New Diablo 4 Patch Nerfs Elite Spawn Rate in Dungeons After Discovery of Experience Exploit

Blizzard has released a new server-side Diablo 4 patch that lowers the spawn rate of elite monster packs in “some” dungeons, thereby possibly battling an experience exploit.

Diablo 4 won’t be globally available until tomorrow, but those who pre-ordered the game’s Ultimate or Digital Deluxe editions can already play the title since last Friday. Various updates and hotfixes have since been released, and the development team has now released another server-side hotfix. Being a server-side patch, this means that this update is being implemented in the background, and players won’t need to download a client-side update.

Aside from the usual bug fixes and stability improvements, the official release notes for this hotfix mention a nerf to the elite spawn rate in some dungeons. “Fixed an issue where elite monster packs in some dungeons were spawning in higher frequency than expected”, the patch notes read.

Interestingly, this could be related to the discovery of an experience exploit in Anica’s Claim dungeon in Stronghold: Malnok. Inside this dungeon, players are required to kill packs of elite monsters in order to complete an objective and kill the final boss. Players, however, can reset the dungeon before killing the final boss to respawn these elites. To make things even ‘easier’, the dungeon is shaped like a big circle, speeding up the killing process. This experience farm method was already present in the game’s beta, but from the looks of it, Blizzard might now doing something to battle this experience exploit.

We aren’t entirely sure whether this new patch is related to this experience farming method as Anica’s Claim isn’t directly mentioned in the patch notes, but there’s a good chance it is.

Diablo 4, or Diablo IV as Blizzard has named the sequel, launches globally tomorrow across PC, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, and PlayStation 4. Be sure to read our launch review here.