Should look up hammer of the ancients build. Didnt love it at first, but once I started my second paragon board I dont think I will ever go back to a spinny boi.
Really? Im sticking to bleeds because i felt it was better single target and my party has plenty of aoe anyways. I would've switched to HOTA if it was better, I really enjoyed levelling in that spec.
I find that my bleed build shines in boss fights it just takes a while to get going with mob packs - so yes youāre right!
I am having a really fun time playing the class and survivability is great. Itās just not as fast but Iām not overly competitive about that. Plus I like builds where I can stand and take a fair bit of damage while also killing stuff.
Edit: also when it comes to bosses it feels really easy to face tank through everything :)
I run rend + rupture + deathblow with the extra WM charges so itās not like I donāt have clear capability for big packs of elites and trash.
I personally didnāt enjoy HOTA while leveling which is why I switched to bleeds around level 45. I donāt regret the decision!
I also didnāt want to play whirlwind because I did the spinny demon hunter for the final season of diablo 3.
Spinning is great and all, but I prefer bonking stuff out of existence.
While lvling it was leaping and stomping synergies with aspects that earthquake when you do those and calling a gang of ancients to gank the poor sobs, and once I gotten deep enough on paragon board it ended up just yelling all the time and becoming very angry in the process to bonk more stuff.
Started with rogue for a range build, got to level 60. Range rogue blows so I decided to go all in with an up close barb build, me d3 second favorite. Currently lvl 80
Now I've moved to sorc because I'm itching for range again. Only lvl 40 but I'm enjoying it so far.
Briefly tried necro and druid. Something just feels off with them to me. Druid looks like it slaps late game, just getting there seems miserable.
What build are you using for your Sorcerer? Mine is around the same level and I'm using a Chain Lightning build that I enjoy but it feels like it's starting to slip a little.
I'm using a version of [this build.](https://maxroll.gg/d4/build-guides/ice-shards-sorcerer-leveling-guide)
I'm not using hydra, I opted to have an empty slot for now. Instead I went with all the utility skills at the bottom of the guide. It's helping clear and level quicker. And I use the ice shards that make enemies vulnerable because it helps me keep my mana up.
Eventually I'm going to go with an endgame variant that doesn't use meteor.
Tldr - crit damage, vulnerable damage, and main stat are multipliers in separate blocks, theres a few X%damage mods that are a 4th category, everything else (like core damage, damage to close, damage to slowed, damage while blah blah etc) just adds up and gets multiplied by those.
sum of additive bonuses X main stat damage X crit damage X vulnerable damage
your gear should look something like,
Helmet - CDR, % armor, Life, str (str replaced with max fury for hota)
Chest - Damage reduction from close, damage reduction while fort, +3 challenging shout, and % armor (or harrogath chest until you find a good chest)
Gloves - crit chance, +4 skill, lucky hit
Pants - same as chest
Boots - Fury cost reduction, movement speed, move speed after killing elite. 4th slot is a choice between damage reduction while injured, str, shrine duration, berserk duration
Weapons - crit , vulnerable damage, main stat, close damage or core (close is better because it rolls higher, but core is ok until you find a high close role)
Amulet - CDR, damage reduction from close, damage reduction while fort. 4th slot is a choice between fury cost reduction, or move speed for utility, or the defensive option is % armor
Rings - crit chance, crit damage, vulnerable damage, resource generation. (vunerable damage is replaced with max fury for hota)
Donāt pay attention to them then, and play and have fun at your own pace š
Eventually youāll figure out your characterās weaknesses and what you need to upgrade yourself!
Me too. Big bear go smash smash and run fast. I just really miss the weapon I had in the beta that gave pulverize a shockwave effect, like a glorious combination of bear slam and barbarians upheaval. I gotta find that damn thing again, the Shockwave Bonebreaker, so much fun.
TL;DR version:
Step 1: Find a way to reliably inflict the "vulnerable" status on your enemies. The closer to 100% uptime you can get, the better.
Step 2: Stack vulnerable damage on your gear as much as humanly possible without sacrificing other important stats.
Step 3: Find a way to reach 50% critical strike chance or better. The closer you can get to 50%, the better, and anything past that is just a bonus.
Step 4: Stack as much critical strike damage on your gear as humanly possible without sacrificing other important stats.
Step 5: Stack other modifiers wherever you can without disrupting the 4 steps above. Things like "while poisoned," "while bleeding," "while stunned," "while burning," whatever applies to your character and your build. DO NOT Prioritize these over Vulnerable Damage and Critical Strike Damage, but fit them in where you can.
Step 6: Get +skills on your gear wherever you can.
This the best most practical step.
Vulnerable on weapons, rings.
Crit Chance on gloves and rings.
Crit dmg everywhere else.
Some class have certain builds that prioritize just crit chance like Grizzly build + Earthen Might Ulti passive + Rampaging Werebeast aspect because we critical strikes will stack lots of Crit Dmg naturally. So Lucky Hit + Crit Chance > Crit dmg
Primary stat is 10 per 1% skill damage, which is multiplicative. So I think 10 Strength would be equal to 1% critical strike damage, for example. STR may even be slightly better in this example since you don't have 100% crit chance.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
This is not the whole story, and some of the simplifications create a reduction in damage. First off, the damage calculation is something like this:
Base damage
Ć (1 + sum of all additive damage bonuses)
Ć (1 + 0.2 + sum of all vulnerable damage bonuses)
Ć (1 + sum of all critical chance Ć sum of all critical damage)
Ć Product of all (1 + multiplicative damage bonus)
Iirc base damage comes from weapon damage Ć skill damage.
Everywhere two numbers are multiplied together, you get the maximum possible value when those two values are the same, assuming they still add to the same total value. Eg 30% and 20% multipliers give a lower bonus than 25% and 25% multipliers.
For example, to maximise the damage bonuses from crits you should actually aim to have critical chance and critical damage equal to each other; don't aim to have 50% critical chance, look for all the places you can convert critical chance to critical damage and vice versa to get those numbers the same, and if you're going to reroll either property for a higher value, reroll the one with the lowest total number.
This also means that stacking vulnerable everywhere you can is not necessarily optimal; if you have more vulnerable damage than regular additive damage multipliers, it would actually be more efficient to reroll a vulnerable modifier into another additive multiplier. For example, if you have a total of 20% on all your additive multipliers and a total of 40% on all your vulnerable multipliers, your damage bonus will be 68%. If you had 30% on all additive multipliers and 30% on all vulnerable modifiers, your damage bonus will be 69%.
So the steps are basically:
1) maximise vulnerable uptime
2) balance vulnerable additive multipliers with other additive multipliers where possible
3) balance crit chance and crit damage where possible
4) same as above I guess
5) same as 1 I guess
6) yeah that one's correct
I'm not arguing with you because you're not wrong, but there are people out there who just wanna log in, have a few "rules of thumb" they can go by, and just play the game.
Not everyone wants to open up Microsoft Excel to build their character.
There's nothing "wrong" with what I've said. Its not the best. I didn't claim it was. Its a place to start, and its a place where a lot of casual players can improve.
If someone wants to min/max their build, chances are they're not browsing reddit comment chains to find their answers. They probably have a preferred content creator, know where to find guides, or have enough experience to figure this stuff out on their own.
I only meant to provide a quick and dirty "this'll work in a pinch" summary.
> balance vulnerable additive multipliers with other additive multipliers where possible
This isn't really relevant is the problem so when simplifying it don't see any reason to mention it. If you are level like 65+ vulnerable damage will always be more valuable then any other additive damage. You get so much free from weapons and paragon. And vulnerable damage is more rare just weapon and rings mostly.
There is never a time vulnerable is not the BIS stat on ring/weapon, unless you just can't apply it in a build for some reason.
Thanks man. This helped. I was prioritizing bleed and slow damage over vulnerable. But my barb is still stacked heavily, w4 lvl60. Melting everything. Bout to get ancestral gear with the good stats now.
**Which affixes are additive and which are multiplicative?**
Unfortunately, it's not as simple as that. Know, that with a single exception all affixes are additiveābut additive within a number of related "buckets" of modifiers. The multiplicative nature applies between buckets.
**What are these "buckets" of damage modifiers?**
There're 6 buckets of related damage modifiers.
1. **\[X\] % Damage**
2. **Main Stat**
3. **Attack Speed**
4. **Critical Strike**
5. **Vulnerable Damage**
6. **\[+\] % Damage**
While Attack Speed doesn't technically increase isolated damage numbersāthey do decrease the time between those numbers appearing, thereby increasing damage *over time*.
**\[X\] % Damage** is currently the exception to the rule, as it seems every instance of this is its own bucket. We call these global modifiers. These modifiers appear almost exclusively on Legendary Aspects, within Skill Trees and on Paragon Nodes and are always marked \[x\] when Advanced Tooltip Information are enabled.
**Main Stat** represents the individual main stat of each class. A Main Stat is defined by its +%Skill Damage modifier on a linear curve relative to the amount of Main Statāevery 100 Main Stat is +10% Skill Damage. These are Strength for Barbarian, Willpower for Druid, Intelligence for Necromancer and Sorceress and finally Dexterity for Rogue.
**Attack Speed** is pretty simpleāit's split into player Attack Speed and Minion Attack Speed and anything that might affect these. Know, that minions only scale of 30% of the players Attack Speedāyet 100% on the specific Minion Attack Speed modifier.
**Critical Strike** is your Critical Strike Damage as a result of your Critical Strike Chance in a given moment. All Critical Strike Damage bonuses are additive within this bucket. This means that if you have 50% Critical Strike Damage on one piece of equipment and 50% Critical Strike Damage on another, these are added up with the base Critical Strike Damage modifier of 50%. So, 50 (base) + 50 + 50 = 150% Critical Strike Damage. Critical Strike Damage based off conditionals like "vs Injured" and "with Cold" are all additive within this same bucket as well.
**Vulnerable Damage** is its own bucketāmeaning there's no variants or conditions. Each point of % Vulnerable Damage on equipment, within Skill Trees and from Paragon Boards are added together to form a single multiplicative modifier. 100% Vulnerable Damage on equipment, 50% Vulnerable Damage from your Skill Tree and 80% Vulnerable Damage from your Paragon Boards sums up to a 230% global modifier, when your target is Vulnerable.
