Diablo IV Damage Buckets Explained - Season 2 Update
Diablo IV Damage Multipliers Example
Diablo IV Damage Buckets Overhaul
Diablo IV Damage calculation is receiving an overhaul.
Before, damage sources such as Critical Strike Damage, Vulnerable Damage, and Overpower Damage were in different buckets, and when these buckets mixed with each other, the full amount of bonus damage from each bucket was multiplied together.
This meant the most effective way to increase your damage was to get as much bonus Critical Strike Damage and bonus Vulnerable Damage and then Critically Strike Vulnerable enemies. Because access to these two buckets was generally more attainable than something like Overpower damage—which has a fixed chance to occur at 3%—most builds that did not take advantage of this multiplicative synergy fell behind.
This is all changing with Season of Blood.
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Vulnerable Damage
Diablo IV Damage Buckets Explained
There will still be different damage buckets, but now only the base amount of bonus damage that these methods provide will be multiplicative. The rest of the bonus damage to these categories will be additive when they are combined. The base bonus multiplicative damage these categories provide are:
Overpower Damage: x50%
Vulnerable Damage: x20%
Critical Strike Damage: x50%
Overpower Damage
Some issues with how Overpower Damage is calculated have been fixex.
In Season of Blood it will be much more competitive as a damage source compared to before.
Your character profile will also display this bonus damage, and the math behind has become more complex.
Here’s a breakdown of how it works with the following example:
In this case, you can see how much bonus Vulnerable Damage the player will inflict on an enemy. The player gets the standard x20% bonus damage that Vulnerable Damage provides, and have an additional +18.0% from gear and no other bonus Vulnerable Damage.
Here’s how to find the total bonus Vulnerable damage:
(1 + additive bonus) * (1 + 1st multiplicative source) * (1 + 2nd multiplicative source) * (1 + 3rd multiplicative source) – 1
In this example, the equation would be:
= (1 + .18) * (1 + .2) -1
= (1.18) * (1.2) – 1
= 1.416 – 1
= .416, or 41.6%
In the interest of avoiding extremely long tooltips, they will not specify any additional multiplicative sources of damage. These types of damage bonuses are uncommon overall, so it’s less vital to include on a tooltip. If the damage bonus value doesn’t match up based on the additive bonus alone, it is likely from having a multiplicative damage bonus on your character.
So what does this all mean? With these changes we expect the following to happen:
↓ Player damage numbers will be lower overall due to the lower multiplicative synergy of mixing different damage buckets. However, ↑ Monsters and enemies have been rebalanced around the new player power. You can still kill the monsters you were killing before about just as quickly.
↑ Mixing damage types will still be powerful, but less mandatory for all builds.
↑ Individual damage sources will be much more equal in value. As an example, Damage-Over-Time and Overpower builds will now be much more competitive than they were previously.
↓ Monsters and enemies have been rebalanced around the new player power. You should not experience a significant difference in your effectiveness from these changes.
The baseline bonus that players get for mixing damage types have been lowered, creating more space to reinsert that multiplicative damage via other methods.
Blizzard’s overall goal with these changes is to reward players for investing into their primary vector of damage—and to be competitive for doing that—while also giving them tools to find other vectors of damage scaling as they customize their character and progress further in the game.
This sums up our Season 2 Guide on Damage Buckets. Thanks for reading!
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