It wouldn’t be a proper new Diablo 4 expansion without some wild match glitches that completely break the game. Lord of Hatred is delivering on that front with a bizarre new exploit introduced after Blizzard actually attempted to patch a different bug. The result, at least for now, is players with god-like survivability as they stack damage reduction way beyond anything the game’s developers intended.
The trouble began with Paladin’s Aspect of Glynn’s Anvil. It increases your maximum Resolve by 2 and gives you 2.5 – 4 percent extra damage reduction per stack. Existing stacks of Resolve provide 25 percent damage reduction and are consumed with each hit taken, with players normally only being able to stack it up to eight times. Got all that?
Well, Lord of Hatred accidentally broke the aspect when it launched on April 28 and it wasn’t giving players as much damage reduction as they were supposed to be getting. A new patch that went live on May 13 finally fixed that bug, among a bunch of other ongoing issues. Or at least it was supposed to. Players quickly realized that the patch had actually busted the aspect in the opposite direction.
“With the now fixed Glynn’s Anvil aspect on my legs and with 58 max stacks of Resolve my toughness in combat went from 9 million to 52 million,” one player wrote on the Diablo 4 subreddit earlier this week. “Don’t sit on this aspect, it’s extremely strong, lets you basically roll off most other defensive rolls on your gear and other places to put in more offence.”
So what’s going on exactly? Well, players are basically taking all of their gear, adding Aspect of Glynn’s Anvil to it (it’s not exclusive to the Paladin class), and then tempering the armor to push the maximum number of Resolve stacks attainable as high as possible. This new meta-defining shift has already spread all across YouTube as users like Wudijo (via GameSpot) and others show how to optimize around it and make higher difficulty content almost trivial.
Diablo 4 YouTuber MacroBioBoi showed the math in action (via PC Gamer). With no stacks of Resolve, his character normally takes 30,000 damage. With full stacks across all of his gear, he’s taking only 4,000 damage. Since it’s a percentage reduction, even a toughness in the millions doesn’t completely negate all damage, but in-game, that’s all about essentially managing cash flows to keep your health net positive. The newly buffed Aspect of Glynn’s Anvil is like adding a dozen new passive income streams to your portfolio.
Blizzard has yet to comment on the new stack-flation sweeping across Sanctuary, but it’s largely believed to only be a matter of time before the development team intervenes to bring things back under control. Of course, while infinite toughness might make players basically immortal, not having the damage to back it up will still make higher-level activities a slog. “I use to have 6m toughness with my barb,” joked one player on the subreddit. “Nobody could kill me but I couldn’t kill anything either.” Another put it more simply, “Yep this broke the game.”