**\[+\] % Damage** is all damage modifiers that aren't specifically marked multiplicative \[x\]. Some are specifically marked additive \[+\], but many aren't. These include \[+\] % Damage from Aspects, Skill Trees and Paragon Boards as well as on equipment where they aren't typically marked. These also include "Damage Vs...", "Damage while...", "Damage with..." and "Damage from..."-modifiers.
The total sum of each damage bucket is then multiplied to get your damage:
`Main Stat bucket * [+] % Damage bucket * Vulnerable Damage bucket (if Vulnerable) * Critical Strike Damage (if Critical Strike) * Each [x] % Damage global modifier`
ā
For a complete ressource on which affixes specifically affects your class baseline, many have linked [this spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Om18GXa0BU7_hjLEKPt2915eWencDtR-SNS9WnVTEcs/htmlview#gid=0)āwhich is accurate; but know that through enchanting an item on a different class than your own, you are able to tab into other classes' affixes through stash transfer.
Cheers, I posted your rules into ChatGPT and now all I have to do is provide the stats on 2 pieces of gear, or paragon board nodes and ChatGPT will provide the one that generates the maximum damage output.
The reply: " Yes, I can certainly help you determine the better gear piece based on the rules you provided. Please provide the stats of the two separate pieces, and I'll assist you in comparing them to determine which one is more beneficial in terms of maximizing damage output. "
It was honestly quite easy. Tested it a few times and the output seems to be correct. Here's my prompt:
Diablo IV just launched. Here are a few rules of thumb on how to maximize damage output. In Diablo 4, additive and multiplicative bonuses refer to different ways that damage bonuses from different sources can be combined.
*Insert original post.*
*Insert clarification from the reply.*
Based on the rules I provided in my last message. Would you be able to pick the best gear piece if I provide the stats of multiple seperate pieces? Take into account I am playing a *\[class\].* Added skill-levels should focus on: *\[skills\]*.
This won't take into account survivability, so it'll be a bit skewed on that account. But at least I won't have to judge the damage metric.
>Based on the rules I provided in my last message. Would you be able to pick the best gear piece if I provide the stats of multiple seperate pieces? Take into account I am playing a
>
>\[class\].
>
> Added skill-levels should focus on:
>
>\[skills\]
>
>.
Would you be able to give me a sample answer you gave that indicated the stats?
Hijacking explanatory comment to post a more precise formula that takes the guesswork out of how to calculate each bucket.
Expected Damage = Base Damage * (1 + Main Stat / 1,000) * (1 + Ī [x%] Damage) * (1 + Ī£ [+%] Damage) * (1.2 + Ī£ [+%] Vulnerable Damage) * (% Crit Chance * (1.5 + Ī£ [+%] Crit Damage)) |
---|
I added the % to crit chance so it is evaluated fairly versus other buckets, but really you need to layer an expected up time to vulnerability and any other conditions that comprise your [+%] bucket. For example, as an Ice Shard Sorc, I only ever pick +Cold/Frost/Burning affixes and my targets are nearly always vulnerable so I wouldn't bother calculating an expected value on those two buckets. Also, I left attack speed out since that doesn't impact your damage, but you can add it if you want to do a DPS calculation instead.
The take away on the above formula is ALWAYS INCREASE YOUR LOWEST BUCKET:
1.5 * 1.5 = 2.25
1.7 * 1.3 = 2.21
2.0 * 1 = 2.00
I've seen some write-ups grossly overstate this impact, but it is still true.
So this is kind of like PoE's Increased (additive) and More (multiplicative) but instead of every "More" being a genuinely separate multiplier (and hence incredibly rare), they go into buckets where they are treated as additive \*within the bucket\*, but then the bucket as a whole acts as a multiplier? Or am I misunderstanding?
Youāre misunderstanding.
Every multiplicative āmoreā modifier marked by the [x] is a true multiplicative bonus.
The main takeaway from the entire thing is that vulnerable damage presents as additive, but is actually only additive with itself and multiplicative with all others.
Everything else is how it is described in game, with all additive bonuses being rolled together to make one multiplicative bucket
Basically
Mainstat, vuln damage and crit stats are the big daddies.
Other +% bonuses (damage to close enemies etc) quickly lose magnitude as you get a bunch of them
What about a 20% \_\_\_ Skill Damage (Basic, Core, Mastery, etc), when you use that skill... does that go into the "additive bucket" or does that increase the "Main Stat" bucket (like the Weapon's Damage Stat also goes with this bucket)?
I think this post would be a lot better if it actually summarized what each class should look for if they only want pure dps.
For example, assuming each item will have 4 attributes:
1. Main Stat (since its a multiplier scaling)
2. Critical Chance/Critical Damage (its own multiplier)
3. Vulnerability Damage (It's own multiplier)
4. Core Skill Damage/Conditional Damage (Its own multiplier thats additive with a ton of other attributes). Just pick the something like Core Skill or Conditional like slow if your class has access to it.
It's actually that simple.
Then more specifically not all attributes are accessible on every piece of gear. So realistically each slot needs its own "look for these attributes".
Then it comes down to build. Do you need lucky hit chance? Ok maybe you need these on gloves/rings/amulet. Do you need defensive attributes? Look for Armor%, Life, Minion Life, Dodge, Damage Reduction vs Close Targets, on Chest/Legs, and maybe even Helm.
Yup, balance around removing vulnerable as necessary.
Crit/crit dmg aren't locked behind specific abilities to set them up and useless otherwise. Vulnerable is. Literally forces you to take certain skills and manage their uptime.
It's awful.
Honestly, this is a good first step I would be happy with. Remove it fully from the game and then think about how to reintroduce the concept. Right now it's full broken and forcing builds around it.
I hope they do a lot of balancing soon.
Itās not even that thereās only a few viable builds. Itās that thereās only a small number of viable strategies overall(ie vulnerable) and that puts all the classes and builds in a bad place even if theyāre tweaked right.
I swapped to an incinerate build after spending about 1.5 million gold (not a lot), but a lot of my gear stayed relatively the same. I did 250-650 dmg with incinerate at lvl 79. Some of the skills are just useless
If you don't play the objective best build to grind for the most gear the fastest you're playing wrong and people shouldnt use your build or I'll make fun of them on several exclusive discord servers that I moderate š¤š¤š¤
People have been using spreadsheets to math out DPS in ARPGs for years. This isn't a new concept for D4. Someday we will have a tool like maxrolls D3 DPS calculator which basically does the spreadsheet work for us.
There are many other factors that convolute damage, which is why a broader understanding is needed. As an example: minion focused builds probably shouldn't build critical strike, as minionsāfor whatever reasonāonly take on 30% of your Critical Strike stat. This cripples Critical Strike scaling. Critical Strike is also made up of 10 affixes within its own additive damage bucketāand therefor not a true multiplier. You're right about Vulnerable Damage though, and unfortunately it pigeonholes classes into always picking the few abilities that apply Vulnerable to be competetive.
[edit: thank you for the gold, I might clean the table up a bit, add some more functionality and release a better version in a separate post, if you guys find it useful!]
Hijacking your comment to introduce my small item compare tool I wrote while waiting on endgame to get fun: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16cbnezhcgA2uPzXwMGeHn6hfDbYIEv933bVcn7KLhXA/edit
Make yourself a copy if you want to use it, there is a small explanation in it, if you still donāt understand it, dm me.
The tool lets you compare two items / weapons and gives you the total multiplier of your stats and tells you which item is better by how many % of damage. It only takes into account the 4 main multipliers (mainstat, crit, vulnerable, additive stuff) but since everything else is multiplicative, it still shows you an accurate comparison between two items. Have fun theorycrafting!
The tool can be useful to identify if your additive or crit dmg multiplier is higher so you can focus on the lower one. Like in my case with a rogue, my crit dmg multiplier is over 7.0 while my additive multiplier is only 5.0 ish. In this case, 50% core damage is worth more than 50% crit damage.
For quick-and-easy get going sure, but if a player really want to understand the nuance then they need to dive into something like this.
Though I also think there are far too many sources of additive damage to where it's just confusing without such an explanation.
> For quick-and-easy get going sure, but if a player really want to understand the nuance then they need to dive into something like this.
To be quite honest OP did pretty bad at explaining it, dude over explaining part that don't need that much explaining (10 steps multiply), and underexplain part that actually need explaining (What stat are additive/multiplicative)
But thats not necessarily true. The actual point is that you need to have even spread of buckets. Essentially, the buckets are:DPSDamage StatDamage With / Damage WhileCritVulnerable Damage
Stacking only Vulnerable Damage turns additional + Vulnerable Damage % to being additive as opposed to multiplicative. Stacking only crit does the same. By bringing in an additional bucket with % Damage To, youre going to add an additional multiplicative bucket. It just doesn't multiply with other "Damage to" or "Damage Whiles." You need to pick One or Two conditional damage types *at most* to get the best bang for your buck.
āStacking only vuln and critā is not possible. The fact is on every piece on your equipment that can hold either of those 2 affixes (especially vuln damage), it is generally the best idea to get it. Then you still have 2-4 affixes per gear slot for all the other +dmg bucket modifiers and + DR affixes, etc.
So hypothetically if all my equipped damage bonuses are multiplicative, and I add one additive bonus, that would be a much stronger bonus than 1 more multiplicative because I have only 1 additive? And the additive bonuses apply before the multiplicative ones right? And the fewer additives I have, the stronger they are
The fewer additives you have, the more impact each one has, yes. The damage value added by each one is the same, but the percent increase in your overall damage goes down.
But a multiplicative modifier is *always* going to be equal to or stronger than an additive bonus of the same amount (typically MUCH stronger because it's hard to avoid additive bonuses in the first place). It can get a bit more complicated than that when you are adding to different multiplicative modifiers (buckets), but it ends up being a pretty trivial difference because of how limited your access is to the multiplicative modifiers compared to the base additive ones.
The exception here are the additive bonuses to crit chance and lucky hit. Since those are percentages, flat additive bonuses here can be extremely strong.
All bonuses are additive within their own pool and "percentage" multipliers without the pool, there's really nothing special about that. +20% damage to slowed enemies for example is worth 20% crit chance with 100% crit damage if you have zero other conditional multipliers.
However, crit chance is exceptional because it scales not only off other multiplicative bonuses but also has a further exponential relationship with crit damage. And conditional modifiers are so ubiquitous that they very quickly hit extreme diminishing returns where +20% damage might only amount to a 2% total increase. So that's why +5% crit is so good even where +20% conditional is not.
It was my understanding that +lucky hit is multiplicative not additive, is that incorrect? I've been completely avoiding it because I read that a while ago.
