Blizzard responds to Diablo 3 nerfs and class balance

Diablo 3 is young, having released just last week, and there are still plenty of changes to come.  That seems to be the message Blizzard is sending players following the fallout that resulted in yesterday's report that they intend on nerfing the Monk class.  You can check out the incoming Diablo 3 hotfixes here.

"Class balance is an ongoing investigation, and by no means do we believe the game is now perfect," community manager Micah Whipple (aka Bashiok) began, "but we're also seeing evidence that supports (with a few nerfs to wizard and demon hunter) the monk and barbarian are not as bad off as they seem."

The big gripe, and this usually happens when a class is nerfed, is that Monks will now have less survivability therefore making Inferno mode impossible to solo.  There are similar complaints about the Barbarian struggling in Hell and Inferno modes.

"A large part of the monk and barbarian designs are based on survival models that mimic the concept of the class itself," Whipple explained. "The idea of a monk is that he survives through being agile and difficult to hit, and his healing and survival scales particularly well by focusing on mitigation stats like dodge, resists, and armor. The concept of the barb is that he survives through a huge health pool, and healing himself through damage (%life on hit stats), which is potentially a bit obvious with all the life return skills but can't be overstated."

"The game is young,"  Whipple defended, "there were some skills that threw things out of whack, and we expect the landscape to settle out a bit more evently.  Or at least change again so we can continue to monitor the impact."

"Maybe we're wrong, maybe there's no current chance for monk or barbarian to compete with ranged," he admitted, "but our current suspicion is that's incorrect and until we know for sure we're not going to turn any dials."

As I mentioned before, I don't play monk, so I can't comment on how this will affect the class.  I play Demon Hunter and the general consensus is that ranged is having an easier time in the more difficult modes.  However, if you do play a Monk, please let us know how you feel about the upcoming hotfixes.