Blizzard buzzkills fix Diablo 4's best bug

A new Diablo 4 patch has arrived with a number of welcome fixes and bugs, including adjustments to the UI that will hopefully cut down on the number of unintentional premium battle pass activations. But there's one change it makes to the game that, to be blunt, I am very disappointed by.

First things first, the good stuff. Complaints about the Diablo 4 interface surfaced earlier this week: The Digital Deluxe and Ultimate editions of the game include one premium battle pass unlock, which can be used for any season—the problem is that the button to activate it appears as soon [[link]] as the Season Journey menu is opened, and worse, the cursor automatically centers on it. That led to a number of people using their unlock by accident, and accusations that Blizzard was using elements of "dark [[link]] design" to encourage misclicks.

In response, community development director Adam Fletcher said Blizzard had a "temporary" fix in the works "that will at least ensure the cursor isn’t defaulted there and will instead be defaulted on Season Journey." As it turns out, Blizzard has actually gone a little further than that: The new patch puts the default focus on the Season Journey button rather than the premium battle pass activation button, as promised, but it also adds a confirmation pop-up to the battle pass activation—something that was inexplicably missing previously.

Other issues addressed by the patch include changes to the color of werebear and werewolf fur to reduce their brightness in certain situations, a fix for a bug that was causing movement problems with some controllers, another fix for an issue that was causing players to stun themselves when they combined the Dark Dance and Punishing Speed Malignant Powers, and various crash fixes and stability improvements.

It's all good stuff, but for this one single point, which I was really hoping Blizzard would leave alone. One of the chapters in Diablo 4's current season requires players to obtain 10 caches from the Tree of Whispers, but it was discovered last week that they didn't have to be different caches: You could get one cache, pick it up and put it down 10 times, and mission accomplished. 

Chapter 3 - Get 10 Tree Caches EZ from r/diablo4

It was a silly, harmless glitch with no real impact on the game, and letting it slide it struck me as an easy [[link]] way for Blizzard to let score a little cred with the community. Videogames are supposed to be fun, right? Alas Blizzard felt differently, and that has now been fixed as well. Killjoys, I say!

Anyway, Diablo 4's 1.1.0c is live now, and the full patch notes are below. Don't forget that Blizzard has a bigger update on the way, which it will talk more about in a "Campfire Chat" developer stream set to take place on July 28.

• Fixed an issue where several Focus off-hand items could only have an aspect imprinted on them once.
• Fixed an issue where combining the Dark Dance and Punishing Speed Malignant Powers could cause the player to stun themselves.
• Fixed an issue where the Grim Reward Season Journey objective could be repeated by dropping and picking up the same stash. (booooo)
• Fixed an issue where the Werebear and Werewolf fur color was too bright in certain situations.
• Fixed an issue where movement on specific controllers was often not functioning correctly.
• Updated the activation of the Premium Battle Pass with a confirmation pop-up.
• The default focus (the button the controller will first highlight) on the Battle Pass screen is now the Season Journey button.
• Fixed multiple instances where players were encountering crashes.
• Further stability improvements.
• Fixed an interaction with the Agitated Winds Malignant Heart power which led to automatic Cyclone Armor casts to ignore its own cooldown.
• Acquiring or re-allocating Seasonal Blessings will now clear the vendor buyback inventory.