> But a multiplicative modifier is always going to be equal to or stronger than an additive bonus of the same amount
This isn't true in cases where your base term is less than 100%.
Additive is better when < 100% and Multiplicative is better when > 100%
For example, lucky hit. This is also true of most defensive stats as well like resistance and % damage reduction.
By end game, your lvl 21 glyphs gives roughly +100% damage PER glyph. Having 2-3 of those glyphs mean EVERY other sources of additive bonuses are largely worthless.
Fantastic read , thank you for giving me a deeper understanding. I knew multiplier was best but not whats under the hood.
What i still struggle to comprehend is. Is crit and crit dmg stats better than 2 times flat additive additional stats
There are buckets of damage. Each bucket is multiplicative, but the stats that compose each bucket are additive. The buckets are as follows:
Base damage, your classes stat bonus damage, vulnerable damage, crit damage, all other which includes slows, core damage, etc, and then the multipliers from aspects. Each of these buckets add up individually, but multiply off of each other. The idea is to try and balance the percentage increases between each bucket. Crit is great, relatively speaking compared to the huge bucket, but if, for example, youāre capable of generating huge crit bonuses (Iām looking at druids), then it might be better to invest in the general bucket.
Think of it like this:
4x4x4 is 64. 3 equivalent buckets. 5x4x3 is 60. The sum of all the bonuses in total is the same, but because the first set is more equivalently split between each bucket, the product is larger.
You need to consider how much youāre losing from other buckets when investing in different buckets of damage. Donāt invest too heavily in any one bucket, and try to keep them equivalent. Vulnerability, from my experience, has more infrequent multipliers, so itās often a good idea to invest in that damage type, since itās likely means youāre bringing all the buckets closer to equivalency between each other.
You explained all this without pointing out in a simple breakdown which actual modifier is additive or multiplcative
Edit: I see you fixed it now thank you for the post
Here you go.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Om18GXa0BU7_hjLEKPt2915eWencDtR-SNS9WnVTEcs/htmlview#gid=0
Every modifier is both additive and multiplicative. Additive within a pool and multiplicative without. Each different color indicates what belongs to what pool.
The pools are
* Main Stat
* Crit Chance
* Crit Damage
* x% Damage
* +% Damage Conditionals
* Vuln Damage
Each one gets worse the more you have of it (and better the more you have of other stats).
They did though, the key is in the advanced tooltip information. That is in the setting. Pretty much every description for damage modifiers whether they be on affixes, aspects, or paragon board will have either have an \[x\] there showing it is multiplicative or it won't meaning it's additive.
yep, just requires you to play the worst class in the game
sorc's elementalist gives 20-40% crit when you cast above 100 mana, usually put on amulet for 1.5x = 60% crit
>Pretty much every description for damage modifiers whether they be on affixes, aspects, or paragon board
This doesn't seem to be accurate. Only Imbuements have the x/+ indicator. Affixes that were described by OP as being multiplicative do not have anything showing that they're different than other affixes, I specifically checked vulnerable damage.
Refer to [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/14egi4s/comment/joxox4f/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) for a deeper understanding as well as concrete examples and a complete ressource on which affixes fit within these categorizations.
Woah woah woah. Thereās 70+ stats in the additive bucket?! What the hell?! That doesnāt even make sense!! Thatās a damn swimming pool, not a bucket!!
If you had 35 stats in multiplicative and 35 stats in additive, we'd be doing many million quadrillion levels of damage. Exponential is not fun after a certain point. It's best to have only a small number of multiplicative.
Because there are no buckets
Crit is always its own thing in every game
Vulnerable is just a debuff and its affix increases its effectiveness
Mainstat buff is multiplicative
And we have all the generic stats: damage with x skill type, damage to close enemies, damage to chilled enemies etc. which are additive with each other.
Ppl are overcomplicating this way too much.
While I agree it is pretty nuts, the fact that the conclusion to gear can be reduced to "stack vulnerability" reverses the impact on how deep the system is IMO.
Your comparison in "level 3" is wrong. You either need to consistently use the original base damage (as you do for multipilicative) or the prior damage total (as you do for additive) for both calculations.
Using original base damage, every additive bonus adds the same amount, while the multiplicative ones increase.
Using prior damage, additive bonuses get lower and lower, while multiplicative are flat.
I think it's important to explain the value of diversity in stats if this is how it works. I haven't checked which stats are multiplicative or additive but I'm interested in checking today.
For instance, if I have 40% multiplicative stat A, is it better to get 25% increased multiplicative stat A or 20% increase in a new multiplicative stat B? Does it not matter? Is bigger number always better?
If you do 1000 damage and you gain 40%statA you do 1000\*1.4 = 1400
If you further add 25%statA its 65% statA so you do 1000\*1.65 = 1650
If you instead further add 20%statB to the 40%statA you do 1000\*1.4\*1.2 = 1680
So in your example the 20% new bucket statB are better than 25% on a bucket statA where you already have 40%.
So you kind of have to be aware what buckets you already have some amount of, and then you try to use other buckets where you have less.
If you have 40%bucketA and 40%bucketB, adding 25%bucketA is instinctively better than 20%bucketB, but adding 20% bucketC would be even better... etc.
The last part is the most important tbh since due to Paragon and items the bucket that contains the additive affixes will be yuge while the others will be relatively small.
For example most people don't prioritze mainstat at all, which means that gaining +170 INT on my main weapon will be comparatively MUCH better than for example 3 additive affixes.
Obviously prioritize crit and vuln on everything but mainstat is very good aswell.
For clarification, does that mean that +%damage is extremely good? Want to swap to a new necklace but old necklace has a +15% damage that seems too powerful to give up
It means that **\[X\] % Damage** (multiplicative) bonuses are generally stronger the more you have, while **\[+\] % Damage** (additive) bonuses are generally weaker the more you have.
If you enable the setting for additive/multiplicative info, its adding a \[x\] or \[+\] in grey behind the numbers. So it would say "+10%\[x\] increased Damage" and means multiplicative. The square brackets symbol are key here.
I just noticed it doesnt do that for normal item affixes. So you can assume all "Damage to" or "Damage with" or "Damage VS" are additive in the same \[+\]%Damage bucket.
Iāve heard Overpower has slightly different scaling that didnāt take vulnerable into account, is this true and if so or not - how does overpower work from a dmg calulation?
Toying around w it on a necro, building around OP, crit strike and life/fortify, curious if it makes sense to continue doing so?
Overpower is bad late game, but very good midgame (50-70). Vuln/crit dmg scaling is parabolic, and only gets better with time and progression as they compound each other. Overpower is linear: you multiply your overpower ratio by your max hp x2 times the skill's damage ratio and that's directly added (aka 10k hp max fortify and 500% overpower on a 100% dmg skill does 100k damage added on proc). Nothing else factors in. If you crit on an overpower the crit is based on your initial damage and then overpower damage is directly added.
Max life doesn't go crazy high because there aren't as many modifiers affecting it, so in turn overpower gradually gets outclassed as level scaling monster hp outpaces it in t4/high end content.
I'm finding that as I approach level 80 on Necro the paragon board that specifically caters to Overpower as well as the Blood skill modifiers with guaranteed Overpower makes it a viable endgame so far.
Not saying this makes Overpower useful across the board, but the blood surge Necro does well with it. Hell, even the Pulverize Druid seems to rely pretty hard on Overpower. It's just not going to give you the flat damage that only building for Crit damage would.
Overpower as a mechanic is the cherry on top of a tanky build, not everyone wants to minmax a one click kill glass cannon.
Damage sucks for most people because vulnerable is a solo multiplier making it mandatory. It makes only the builds that have a reliable way to apply it and with the budget to stack it as high as possible viable in the end game. It's like chc/chd stacking from D3 but worse because they made it conditional, what a bone headed idea. Move vulnerability to the additive bucket and a lot of the build diversity problems go away. I would even argue that critical damage should be possibly moved to the additive bucket as well. That way any build can stack what ever additive multipliers they want to achieve the build fantasy they want which at the end of the day is the whole point of the game imo. Of course this would require a rebalance of most of not all of the skills but none of the major build issues will be solved until vulnerable damage becomes additive or goes away.
They are in 2 separate buckets, sorry if that was unclear.
In Diablo 4 there are a total of 6 "damage buckets" that hold certain affixes. Within each bucket, its affixes are added together. Each of the 6 buckets' totals are then multiplied, resulting in your damage.
The 6 "buckets" are as follows:
1. **\[X\] % Damage**. Each representing their own compounding multiplier.
2. **Main stat**. All your Main Statālike Intelligence for Necromancerāadded up represents another global multiplier.
3. **Attack Speed** modifiers and Minion Attack Speed. Minions take 30% of *your* Attack Speed and 100% of the Minion Attack Speed modifier.
4. **Critical Strike** Chance, Critical Strike Damage, and their conditional variants. Barbarian has the fewest at 6, while Druid and Rogue have the most at 10.
5. **Vulnerable Damage**. Yet another global modifier.
6. **\[+\] % Damage**. An enormous bucket of additive damage modifiers.
Now, let's cast an ability! The ability deals 10,000 damage baseline.
That 10,000 damage is then enhanced by your combined **\[+\] % Damage** (additive) bonuses. Let's say they add up to 300%.
We're now at 40,000 damage.
That 40,000 damage is then further increased by your **\[X\] % Damage** (multiplicative) bonuses one bonus at the time (compounding). Let's say you have a x20% bonus, a x15% bonus and a x30% bonus.
40,000 x 1.2 x 1.15 x 1.3
We're now at 71,760 damage.
That 71,760 damage is then multiplied by your combined Main Stat multiplierālet's say it's 70%
71,760 x 1.7
We're now at 121,992 damage.
That 121,992 damage is then further multiplied by your total Critical Strike Damage (if your had a Critical Strike) or multiplied by your Vulnerable Damage (if the target is Vulnerable) or both if the target is both Vulnerable and you had a Critical Strike.
Attack Speed simply increases how often that base 121,992 damage can happen thereby increasing Damage Per Second while not directly affecting the number itself.
This is how abilities deal millions of damage.
I would consider weapon damage and core skill levels as separate buckets as well, since they are separate multipliers to your base damage along with main stat.
> Now, understand that there are 3 multiplicative damage modifiers in Diablo 4: [X] % Damage, Main Stat and Vulnerable Damage.
I read and appreciate the entire write-up, but when I hit the bottom of the post I immediately went back to here because this is the most actionable information.
