Diablo 2 gets first major update in 11 years, fixes some 20-year-old bugs

Blizzard Entertainment rolled out a major new update for Diablo 2: Resurrected on Thursday, a patch that made sweeping balance changes to and fixed numerous bugs in the classic click-and-kill action-RPG. Patch 2.4 for Diablo 2: Resurrected is the first major balance update to the game in more than 11 years and fixes some nasty bugs that players have faced since the original game launched in 2000.

Of note are two longstanding bugs with Diablo 2 that would have completely wiped out your character’s mana — making some classes effectively defenseless — or dealt too much damage — namely fire-enchanted monsters. From Blizzard’s extensive patch notes:

• Fixed an issue where Unique monster packs with mana drain were draining way more mana than was intended
• Fixed an issue where fire enchanted monsters were doing too much damage in Nightmare difficulty

Diablo 2: Resurrected developers said last year that they wanted to address bugs like the above, the unexpected results of miscalculations in the game’s code, that have long vexed players. Andre Abrahamian, former game designer at Blizzard Entertainment and lead design for Diablo 2: Resurrected, said during a Q&A video session that the team in charge of the Diablo 2 remaster wanted to fix “things that are misinforming players,” but leave “quirks” that could benefit players or that became part of the game’s meta as-is.

Elsewhere in the update, Blizzard has made substantial balance changes to all of Diablo 2: Resurrected’s seven classes. The team appears to have touched every aspect of classes, from attack animations, to combat skills, to class-specific tooltips. (Barbarian players will undoubtedly be thrilled by a fix to that class’ Whirlwind skill.) Those 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 wide-ranging quality of life updates. The latter includes new “Legacy” graphics emulation that offers a variety of classic visualization options. Here’s how Blizzard’s patch notes describe them:

• ‘GDI’ emulates the software rasterization of the original legacy game and does not apply any filtering
• ‘Glide’ emulates the hardware accelerated backend of the original legacy 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’s changed, check out Diablo 2: Resurrected’s 2.4 patch notes.

Diablo 2: Resurrected is available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.