Diablo 4 Patch 1.1 brought massive changes to the recently released dungeon crawler the update launched on July 18. Chief among these balancing changes are the reductions to Critical Strike and Vulnerable damage.
Soon after Diablo 4’s launch, countless players quickly realized how strong Vulnerable damage could be in every build. Vulnerability is a status effect that temporarily applies a damage increase to enemies inflicted by the effect. Vulnerability damage is usually gained through unlocking specific abilities or comes as a unique effect on weapons.
Related: Here are the Diablo 4 Patch 1.1 patch notes
As of Patch 1.1, Vulnerability damage is taking a massive 40 percent damage cut. Alongside this, Critical Strike, another important damage stat that greatly increases your character’s damage output, will also be reduced by 17 percent. Both cuts apply to Affixes, which are found primarily from weapons and armor, but also directly apply to lightning damage and Bone, Earth, Imbued, and Werewolf skills.
These Critical Strike and Vulnerable damage nerfs also greatly impact primary weapons, including swords and crossbows. For swords, Critical Damage inherent to these weapons will drop by 50 percent, whereas Vulnerable damage applied by crossbows will drop by 65 percent.
Diablo 4 developers justified these huge changes to both stats by stating that both were viewed as “hard requirements” for most builds. With Critical Strike and Vulnerable damage now gutted, developers hope that “this is a step towards allowing more builds to flourish and will continue to make changes in support of this goal.”
Patch 1.1 is the first major update to hit Diablo 4 and has brought various major changes to the game aside from these stat reductions. Including leveling changes and end-game content shifts, Patch 1.1 was an extensive retooling of Diablo 4’s current state.