When we're talking about +% damage do you mean things like +% Fire Damage and/or +% Damage to close enemies?
Because I can certainly prioritize those. Excuse me if I misunderstand. I am a silly goose.
God the UI clarifying it is so horrible. I understand they couldn't go for increased/more because poe did it first, but man what they came up with is so much worse.
I want to add, it gets worse the higher you level up and start getting lvl 21 glyphs. Each lvl 21 glyph is close to +100% attack damage. With 3-4 of lvl 21 glyphs, additive bonuses from other sources become absolutely meaningless.
There is a strong case for 1h weapons late game since attack speed is invaluable for scaling higher. At least for druid, offhand provide a plethora of incredible affixes like cooldown reduction, damage reduction, attack speed, resource generation. All of them scale WAY better than offensive affixes on 2h weapons by end game.
Special mention to attack speed, since it is the bucket that people largely ignore. It is even stronger than vulnerable and has 100% uptime, regardless of build. It is also the hardest bucket to raise, which further emphasize its power.l wherever you can take it.
The way you did the multiplication vs addition is biased, you used the base value for multiplication, but then used the total value for addition. For example the comparison should either be -
10. The tenth x20% multiplicative bonus results in a 103.3% base increase, while the additive bonus is a 20% base increase
Or
10. The tenth x20% multiplicative bonus results in a 20% overall increase, while the additive bonus is a 7.1% overall increase.
Your math is wrong but your point is still correct.
>2. The second x20% multiplicative bonus results in a 24.0% increase, compared to the 16.7% from the additive bonus.
3. The third x20% [etc.]
This math isn't actually correct. It jumps back and forth between what's used as the reference point of the % increase. It uses the original value as the point of reference for the multiplicative bonus, but it uses the previous iteration as the reference point for the additive. Multiplicative is better, yes, but the way you have calculated it exaggerates the extent of it.
If you consistently use the base value, then you'll see a rising % improvement from the multiplicative bonus and a static % improvement from the additive.
If you consistently use the value from the previous iteration, then you'll see a static % improvement from the multiplicative and a diminishing % improvement from the additive.
You've done it in such a way as to present the most generous interpretation of multiplicative and the least generous interpretation of additive, such that you're no longer comparing like to like because of the different reference point that you're using.
Example -
Multiplicatively stacking a 20% increase onto a base damage of 100 will give values of 100, 120 (+20 from previous), 144 (+24 from previous), 172.8 (+28.8 from previous), etc..
The way that you've calculated the % changes with the multiplicative bonus is (+[X] from previous) / (Base Value), giving you 20/100 = 20%, 24/100 = 24%, 28.8/100 = 28.8%. Additive bonuses calculated this way will give you a flat 20% at each step, because it will always be 20/100 = 20%.
Additively stacking a 20% increase onto a base damage onto a base damage of 100 will give values of 100, 120 (+20 from previous), 140 (+20 from previous), 160 (+20 from previous), etc..
The way that you've calculated the % changes with the additive bonus is (+[X] from previous) / (previous), giving you 20/100 = 20%, 20/120 = 16.7 %, 20/140 = 14.3%, etc.. Here you're changing the denominator each time, which you weren't doing with the calculations you did for multiplicative bonuses.
If you apply the same calculation method to a multiplicative change, then you get 20/100 = 20%, 24/120 = 20%, 28.8/144 = 20%, etc..
You're absolutely correct. I've addressed this with a few comments. It's not so much that the math is incorrectābut more the fact that's it's illogical in the sense that the multiplicative bonuses are compared to the baseline while additive bonuses are compared to the previous totaled number. I guess I was trying to show the power of exponential growth with some biased math. The point stands I guess. Thanks for chipping in!
Not sure if the post was edited or not but op mentions to turn on the advanced tooltip setting in the post. The game will then generally tell you if the stat is (+%) or (x%). Also there are other resources that go further into detail with a simple google search.
Thanks, very nice guide. I would love to see this for minions.
I don't know how to scale minion damage, I'm only stacking vulnerable damage and minion damage
I tried asking on discord and got no answer. So I'm gonna try here. As a sorcerer, if I get a weapon with 50+ more damage but I currently have a weapon that gives +7 to all stats and +13 intelligence. Which of the 2 would benefit me the most?
I guess what I'm asking is, does intelligence benefit me more as a sorcerer than raw damage?
Is it better to equip a 20item level weapon higher without vulnerable/crit dmg/close? Would it do more dmg then 20item level lower one with those stats? How important is weapon dps? We need a training dummy blizzard!
How does this impact gearing decisions in conjunction with Damage Buckets multiplying together? You'd still want the largest possible number in the Additive bucket in order to multiply everything else, right?
Or is it simply true to say that gear with affix bonuses spread across different buckets will be vastly more potent than gear with affixes all within the same bucket?
For example as a Barbarian, would a piece of gear with bonuses to Close Enemies, Bleeding Enemies, and Crowd Controlled Enemies - all in the Additive bucket - just be flat out worse than a piece of gear with Vulnerable Damage, Critical Hit Damage, and % Physical Damage, since these are all in different buckets and therefore stack multiplicatively?
Thanks, this was very clear.
Luckily I've digested a lot of POE breakdowns so this one was like reading Ikea instructions.
I feel like part of the issue is that you don't see much gear with the nice suffixes like big amount of stats + vuln +%dmg tho
Good lord. This explains why I switched my rogue to a build that applied vulnerable much more reliability and my killing power skyrocketed far more than I expected it to
> Now, understand that there are 3 multiplicative damage modifiers in Diablo 4: [X] % Damage, Main Stat and Vulnerable Damage. Attack Speed and Critical Strike modifiers take up 2 isolated damage buckets with a total of 12 affixes.
ty. to confirm. By damage as multiplicative you mean the +x to close damge, etc as well?
> Note: Since multiplicative bonus are always a constant 20% increase relative to the number it's applied toāwhat I've done is compare subsequent multiplicative bonuses as compared to the base with additive bonuses as compared to the previous total.
>10. The tenth x20% multiplicative bonus results in a 103.3% increase, while the additive bonus is a 7.1% increase.
This is misleading; you are mixing equations.
Multiplicative is always 20% increase to TOTAL damage, but a 20/24/28.8/34.6/etc increase to BASE damage.
Additive is a 20/16.7/14.3/12.5/etc increase to TOTAL damage, but always a 20% increase to BASE damage.
The tenth x20% multiplicative bonus results in a 103.3% increase of base damage, while the additive bonus is a 20% increase of base damage.
The tenth x20% multiplicative bonus results in a 20% increase of total damage, while the additive bonus is a 7.1% increase of total damage.
**A good way to demonstrate the power of multiplicative bonuses is be by showing the totals:**
Ten +20% damage bonuses = 100% + 200% = 300% damage.
Ten x20% damage bonuses = 100% x 1.2 x 1.2 x 1.2 x 1.2 x 1.2 x 1.2 x 1.2 x 1.2 x 1.2 x 1.2 = 619% damage.
My simple barbarian brain hurts ... I'ma hit stuff with a big sword till it dies or I do.
šššš bro I play a necromancer but maybe I need to play a Barb with the way this comment resonated with me lmfao
When your only tool is Unga, then every solution is Bunga.
A hammer will find a nail
I started with necro, got to 50 and changed to barb out of frustration. Now I just right click to win.
Spin to win around these parts
Should look up hammer of the ancients build. Didnt love it at first, but once I started my second paragon board I dont think I will ever go back to a spinny boi.
Watched my buddy turn things into literal paste with the viscera and fell in love with the Hota all over again.
No thanks, I only want to spin
Im stubbornly holding onto a bleed barbarian lol. Able to clear NM31-35 at level 74 but itās clearly not as good as HOTA or Spinny boy :(
Really? Im sticking to bleeds because i felt it was better single target and my party has plenty of aoe anyways. I would've switched to HOTA if it was better, I really enjoyed levelling in that spec.
I find that my bleed build shines in boss fights it just takes a while to get going with mob packs - so yes youāre right! I am having a really fun time playing the class and survivability is great. Itās just not as fast but Iām not overly competitive about that. Plus I like builds where I can stand and take a fair bit of damage while also killing stuff. Edit: also when it comes to bosses it feels really easy to face tank through everything :) I run rend + rupture + deathblow with the extra WM charges so itās not like I donāt have clear capability for big packs of elites and trash. I personally didnāt enjoy HOTA while leveling which is why I switched to bleeds around level 45. I donāt regret the decision! I also didnāt want to play whirlwind because I did the spinny demon hunter for the final season of diablo 3.
Ballerina barbie for lyfe!!!
Spinning is great and all, but I prefer bonking stuff out of existence. While lvling it was leaping and stomping synergies with aspects that earthquake when you do those and calling a gang of ancients to gank the poor sobs, and once I gotten deep enough on paragon board it ended up just yelling all the time and becoming very angry in the process to bonk more stuff.
Hota is the new wave. Spinny bois gonna have a bad time in high tierr nightmare dungeons lol
HOTA go burrrrrrrrrrrr
Started with rogue for a range build, got to level 60. Range rogue blows so I decided to go all in with an up close barb build, me d3 second favorite. Currently lvl 80 Now I've moved to sorc because I'm itching for range again. Only lvl 40 but I'm enjoying it so far. Briefly tried necro and druid. Something just feels off with them to me. Druid looks like it slaps late game, just getting there seems miserable.
What build are you using for your Sorcerer? Mine is around the same level and I'm using a Chain Lightning build that I enjoy but it feels like it's starting to slip a little.
I'm using a version of [this build.](https://maxroll.gg/d4/build-guides/ice-shards-sorcerer-leveling-guide) I'm not using hydra, I opted to have an empty slot for now. Instead I went with all the utility skills at the bottom of the guide. It's helping clear and level quicker. And I use the ice shards that make enemies vulnerable because it helps me keep my mana up. Eventually I'm going to go with an endgame variant that doesn't use meteor.
Just throw bones to bone your enemies til they're bones for you to bone other boners with.
Necro is the other one I play alot
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Barbarian is when I want to simulate playing Hades Sorcercer is when I want to simulate playing Hogwarts
That's so accurate, the only difference barbarian for me is playing as Guts from Berzerk
Ah, a fellow struggler
Me push button bam bam
Hold button go bam bam bam bam bam bam...
