The battle against Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred’s main villain Mephisto is finally over, but the battle against the villain that has haunted the game since it came out might never be over: Items that mysteriously break the game have reared their ugly heads again.
Normally, Limitless Rage gives you a stacking damage buff for generating rage, the barbarian’s primary resource for casting skills. It’s a bonus that falls off after a mere four seconds to accommodate for the fact that it is—true to its name—limitless. Before Lord of Hatred, there weren’t any ways of generating enough fury for it to be a problem.
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But something funky was going on when you combined the aspect with the Melted Heart of Selig mythic unique and the Endurant Faith unique. If I had to guess, it probably had something to do with the way the Melted Heart of Selig gives you loads of extra fury (because it doubles it in exchange for using it as your life when it’s equipped) and the way Endurant Faith spreads out any damage you take over a few seconds. This broken interaction caused Limitless Rage to stack over 15,000 times in an instant, multiplying your damage by tens of thousands more than intended.
YouTube streamer Rob2628 has a full explanation of how players were exploiting the bug with a build that could reach the highest difficulty tiers in the game with ease. By stacking loads of fury regeneration and tearing through packs of enemies with the Whirlwind skill, your damage would stack near-infinitely before falling off and starting back up again.
Now that Diablo 4 has official in-game leaderboards, Blizzard has been acting fast when it comes to game-breaking levels of damage like this. Earlier this week, it quickly hotfixed three bugs that let sorcerers, rogues, and spiritborn breeze through the toughest monsters. All of these bugs were pretty egregious, but it’s still a little surprising to see how committed Blizzard is to maintaining some level of competitive integrity (for those who care about that in action RPGs). In the past, some of these might’ve been left alone until the next proper patch.
Until Limitless Rage gets fixed, barbarian players will see that any item with the aspect on it will state that it’s been “temporarily disabled”. A Blizzard community manager said that the issue will be fixed “as soon as we can.” Judging from the speed of the previous fixes, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it resolved by the end of the day.
