Diablo 4 players discover forbidden power combo that melts everything—including the servers
When Blizzard said Diablo 4's latest season was all about "becoming the boss," I don't think it meant they would become so powerful that they would control the stability of its servers. But here we are with yet another build that is so over-the-top the game can't keep up with it.
This time it doesn't appear to be a bug, but just a clever interaction with the new seasonal boss powers that probably shouldn't work the way it does. Diablo 4 YouTuber Macrobioboi revealed the secret in a video over the weekend: Basically, you can hit a room full of enemies hundreds of times a second with the right combination of boss powers and a Legendary Aspect on your gear.
The engine for this machine is the Vampiric Curse Legendary Aspect you can put on your items that afflicts enemies with a status called Vulnerable. Normally this is just an easy way to boost your damage, but unlike other ways of applying Vulnerable, Vampiric Curse won't let it fall off monsters until they die. That wouldn't matter if it weren't for the Flesh Reaper's Disruption boss power that activates every time you hit a Vulnerable enemy. It's supposed to remove Vulnerable and leave enemies stunned in place as a trade-off, but Vampiric Curse doesn't let that happen. This means enemies are permanently Vulnerable and you can activate the boss power over and over again, or as fast as you can dish out attacks.
It gets worse, or better, depending on whether you work at Blizzard or not: Another boss power, Varshan's Life Steal, deals huge amounts of damage every time you activate your main boss power. When combined, all three powers cause so many instances of damage that the server will start to chug, which means if you're out in the open world, everyone will feel it.
You can watch this happen in a video from Wudijo: There are so many hits happening that enemies stop moving and jitter in place. "There are a lot of calculations going on, it's very understandable that this is a laggy build," he said.
Believe it or not, a similar thing has happened before in Diablo 4. Just after the expansion launched, spiritborn players could spam their dodge roll enough to break the servers. Blizzard was quick to patch that out of the game. But this latest server-killer build hasn't been acknowledged by the developer, not even in the notes for a patch that goes live on Wednesday.
It would be one thing if it was just super powerful—which it is—but it's another thing when it actually impacts the performance of the game. Blizzard has said time and time again that interactions like this will be fixed as soon as possible, so I don't expect it'll make it to the end of the week.