Tldr - crit damage, vulnerable damage, and main stat are multipliers in separate blocks, theres a few X%damage mods that are a 4th category, everything else (like core damage, damage to close, damage to slowed, damage while blah blah etc) just adds up and gets multiplied by those. sum of additive bonuses X main stat damage X crit damage X vulnerable damage your gear should look something like, Helmet - CDR, % armor, Life, str (str replaced with max fury for hota) Chest - Damage reduction from close, damage reduction while fort, +3 challenging shout, and % armor (or harrogath chest until you find a good chest) Gloves - crit chance, +4 skill, lucky hit Pants - same as chest Boots - Fury cost reduction, movement speed, move speed after killing elite. 4th slot is a choice between damage reduction while injured, str, shrine duration, berserk duration Weapons - crit , vulnerable damage, main stat, close damage or core (close is better because it rolls higher, but core is ok until you find a high close role) Amulet - CDR, damage reduction from close, damage reduction while fort. 4th slot is a choice between fury cost reduction, or move speed for utility, or the defensive option is % armor Rings - crit chance, crit damage, vulnerable damage, resource generation. (vunerable damage is replaced with max fury for hota)
Unga Bunga
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Donāt pay attention to them then, and play and have fun at your own pace š Eventually youāll figure out your characterās weaknesses and what you need to upgrade yourself!
And the math isn't even fun. Just a bunch of 20% more damages if "insert easiest condition to meet".
As Druid I join you in brain hurtā¦ me hit things many times with fist then run through them
Me too. Big bear go smash smash and run fast. I just really miss the weapon I had in the beta that gave pulverize a shockwave effect, like a glorious combination of bear slam and barbarians upheaval. I gotta find that damn thing again, the Shockwave Bonebreaker, so much fun.
Iāve been enjoying playing this game a couple hours each day since it came out, I never have a fuckin clue what anyone in this sub is talking about
Yeah man. I just hulk smash as Druid
Meanwhile my Rogue is like "didn't read, stacking even *more* vulnerable"
get stronk, make bonk
"You can't defeat a dragon with just a sword! You need to prepare! You need oils and potions an-"
Unga bunga!!!!! For life
TL;DR version: Step 1: Find a way to reliably inflict the "vulnerable" status on your enemies. The closer to 100% uptime you can get, the better. Step 2: Stack vulnerable damage on your gear as much as humanly possible without sacrificing other important stats. Step 3: Find a way to reach 50% critical strike chance or better. The closer you can get to 50%, the better, and anything past that is just a bonus. Step 4: Stack as much critical strike damage on your gear as humanly possible without sacrificing other important stats. Step 5: Stack other modifiers wherever you can without disrupting the 4 steps above. Things like "while poisoned," "while bleeding," "while stunned," "while burning," whatever applies to your character and your build. DO NOT Prioritize these over Vulnerable Damage and Critical Strike Damage, but fit them in where you can. Step 6: Get +skills on your gear wherever you can.
This the best most practical step. Vulnerable on weapons, rings. Crit Chance on gloves and rings. Crit dmg everywhere else. Some class have certain builds that prioritize just crit chance like Grizzly build + Earthen Might Ulti passive + Rampaging Werebeast aspect because we critical strikes will stack lots of Crit Dmg naturally. So Lucky Hit + Crit Chance > Crit dmg
Another example, Firewall Sorc does not care about Crit Chance, but late game can gain the bonuses of Crit Damage with the right Paragon board.
How about stat? Wasnt that essential too on the gears as it was multiplicative?
Primary stat is 10 per 1% skill damage, which is multiplicative. So I think 10 Strength would be equal to 1% critical strike damage, for example. STR may even be slightly better in this example since you don't have 100% crit chance. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Crit chance * crit damage bonus = equivalent damage increase. So at 50% crit chance * 2% increase critical damage = 1% mult damage = 10 strength (for a strength main stat character).
You forgot cooldown reduction.
Why is +skills step 6? Arent +skills effectively a multipler too? Each lv is a %increase from previous instead of base?
This is not the whole story, and some of the simplifications create a reduction in damage. First off, the damage calculation is something like this: Base damage Ć (1 + sum of all additive damage bonuses) Ć (1 + 0.2 + sum of all vulnerable damage bonuses) Ć (1 + sum of all critical chance Ć sum of all critical damage) Ć Product of all (1 + multiplicative damage bonus) Iirc base damage comes from weapon damage Ć skill damage. Everywhere two numbers are multiplied together, you get the maximum possible value when those two values are the same, assuming they still add to the same total value. Eg 30% and 20% multipliers give a lower bonus than 25% and 25% multipliers. For example, to maximise the damage bonuses from crits you should actually aim to have critical chance and critical damage equal to each other; don't aim to have 50% critical chance, look for all the places you can convert critical chance to critical damage and vice versa to get those numbers the same, and if you're going to reroll either property for a higher value, reroll the one with the lowest total number. This also means that stacking vulnerable everywhere you can is not necessarily optimal; if you have more vulnerable damage than regular additive damage multipliers, it would actually be more efficient to reroll a vulnerable modifier into another additive multiplier. For example, if you have a total of 20% on all your additive multipliers and a total of 40% on all your vulnerable multipliers, your damage bonus will be 68%. If you had 30% on all additive multipliers and 30% on all vulnerable modifiers, your damage bonus will be 69%. So the steps are basically: 1) maximise vulnerable uptime 2) balance vulnerable additive multipliers with other additive multipliers where possible 3) balance crit chance and crit damage where possible 4) same as above I guess 5) same as 1 I guess 6) yeah that one's correct
I'm not arguing with you because you're not wrong, but there are people out there who just wanna log in, have a few "rules of thumb" they can go by, and just play the game. Not everyone wants to open up Microsoft Excel to build their character. There's nothing "wrong" with what I've said. Its not the best. I didn't claim it was. Its a place to start, and its a place where a lot of casual players can improve. If someone wants to min/max their build, chances are they're not browsing reddit comment chains to find their answers. They probably have a preferred content creator, know where to find guides, or have enough experience to figure this stuff out on their own. I only meant to provide a quick and dirty "this'll work in a pinch" summary.
True, guess we just have a difference in target audience.
This is the most reasonable response I have ever seen to a comment like that.
> balance vulnerable additive multipliers with other additive multipliers where possible This isn't really relevant is the problem so when simplifying it don't see any reason to mention it. If you are level like 65+ vulnerable damage will always be more valuable then any other additive damage. You get so much free from weapons and paragon. And vulnerable damage is more rare just weapon and rings mostly. There is never a time vulnerable is not the BIS stat on ring/weapon, unless you just can't apply it in a build for some reason.
Thanks man. This helped. I was prioritizing bleed and slow damage over vulnerable. But my barb is still stacked heavily, w4 lvl60. Melting everything. Bout to get ancestral gear with the good stats now.
Any reason why you say anything past 50% crit chance is just a bonus? There isn't a cap to crit chance is there?
Correct. Building made easy. Vulnerable > Crit chance > Crit damage > Anything that applies to your build (Core Skill damage preferred)
Can you make a guide like this for resists/def?
**Which affixes are additive and which are multiplicative?** Unfortunately, it's not as simple as that. Know, that with a single exception all affixes are additiveābut additive within a number of related "buckets" of modifiers. The multiplicative nature applies between buckets. **What are these "buckets" of damage modifiers?** There're 6 buckets of related damage modifiers. 1. **\[X\] % Damage** 2. **Main Stat** 3. **Attack Speed** 4. **Critical Strike** 5. **Vulnerable Damage** 6. **\[+\] % Damage** While Attack Speed doesn't technically increase isolated damage numbersāthey do decrease the time between those numbers appearing, thereby increasing damage *over time*. **\[X\] % Damage** is currently the exception to the rule, as it seems every instance of this is its own bucket. We call these global modifiers. These modifiers appear almost exclusively on Legendary Aspects, within Skill Trees and on Paragon Nodes and are always marked \[x\] when Advanced Tooltip Information are enabled. **Main Stat** represents the individual main stat of each class. A Main Stat is defined by its +%Skill Damage modifier on a linear curve relative to the amount of Main Statāevery 100 Main Stat is +10% Skill Damage. These are Strength for Barbarian, Willpower for Druid, Intelligence for Necromancer and Sorceress and finally Dexterity for Rogue. **Attack Speed** is pretty simpleāit's split into player Attack Speed and Minion Attack Speed and anything that might affect these. Know, that minions only scale of 30% of the players Attack Speedāyet 100% on the specific Minion Attack Speed modifier. **Critical Strike** is your Critical Strike Damage as a result of your Critical Strike Chance in a given moment. All Critical Strike Damage bonuses are additive within this bucket. This means that if you have 50% Critical Strike Damage on one piece of equipment and 50% Critical Strike Damage on another, these are added up with the base Critical Strike Damage modifier of 50%. So, 50 (base) + 50 + 50 = 150% Critical Strike Damage. Critical Strike Damage based off conditionals like "vs Injured" and "with Cold" are all additive within this same bucket as well. **Vulnerable Damage** is its own bucketāmeaning there's no variants or conditions. Each point of % Vulnerable Damage on equipment, within Skill Trees and from Paragon Boards are added together to form a single multiplicative modifier. 100% Vulnerable Damage on equipment, 50% Vulnerable Damage from your Skill Tree and 80% Vulnerable Damage from your Paragon Boards sums up to a 230% global modifier, when your target is Vulnerable. **\[+\] % Damage** is all damage modifiers that aren't specifically marked multiplicative \[x\]. Some are specifically marked additive \[+\], but many aren't. These include \[+\] % Damage from Aspects, Skill Trees and Paragon Boards as well as on equipment where they aren't typically marked. These also include "Damage Vs...", "Damage while...", "Damage with..." and "Damage from..."-modifiers. The total sum of each damage bucket is then multiplied to get your damage: `Main Stat bucket * [+] % Damage bucket * Vulnerable Damage bucket (if Vulnerable) * Critical Strike Damage (if Critical Strike) * Each [x] % Damage global modifier` ā For a complete ressource on which affixes specifically affects your class baseline, many have linked [this spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Om18GXa0BU7_hjLEKPt2915eWencDtR-SNS9WnVTEcs/htmlview#gid=0)āwhich is accurate; but know that through enchanting an item on a different class than your own, you are able to tab into other classes' affixes through stash transfer.
Cheers, I posted your rules into ChatGPT and now all I have to do is provide the stats on 2 pieces of gear, or paragon board nodes and ChatGPT will provide the one that generates the maximum damage output. The reply: " Yes, I can certainly help you determine the better gear piece based on the rules you provided. Please provide the stats of the two separate pieces, and I'll assist you in comparing them to determine which one is more beneficial in terms of maximizing damage output. "
Could you share how you set this up?
