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December 6, 2023: Blizzard has now resolved this issue via hotfix, restoring Glyphs to their original levels, and also the radius of those Glyphs if the bug caused a drop from level 15 to 14. Original story from December 5 follows below:
Today, Blizzard opened the gates to Diablo 4's hardest endgame dungeon, a seasonal event called the Abattoir of Zir. Experienced players have been gearing up for this moment for weeks, perfecting their builds to tackle the first tier of a dungeon that the developer teased might be completely impossible at its highest difficulty level. But in an absurdly unfortunate piece of timing, the update also introduced a bug that has reduced the power of almost every endgame player in the game.
After you reach level 50 in Diablo 4, you gain Paragon Points instead of skill points and can start spending them on incremental upgrades, like a few points in intelligence or dexterity, on your Paragon Board. As you draw a path across the board, you unlock sockets to place Glyphs into for more powerful bonuses. Glyphs have a secondary effect you can attain by having the right amount of nodes activated within a highlighted radius. Level your Glyphs up to 15 and the radius gets bigger, allowing you to spread your points out more efficiently.
It would be painful if that radius were to suddenly drop down a level, ruining your meticulously planned board and robbing you of considerable boosts to your damage output, wouldn't it? The answer, as many Diablo 4 players found out as soon as Patch 1.2.3 dropped today, is yes.
A nasty bug has caused everyone's Glyphs to drop a level, punishing anyone who left their Glyphs at level 15 (me and many others) the hardest. Those who had maxed out their glyphs to level 21 won't feel as big of an impact, but they will still be sub-optimal going into what Blizzard has specifically designed to be the most brutal activity in the game.
On Reddit, Diablo community manager Lyricana_Nightrayne said the team is aware of the issue and plans on fixing it in an update later today. "Users that were max level on Paragon Glyph XP, you can re-level the Glyphs in the meantime if you prefer until the fix is available," they said. "For those that were below the max Glyph XP, you can still progress your Glyphs and after the fix will have that Glyph XP added to the old amounts prior to the 1.2.3 update."
Believe me, you'll need all the power you can get. Diablo 4 season 2 might've spawned the most broken, degenerate builds in the game so far, but Blizzard intentionally designed the Abattoir of Zir to test them. Each of its rapidly scaling tiers challenges you to kill loads of demons and a boss within 10 minutes and with one life.
PC Gamer's Sean Martin and I made several attempts on the first tier and found it significantly harder than anything else in the game with how dense the dungeons are with enemies who can nearly one-shot you—especially when you're on the clock. But it's doable, provided you play carefully and have your Glyphs properly activated at full power. As for the 25th tier, we'll have to see what kind of absurd build the community creates to clear it, if they clear it at all. (Spoiler: they will.)
