Rocksteady is nerfing Afflictions in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League
Before resolving critical issues like the game crashing often in multiplayer for some players, Rocksteady has announced they’re nerfing the Diablo Blaze Affliction in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. The news came via a Twitter post from Community Manager Darroch Brown on February 7, 2024.
Understandably, many of the replies were questions regarding the other numerous bugs with their responses being “This is being monitored.” or “Noted your question!” I understand that a community manager’s hands are a bit tied in what they can divulge or what announcements are made, so I respect how Darroch Brown handled the situation and prevented it from spiraling.
Diablo Blaze to become Mild Blaze
Diablo Blaze is one of four Afflictions that players can inflict on Brainiac’s forces in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. While this first season is more focused on Craze with the various benefits from Bane, Two-Face, and Hugo Strange’s Infamous gear, players climbing the Mastery Levels have been leaning hard into Blaze thanks to its ability to melt foes.
While Blaze removes a character’s ability to Shield Harvest, the 20-second DoT is more than enough to offset that drawback. This led to the unintended ability for players to quickly tear through Mastery levels. As Rocksteady developer RS_Axel wrote in the official Discord:
“This effect was supposed to scale in a certain way across the Mastery Levels, so it can remain as a viable way to deal consistent damage. When we looked deeper into this issue based on the loadouts used, we found that there was a major unintended bug that made Burn not scale correctly. As Mastery levels increased, Burn’s damage also increased, which basically meant that if you used a Burn build, every Mastery Level had the same difficulty.” (sic)
This bug meant that players had pushed into Mastery Levels well beyond what the game had been balanced for at release. With a Diablo Blaze build, players could circumvent the challenge of higher difficulties and climb atop the leaderboards in addition to the Mastery Levels.
What’s the plan going forward?
The bug is going to be corrected and the Affliction will scale properly. Due to how it impacted the leaderboards, the current leaderboard will be retired (and still viewable) while a new one is put in place.
50+ Mastery Levels are going to be adjusted as the enemy health ramped up far too quickly. This should offset the adjustment to Blaze while also making other Afflictions more viable. Also in regards to Mastery Levels, players’ Mastery Levels, Finite Crisis rank, Squad Levels, and looted gear will not be reset.
The Turtle’s Shell and The Heat Wave’s Molten Skin shields are also being adjusted. Rather than granting immunity, the shields will now reduce damage taken by 90%. The idea behind this change is that the criteria to proc immunity was too easy to achieve. This will require players to engage with a tad more caution.
Finally, the development team will begin publishing a weekly update to let players know what’s going on in terms of bugs, fixes, and upcoming content.
So, if you’re one of the lucky players who can get into multiplayer sessions without the game crashing, be sure to try out a Blaze build before this patch goes live. While you’re free to do it in a private session, I think we can all agree that lighting enemies on fire is better with friends.