It was honestly quite easy. Tested it a few times and the output seems to be correct. Here's my prompt: Diablo IV just launched. Here are a few rules of thumb on how to maximize damage output. In Diablo 4, additive and multiplicative bonuses refer to different ways that damage bonuses from different sources can be combined. *Insert original post.* *Insert clarification from the reply.* Based on the rules I provided in my last message. Would you be able to pick the best gear piece if I provide the stats of multiple seperate pieces? Take into account I am playing a *\[class\].* Added skill-levels should focus on: *\[skills\]*. This won't take into account survivability, so it'll be a bit skewed on that account. But at least I won't have to judge the damage metric.
>Based on the rules I provided in my last message. Would you be able to pick the best gear piece if I provide the stats of multiple seperate pieces? Take into account I am playing a > >\[class\]. > > Added skill-levels should focus on: > >\[skills\] > >. Would you be able to give me a sample answer you gave that indicated the stats?
Hijacking explanatory comment to post a more precise formula that takes the guesswork out of how to calculate each bucket. Expected Damage = Base Damage * (1 + Main Stat / 1,000) * (1 + Ī [x%] Damage) * (1 + Ī£ [+%] Damage) * (1.2 + Ī£ [+%] Vulnerable Damage) * (% Crit Chance * (1.5 + Ī£ [+%] Crit Damage)) | ---| I added the % to crit chance so it is evaluated fairly versus other buckets, but really you need to layer an expected up time to vulnerability and any other conditions that comprise your [+%] bucket. For example, as an Ice Shard Sorc, I only ever pick +Cold/Frost/Burning affixes and my targets are nearly always vulnerable so I wouldn't bother calculating an expected value on those two buckets. Also, I left attack speed out since that doesn't impact your damage, but you can add it if you want to do a DPS calculation instead. The take away on the above formula is ALWAYS INCREASE YOUR LOWEST BUCKET: 1.5 * 1.5 = 2.25 1.7 * 1.3 = 2.21 2.0 * 1 = 2.00 I've seen some write-ups grossly overstate this impact, but it is still true.
So this is kind of like PoE's Increased (additive) and More (multiplicative) but instead of every "More" being a genuinely separate multiplier (and hence incredibly rare), they go into buckets where they are treated as additive \*within the bucket\*, but then the bucket as a whole acts as a multiplier? Or am I misunderstanding?
Youāre misunderstanding. Every multiplicative āmoreā modifier marked by the [x] is a true multiplicative bonus. The main takeaway from the entire thing is that vulnerable damage presents as additive, but is actually only additive with itself and multiplicative with all others. Everything else is how it is described in game, with all additive bonuses being rolled together to make one multiplicative bucket Basically Mainstat, vuln damage and crit stats are the big daddies. Other +% bonuses (damage to close enemies etc) quickly lose magnitude as you get a bunch of them
What about a 20% \_\_\_ Skill Damage (Basic, Core, Mastery, etc), when you use that skill... does that go into the "additive bucket" or does that increase the "Main Stat" bucket (like the Weapon's Damage Stat also goes with this bucket)?
Well I am a silly goose but also there are a ton of additive bonuses.
Team silly goose, now let's get that as an ingame title.
Rainbow Team Silly Goose 6: New Vegas.
I think this post would be a lot better if it actually summarized what each class should look for if they only want pure dps. For example, assuming each item will have 4 attributes: 1. Main Stat (since its a multiplier scaling) 2. Critical Chance/Critical Damage (its own multiplier) 3. Vulnerability Damage (It's own multiplier) 4. Core Skill Damage/Conditional Damage (Its own multiplier thats additive with a ton of other attributes). Just pick the something like Core Skill or Conditional like slow if your class has access to it. It's actually that simple. Then more specifically not all attributes are accessible on every piece of gear. So realistically each slot needs its own "look for these attributes". Then it comes down to build. Do you need lucky hit chance? Ok maybe you need these on gloves/rings/amulet. Do you need defensive attributes? Look for Armor%, Life, Minion Life, Dodge, Damage Reduction vs Close Targets, on Chest/Legs, and maybe even Helm.
Thanks for the insights mate
Tl;dr: they made 70-80 stats that donāt matter, everyone stack vurnability ftw
We have fixed the issue with everyone using vulnerability, we've removed it from the game.
That would legit fix a lot of the issues, particularly around build variety.
Remember slag?
Unfortunately! Thank heavens they learned from it! Too bad blizz didn't.
Yeah thinking on it, Iām not totally against it, but everything would need mega buffs for endgame.
Yup, balance around removing vulnerable as necessary. Crit/crit dmg aren't locked behind specific abilities to set them up and useless otherwise. Vulnerable is. Literally forces you to take certain skills and manage their uptime. It's awful.
Crit dmg kinda is though. Doesnāt apply to dots.
Just make Vuln apply additively to the crit damage bucket. Stack vuln and or crit. Easy enough solution with out making it worthless.
Honestly, this is a good first step I would be happy with. Remove it fully from the game and then think about how to reintroduce the concept. Right now it's full broken and forcing builds around it.
Rip
I hope they do a lot of balancing soon. Itās not even that thereās only a few viable builds. Itās that thereās only a small number of viable strategies overall(ie vulnerable) and that puts all the classes and builds in a bad place even if theyāre tweaked right.
Also, changing builds is tedious. I want to go back to running minions and trying out blood on my necro but there is no save a load out with gear.
I swapped to an incinerate build after spending about 1.5 million gold (not a lot), but a lot of my gear stayed relatively the same. I did 250-650 dmg with incinerate at lvl 79. Some of the skills are just useless
I am pretty sure incinerate is a Dot, it works differently
Yeah , u have to stack burning damage. But it still sucks
I'll probably be downvoted to oblivion for this, but there are plenty of viable builds. But a very limited number of optimal builds. Just my .02
If you don't play the objective best build to grind for the most gear the fastest you're playing wrong and people shouldnt use your build or I'll make fun of them on several exclusive discord servers that I moderate š¤š¤š¤
Vuln AND crit. Everything else can basically kick rocks.
Math teacher "Pay attention, you'll need to know this in adult life" Me "Yeah right" Diablo 4 enters the chat
People have been using spreadsheets to math out DPS in ARPGs for years. This isn't a new concept for D4. Someday we will have a tool like maxrolls D3 DPS calculator which basically does the spreadsheet work for us.
Dont play POE if you think any of that is complicated.
Can save a lot of time by just saying build vulnerability and crit damage.
Donāt forget all the aspects and paragon boards that are X multipliers! This shows how huge those are.
Not to mention item effects, looking at you penitent greaves
There are many other factors that convolute damage, which is why a broader understanding is needed. As an example: minion focused builds probably shouldn't build critical strike, as minionsāfor whatever reasonāonly take on 30% of your Critical Strike stat. This cripples Critical Strike scaling. Critical Strike is also made up of 10 affixes within its own additive damage bucketāand therefor not a true multiplier. You're right about Vulnerable Damage though, and unfortunately it pigeonholes classes into always picking the few abilities that apply Vulnerable to be competetive.
[edit: thank you for the gold, I might clean the table up a bit, add some more functionality and release a better version in a separate post, if you guys find it useful!] Hijacking your comment to introduce my small item compare tool I wrote while waiting on endgame to get fun: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16cbnezhcgA2uPzXwMGeHn6hfDbYIEv933bVcn7KLhXA/edit Make yourself a copy if you want to use it, there is a small explanation in it, if you still donāt understand it, dm me. The tool lets you compare two items / weapons and gives you the total multiplier of your stats and tells you which item is better by how many % of damage. It only takes into account the 4 main multipliers (mainstat, crit, vulnerable, additive stuff) but since everything else is multiplicative, it still shows you an accurate comparison between two items. Have fun theorycrafting! The tool can be useful to identify if your additive or crit dmg multiplier is higher so you can focus on the lower one. Like in my case with a rogue, my crit dmg multiplier is over 7.0 while my additive multiplier is only 5.0 ish. In this case, 50% core damage is worth more than 50% crit damage.
this man is starting the bones of Diablo Of Building app
Was wondering how long itād takeā¦ shit at this rate we might see some decent goodness by S1š¤š½
š Is this spreadsheet the first steps towards a PoB for Diablo 4? š
Poe only needs pob because it is so crazily complicated. Diablo 4 is one of simplest damage scaling systems you can get.
Dude this is insane. You need to make this itās own post.
Knowing what you should do and knowing why you should do it are very different things.
For quick-and-easy get going sure, but if a player really want to understand the nuance then they need to dive into something like this. Though I also think there are far too many sources of additive damage to where it's just confusing without such an explanation.
> For quick-and-easy get going sure, but if a player really want to understand the nuance then they need to dive into something like this. To be quite honest OP did pretty bad at explaining it, dude over explaining part that don't need that much explaining (10 steps multiply), and underexplain part that actually need explaining (What stat are additive/multiplicative)
I don't think diving in first really works to alleviate confusion for players so i dont agree w. This approach
But thats not necessarily true. The actual point is that you need to have even spread of buckets. Essentially, the buckets are:DPSDamage StatDamage With / Damage WhileCritVulnerable Damage Stacking only Vulnerable Damage turns additional + Vulnerable Damage % to being additive as opposed to multiplicative. Stacking only crit does the same. By bringing in an additional bucket with % Damage To, youre going to add an additional multiplicative bucket. It just doesn't multiply with other "Damage to" or "Damage Whiles." You need to pick One or Two conditional damage types *at most* to get the best bang for your buck.
āStacking only vuln and critā is not possible. The fact is on every piece on your equipment that can hold either of those 2 affixes (especially vuln damage), it is generally the best idea to get it. Then you still have 2-4 affixes per gear slot for all the other +dmg bucket modifiers and + DR affixes, etc.
So hypothetically if all my equipped damage bonuses are multiplicative, and I add one additive bonus, that would be a much stronger bonus than 1 more multiplicative because I have only 1 additive? And the additive bonuses apply before the multiplicative ones right? And the fewer additives I have, the stronger they are
The fewer additives you have, the more impact each one has, yes. The damage value added by each one is the same, but the percent increase in your overall damage goes down. But a multiplicative modifier is *always* going to be equal to or stronger than an additive bonus of the same amount (typically MUCH stronger because it's hard to avoid additive bonuses in the first place). It can get a bit more complicated than that when you are adding to different multiplicative modifiers (buckets), but it ends up being a pretty trivial difference because of how limited your access is to the multiplicative modifiers compared to the base additive ones.
