Diablo 4 Patch 1.1.0 nerfs popular power leveling tactic with key dungeon change

Recent Diablo 4 patch 1.1.0 has nerfed a popular power-leveling tactic by reducing the amount of experience gained whilst under-leveled in high-tier dungeons.

Diablo 4’s Season 1 update just rolled out and with its 1.1.0 patch with a bunch of new content for players to explore and complete soon arriving. The inaugural season of Blizzard’s wildly successful ARPG, Season of the Malignant offers new items, aspects, and a new battle pass for players to progress through. Players will be required to level up a seasonal character in order to achieve all the rewards, however, which has definitely rubbed some players the wrong way.

Players were able to level up quickly prior to Season of the Malignant due to a power leveling strategy. Newer players were able to get pulled through a high-level dungeon by an experienced friend, essentially netting them massive amounts of experience. This is a common strategy that allowed those with friends online to easily bypass the leveling grind.

However, it appears Blizzard isn’t too happy with players skipping out on the leveling experience and is attempting to put a stop in place.

Blizzard

Diablo 4 devs nerf popular power leveling strategy

Alongside the large number of updates and changes listed in Patch 1.1 came an interesting nerf to the bonus experience reward players would gain from killing monsters above their level.

“We have observed that the experience bonus rewarded for killing higher-level monsters escalates too fast when compared to the relative challenge involved. We still want to reward players for taking on this challenge by encouraging them to participate in powerleveling together instead of one player killing enemies while another member of their Party waits at the dungeon’s entrance.” the developers commented.

Now instead of a fixed amount of bonus experience, enemies will reward players +1.5% experience per level higher than the player. This goes to a maximum of 15% at 10 levels above the player.

Blizzard

The developers have also adjusted the experience rewarded for world tiers.

“We are also adjusting experience rewards for monster Level offsets for higher World Tiers.
Current World Tier Level offsets

• World Tier II: Up to +3.
• World Tier III: Up to +10.
• World Tier IV: Up to +100.

We are changing this to

• World Tier II: Up to +3 (Unchanged).
• World Tier III: Up to +6.
• World Tier IV: Up to +10.”

This means players will now have a cap on the monster level killed when joining a Tier IV world.

What this means for the current power leveling strategy meta is yet to be known, but it seems Blizzard wants the players to actively engage in order to level up.