be thrilled with a fix to that class’ Whirlwind skill.) These tweaks have been in testing since January, when Blizzard brought patch 2.4 to the game’s public test realm.
Thursday’s update also includes new Horadric Cube recipes, new Ladder-exclusive Rune Words and comprehensive quality of life updates. The latter includes new “Legacy” graphics emulation that offers a range of classic visualization options. Here’s how Blizzard’s patch notes describe them:
- ‘GDI’ emulates the software rasterization of the original older game and uses no filtering
- ‘Glide’ emulates the hardware-accelerated backend of the original older game with bilinear filtering
- ‘Resurrected’ uses the Glide emulation with additional fixes in place to address an artifact that would occur with the original Glide rendering
For a closer look at everything that has changed, check it out Diablo 2: Resurrection‘s 2.4 patch notes.
Diablo 2: Resurrection is available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X.