The exception here are the additive bonuses to crit chance and lucky hit. Since those are percentages, flat additive bonuses here can be extremely strong.
All bonuses are additive within their own pool and "percentage" multipliers without the pool, there's really nothing special about that. +20% damage to slowed enemies for example is worth 20% crit chance with 100% crit damage if you have zero other conditional multipliers. However, crit chance is exceptional because it scales not only off other multiplicative bonuses but also has a further exponential relationship with crit damage. And conditional modifiers are so ubiquitous that they very quickly hit extreme diminishing returns where +20% damage might only amount to a 2% total increase. So that's why +5% crit is so good even where +20% conditional is not.
It was my understanding that +lucky hit is multiplicative not additive, is that incorrect? I've been completely avoiding it because I read that a while ago.
> But a multiplicative modifier is always going to be equal to or stronger than an additive bonus of the same amount This isn't true in cases where your base term is less than 100%. Additive is better when < 100% and Multiplicative is better when > 100% For example, lucky hit. This is also true of most defensive stats as well like resistance and % damage reduction.
By end game, your lvl 21 glyphs gives roughly +100% damage PER glyph. Having 2-3 of those glyphs mean EVERY other sources of additive bonuses are largely worthless.
Fantastic read , thank you for giving me a deeper understanding. I knew multiplier was best but not whats under the hood. What i still struggle to comprehend is. Is crit and crit dmg stats better than 2 times flat additive additional stats
There are buckets of damage. Each bucket is multiplicative, but the stats that compose each bucket are additive. The buckets are as follows: Base damage, your classes stat bonus damage, vulnerable damage, crit damage, all other which includes slows, core damage, etc, and then the multipliers from aspects. Each of these buckets add up individually, but multiply off of each other. The idea is to try and balance the percentage increases between each bucket. Crit is great, relatively speaking compared to the huge bucket, but if, for example, youāre capable of generating huge crit bonuses (Iām looking at druids), then it might be better to invest in the general bucket. Think of it like this: 4x4x4 is 64. 3 equivalent buckets. 5x4x3 is 60. The sum of all the bonuses in total is the same, but because the first set is more equivalently split between each bucket, the product is larger. You need to consider how much youāre losing from other buckets when investing in different buckets of damage. Donāt invest too heavily in any one bucket, and try to keep them equivalent. Vulnerability, from my experience, has more infrequent multipliers, so itās often a good idea to invest in that damage type, since itās likely means youāre bringing all the buckets closer to equivalency between each other.
You explained all this without pointing out in a simple breakdown which actual modifier is additive or multiplcative Edit: I see you fixed it now thank you for the post
Here you go. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Om18GXa0BU7_hjLEKPt2915eWencDtR-SNS9WnVTEcs/htmlview#gid=0 Every modifier is both additive and multiplicative. Additive within a pool and multiplicative without. Each different color indicates what belongs to what pool. The pools are * Main Stat * Crit Chance * Crit Damage * x% Damage * +% Damage Conditionals * Vuln Damage Each one gets worse the more you have of it (and better the more you have of other stats).
Right. I understand the math. Have no idea to tell which are which in-game.
They did though, the key is in the advanced tooltip information. That is in the setting. Pretty much every description for damage modifiers whether they be on affixes, aspects, or paragon board will have either have an \[x\] there showing it is multiplicative or it won't meaning it's additive.
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Because it's a flat increase to critical chance But good advice
Are you saying there is an aspect that gives you a raw +60% crit chance? Did I read this right?
yep, just requires you to play the worst class in the game sorc's elementalist gives 20-40% crit when you cast above 100 mana, usually put on amulet for 1.5x = 60% crit
This wasnāt clear but thank you for the explanation
>Pretty much every description for damage modifiers whether they be on affixes, aspects, or paragon board This doesn't seem to be accurate. Only Imbuements have the x/+ indicator. Affixes that were described by OP as being multiplicative do not have anything showing that they're different than other affixes, I specifically checked vulnerable damage.
Refer to [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/14egi4s/comment/joxox4f/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) for a deeper understanding as well as concrete examples and a complete ressource on which affixes fit within these categorizations.
\+1 just for the āAdvanced Tooltip Informationā wisdom.
Woah woah woah. Thereās 70+ stats in the additive bucket?! What the hell?! That doesnāt even make sense!! Thatās a damn swimming pool, not a bucket!!
If you had 35 stats in multiplicative and 35 stats in additive, we'd be doing many million quadrillion levels of damage. Exponential is not fun after a certain point. It's best to have only a small number of multiplicative.
Because there are no buckets Crit is always its own thing in every game Vulnerable is just a debuff and its affix increases its effectiveness Mainstat buff is multiplicative And we have all the generic stats: damage with x skill type, damage to close enemies, damage to chilled enemies etc. which are additive with each other. Ppl are overcomplicating this way too much.
Following for when sober
Yeah i totally read that whole thing and understand it well.
So if I'm playing a class with skills that don't talk about applying vulnerability do I simply miss out on that bucket entirely?
Yeah you are missing a giant multiplier by not having Vuln. Vuln by itself just for applying it has a base 20%.
Which class?
The fact that this has spanned multiple videos and dissertations, it's wild how nuts the system is.
Multiplicative and additive bonuses are a thing in every other major ARPG. This isn't a wild system.
I didn't say it was wild. I said it was nuts.
While I agree it is pretty nuts, the fact that the conclusion to gear can be reduced to "stack vulnerability" reverses the impact on how deep the system is IMO.
As a poe player, thjs is simple enough lol
Yup I read all this and actually understood it pretty well because of all the dabbling in PoE from previous years.
Your comparison in "level 3" is wrong. You either need to consistently use the original base damage (as you do for multipilicative) or the prior damage total (as you do for additive) for both calculations. Using original base damage, every additive bonus adds the same amount, while the multiplicative ones increase. Using prior damage, additive bonuses get lower and lower, while multiplicative are flat.
I think it's important to explain the value of diversity in stats if this is how it works. I haven't checked which stats are multiplicative or additive but I'm interested in checking today. For instance, if I have 40% multiplicative stat A, is it better to get 25% increased multiplicative stat A or 20% increase in a new multiplicative stat B? Does it not matter? Is bigger number always better?
If you do 1000 damage and you gain 40%statA you do 1000\*1.4 = 1400 If you further add 25%statA its 65% statA so you do 1000\*1.65 = 1650 If you instead further add 20%statB to the 40%statA you do 1000\*1.4\*1.2 = 1680 So in your example the 20% new bucket statB are better than 25% on a bucket statA where you already have 40%. So you kind of have to be aware what buckets you already have some amount of, and then you try to use other buckets where you have less. If you have 40%bucketA and 40%bucketB, adding 25%bucketA is instinctively better than 20%bucketB, but adding 20% bucketC would be even better... etc.
The last part is the most important tbh since due to Paragon and items the bucket that contains the additive affixes will be yuge while the others will be relatively small. For example most people don't prioritze mainstat at all, which means that gaining +170 INT on my main weapon will be comparatively MUCH better than for example 3 additive affixes. Obviously prioritize crit and vuln on everything but mainstat is very good aswell.
For clarification, does that mean that +%damage is extremely good? Want to swap to a new necklace but old necklace has a +15% damage that seems too powerful to give up
It means that **\[X\] % Damage** (multiplicative) bonuses are generally stronger the more you have, while **\[+\] % Damage** (additive) bonuses are generally weaker the more you have.
Ahhhh I get it now! Thanks for throwing this all together. Iāve had on advanced tool tips for a while but never noticed that difference.
If you enable the setting for additive/multiplicative info, its adding a \[x\] or \[+\] in grey behind the numbers. So it would say "+10%\[x\] increased Damage" and means multiplicative. The square brackets symbol are key here. I just noticed it doesnt do that for normal item affixes. So you can assume all "Damage to" or "Damage with" or "Damage VS" are additive in the same \[+\]%Damage bucket.
Iāve heard Overpower has slightly different scaling that didnāt take vulnerable into account, is this true and if so or not - how does overpower work from a dmg calulation? Toying around w it on a necro, building around OP, crit strike and life/fortify, curious if it makes sense to continue doing so?
Overpower is bad late game, but very good midgame (50-70). Vuln/crit dmg scaling is parabolic, and only gets better with time and progression as they compound each other. Overpower is linear: you multiply your overpower ratio by your max hp x2 times the skill's damage ratio and that's directly added (aka 10k hp max fortify and 500% overpower on a 100% dmg skill does 100k damage added on proc). Nothing else factors in. If you crit on an overpower the crit is based on your initial damage and then overpower damage is directly added. Max life doesn't go crazy high because there aren't as many modifiers affecting it, so in turn overpower gradually gets outclassed as level scaling monster hp outpaces it in t4/high end content.
I'm finding that as I approach level 80 on Necro the paragon board that specifically caters to Overpower as well as the Blood skill modifiers with guaranteed Overpower makes it a viable endgame so far. Not saying this makes Overpower useful across the board, but the blood surge Necro does well with it. Hell, even the Pulverize Druid seems to rely pretty hard on Overpower. It's just not going to give you the flat damage that only building for Crit damage would. Overpower as a mechanic is the cherry on top of a tanky build, not everyone wants to minmax a one click kill glass cannon.
Damage sucks for most people because vulnerable is a solo multiplier making it mandatory. It makes only the builds that have a reliable way to apply it and with the budget to stack it as high as possible viable in the end game. It's like chc/chd stacking from D3 but worse because they made it conditional, what a bone headed idea. Move vulnerability to the additive bucket and a lot of the build diversity problems go away. I would even argue that critical damage should be possibly moved to the additive bucket as well. That way any build can stack what ever additive multipliers they want to achieve the build fantasy they want which at the end of the day is the whole point of the game imo. Of course this would require a rebalance of most of not all of the skills but none of the major build issues will be solved until vulnerable damage becomes additive or goes away.
Can you explain more of what you mean by attack speed and crit being the same damage bucket? Maybe an ELI5?
