Beyond the hordes of demons, flashy abilities, and shiny loot, Diablo 4 is, at its core, a numbers game. Everything the player does in this game is to make their numbers bigger, whether it's levels, money, highest-passed nightmare dungeons, etc. All of this ultimately depends on how much damage the player does. Players can prepare enough Diablo IV Gold in the game.
Even before the game's official release, the Diablo 4 community has been hard at work figuring out how damage is actually calculated. After rigorous testing with many players around the world, everyone seems to agree that the damage is divided into "buckets", which effectively limits the size of the damage numbers while expanding build variety. Here's how it works.
What are damage buckets and how do they work?
Damage buckets are essentially a class of damage sources that all add up to one big multiplier. There are a ton of different stat modifiers in Diablo 4, and they're all grouped into these categories to keep damage numbers from reaching astronomical levels -- at least, in theory.
A player named SnowRaven created a publicly available Google spreadsheet that contains all the damage modifiers in the game, sorted by the damage range they belong to. As this is still only a theory, this article will be updated when more information is proven or discovered.
According to the test information, the damage is divided into five levels:
Primary attributes (Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Willpower)
[x]% damage (including skill damage)
critical damage
[+]% Damage (includes "Combat Damage", "Simultaneous Damage" and "Simultaneous Damage" affixes)
vulnerable
Players deal damage proportional to the weapon they use. Then multiply that five times based on the damage range above. Modifiers belonging to the same category add up to form a larger multiplier. Technically, attack speed counts as its own separate damage radius, though it affects how often damage is dealt rather than the strength of the damage.
For example, an attack that does 100 damage will do 165 damage, assuming all damage buckets provide a 10% bonus. This is not representative of how damage is actually calculated in game, it is only used to visualize how the damage buckets interact.
A good rule of thumb when preparing is to focus on stacking unconditional damage modifiers (primary stats, fragility, and critical strike damage) or having easy-to-achieve conditions (core skill damage, damage to crowd-controlled, etc.).
It is highly recommended to have advanced tooltips turned on, as it will let the player know if an item's modifiers provide additive or multiplicative damage. This should make sorting loot easier until players become more familiar with which stats belong in which bucket.
Also, it's worth noting that certain aspects and skills seem to count towards their own damage area. The Necromancer's Jagged Face appears to act as a separate damage multiplier rather than being added on top of the existing crit damage stat. It's unclear if this was an intended interaction, but it's something to keep in mind. For more game guides, please visit 777chips.com.