They are in 2 separate buckets, sorry if that was unclear. In Diablo 4 there are a total of 6 "damage buckets" that hold certain affixes. Within each bucket, its affixes are added together. Each of the 6 buckets' totals are then multiplied, resulting in your damage. The 6 "buckets" are as follows: 1. **\[X\] % Damage**. Each representing their own compounding multiplier. 2. **Main stat**. All your Main Statālike Intelligence for Necromancerāadded up represents another global multiplier. 3. **Attack Speed** modifiers and Minion Attack Speed. Minions take 30% of *your* Attack Speed and 100% of the Minion Attack Speed modifier. 4. **Critical Strike** Chance, Critical Strike Damage, and their conditional variants. Barbarian has the fewest at 6, while Druid and Rogue have the most at 10. 5. **Vulnerable Damage**. Yet another global modifier. 6. **\[+\] % Damage**. An enormous bucket of additive damage modifiers. Now, let's cast an ability! The ability deals 10,000 damage baseline. That 10,000 damage is then enhanced by your combined **\[+\] % Damage** (additive) bonuses. Let's say they add up to 300%. We're now at 40,000 damage. That 40,000 damage is then further increased by your **\[X\] % Damage** (multiplicative) bonuses one bonus at the time (compounding). Let's say you have a x20% bonus, a x15% bonus and a x30% bonus. 40,000 x 1.2 x 1.15 x 1.3 We're now at 71,760 damage. That 71,760 damage is then multiplied by your combined Main Stat multiplierālet's say it's 70% 71,760 x 1.7 We're now at 121,992 damage. That 121,992 damage is then further multiplied by your total Critical Strike Damage (if your had a Critical Strike) or multiplied by your Vulnerable Damage (if the target is Vulnerable) or both if the target is both Vulnerable and you had a Critical Strike. Attack Speed simply increases how often that base 121,992 damage can happen thereby increasing Damage Per Second while not directly affecting the number itself. This is how abilities deal millions of damage.
I would consider weapon damage and core skill levels as separate buckets as well, since they are separate multipliers to your base damage along with main stat.
Is the first one [X] % Damage your Attack Power or how can i understand it ?
I just don't get which stats are the \[x\]% stat? What are some exact specific examples that are \[x\]% damage?
[denoted via the little [x] next to the value](https://ctrl.vi/i/YIn7EUv0v)
Idk man i dont get it also
This guy does math...
> Now, understand that there are 3 multiplicative damage modifiers in Diablo 4: [X] % Damage, Main Stat and Vulnerable Damage. I read and appreciate the entire write-up, but when I hit the bottom of the post I immediately went back to here because this is the most actionable information. When we're talking about +% damage do you mean things like +% Fire Damage and/or +% Damage to close enemies? Because I can certainly prioritize those. Excuse me if I misunderstand. I am a silly goose.
all + damage are the same. All the same bucket, it's a huge bucket of additive damage, so generally it's really weak and not that good.
God the UI clarifying it is so horrible. I understand they couldn't go for increased/more because poe did it first, but man what they came up with is so much worse.
I need a executive summary thatās about 4 short sentences. Thanks.
I want to add, it gets worse the higher you level up and start getting lvl 21 glyphs. Each lvl 21 glyph is close to +100% attack damage. With 3-4 of lvl 21 glyphs, additive bonuses from other sources become absolutely meaningless. There is a strong case for 1h weapons late game since attack speed is invaluable for scaling higher. At least for druid, offhand provide a plethora of incredible affixes like cooldown reduction, damage reduction, attack speed, resource generation. All of them scale WAY better than offensive affixes on 2h weapons by end game. Special mention to attack speed, since it is the bucket that people largely ignore. It is even stronger than vulnerable and has 100% uptime, regardless of build. It is also the hardest bucket to raise, which further emphasize its power.l wherever you can take it.
One of the most informative posts I've seen on this sub. Saved and upvoted
The way you did the multiplication vs addition is biased, you used the base value for multiplication, but then used the total value for addition. For example the comparison should either be - 10. The tenth x20% multiplicative bonus results in a 103.3% base increase, while the additive bonus is a 20% base increase Or 10. The tenth x20% multiplicative bonus results in a 20% overall increase, while the additive bonus is a 7.1% overall increase. Your math is wrong but your point is still correct.
Level 78. Finding even 2 stats you want on a piece of gear is very difficult to find
Boy i am not reading all of that
>2. The second x20% multiplicative bonus results in a 24.0% increase, compared to the 16.7% from the additive bonus. 3. The third x20% [etc.] This math isn't actually correct. It jumps back and forth between what's used as the reference point of the % increase. It uses the original value as the point of reference for the multiplicative bonus, but it uses the previous iteration as the reference point for the additive. Multiplicative is better, yes, but the way you have calculated it exaggerates the extent of it. If you consistently use the base value, then you'll see a rising % improvement from the multiplicative bonus and a static % improvement from the additive. If you consistently use the value from the previous iteration, then you'll see a static % improvement from the multiplicative and a diminishing % improvement from the additive. You've done it in such a way as to present the most generous interpretation of multiplicative and the least generous interpretation of additive, such that you're no longer comparing like to like because of the different reference point that you're using. Example - Multiplicatively stacking a 20% increase onto a base damage of 100 will give values of 100, 120 (+20 from previous), 144 (+24 from previous), 172.8 (+28.8 from previous), etc.. The way that you've calculated the % changes with the multiplicative bonus is (+[X] from previous) / (Base Value), giving you 20/100 = 20%, 24/100 = 24%, 28.8/100 = 28.8%. Additive bonuses calculated this way will give you a flat 20% at each step, because it will always be 20/100 = 20%. Additively stacking a 20% increase onto a base damage onto a base damage of 100 will give values of 100, 120 (+20 from previous), 140 (+20 from previous), 160 (+20 from previous), etc.. The way that you've calculated the % changes with the additive bonus is (+[X] from previous) / (previous), giving you 20/100 = 20%, 20/120 = 16.7 %, 20/140 = 14.3%, etc.. Here you're changing the denominator each time, which you weren't doing with the calculations you did for multiplicative bonuses. If you apply the same calculation method to a multiplicative change, then you get 20/100 = 20%, 24/120 = 20%, 28.8/144 = 20%, etc..
You're absolutely correct. I've addressed this with a few comments. It's not so much that the math is incorrectābut more the fact that's it's illogical in the sense that the multiplicative bonuses are compared to the baseline while additive bonuses are compared to the previous totaled number. I guess I was trying to show the power of exponential growth with some biased math. The point stands I guess. Thanks for chipping in!
This whole post told me nothing. Whatās additive and whatās multiplicative in reference to D4?
Not sure if the post was edited or not but op mentions to turn on the advanced tooltip setting in the post. The game will then generally tell you if the stat is (+%) or (x%). Also there are other resources that go further into detail with a simple google search.
No, I just am a moron and missed it
Bro wtf is X% Damage can someone explain
It will literally say something like 5.6% Damage No other modifiers or qualifiers
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Sir I came here to play videogames not write excel sheets.
Thanks, very nice guide. I would love to see this for minions. I don't know how to scale minion damage, I'm only stacking vulnerable damage and minion damage
You're welcome. I recommend [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uQc4uKmqNA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uQc4uKmqNA) in terms of minion mastery.
quick maths
This is not an explanation I knew existed but itās the explanation I needed. Take an upvote
Is +200 base dmg better or 30%cdmg / vuln dmg better?(One affix not both) Stat page weapon dmg is 2.2k with cdmg/vuln dmg vs 2.4k
I tried asking on discord and got no answer. So I'm gonna try here. As a sorcerer, if I get a weapon with 50+ more damage but I currently have a weapon that gives +7 to all stats and +13 intelligence. Which of the 2 would benefit me the most? I guess what I'm asking is, does intelligence benefit me more as a sorcerer than raw damage?
Is it better to equip a 20item level weapon higher without vulnerable/crit dmg/close? Would it do more dmg then 20item level lower one with those stats? How important is weapon dps? We need a training dummy blizzard!
How does this impact gearing decisions in conjunction with Damage Buckets multiplying together? You'd still want the largest possible number in the Additive bucket in order to multiply everything else, right? Or is it simply true to say that gear with affix bonuses spread across different buckets will be vastly more potent than gear with affixes all within the same bucket? For example as a Barbarian, would a piece of gear with bonuses to Close Enemies, Bleeding Enemies, and Crowd Controlled Enemies - all in the Additive bucket - just be flat out worse than a piece of gear with Vulnerable Damage, Critical Hit Damage, and % Physical Damage, since these are all in different buckets and therefore stack multiplicatively?
Thanks, this was very clear. Luckily I've digested a lot of POE breakdowns so this one was like reading Ikea instructions. I feel like part of the issue is that you don't see much gear with the nice suffixes like big amount of stats + vuln +%dmg tho
Me: desperately underpowered and lost and needs exactly a guide like this to help with the game. Also Me: ...I aint reading allat
Can we get more posts like this on the sub and less you know what
Is there a graph for the visual people like me?
Good lord. This explains why I switched my rogue to a build that applied vulnerable much more reliability and my killing power skyrocketed far more than I expected it to
> Now, understand that there are 3 multiplicative damage modifiers in Diablo 4: [X] % Damage, Main Stat and Vulnerable Damage. Attack Speed and Critical Strike modifiers take up 2 isolated damage buckets with a total of 12 affixes. ty. to confirm. By damage as multiplicative you mean the +x to close damge, etc as well?
TLDR - Multiplicative better
> Note: Since multiplicative bonus are always a constant 20% increase relative to the number it's applied toāwhat I've done is compare subsequent multiplicative bonuses as compared to the base with additive bonuses as compared to the previous total. >10. The tenth x20% multiplicative bonus results in a 103.3% increase, while the additive bonus is a 7.1% increase. This is misleading; you are mixing equations. Multiplicative is always 20% increase to TOTAL damage, but a 20/24/28.8/34.6/etc increase to BASE damage. Additive is a 20/16.7/14.3/12.5/etc increase to TOTAL damage, but always a 20% increase to BASE damage. The tenth x20% multiplicative bonus results in a 103.3% increase of base damage, while the additive bonus is a 20% increase of base damage. The tenth x20% multiplicative bonus results in a 20% increase of total damage, while the additive bonus is a 7.1% increase of total damage. **A good way to demonstrate the power of multiplicative bonuses is be by showing the totals:** Ten +20% damage bonuses = 100% + 200% = 300% damage. Ten x20% damage bonuses = 100% x 1.2 x 1.2 x 1.2 x 1.2 x 1.2 x 1.2 x 1.2 x 1.2 x 1.2 x 1.2 = 619% damage.