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Creating a powerful build inDiablo 4requires some knowledge on the game’s core systems. Beyond enemy scaling, your biggest enemy when creating a build is going to be damage scaling. Finding a way to outmatch your foes with overwhelming amounts of damage can be tricky if you’re a newcomer to Diablo or ARPGs in general.
Related:Diablo 4: Level Scaling, Explained
The good news is that scaling your damage in Diablo 4 is fairly easy, if somewhat confusing. By understanding the way your damage is calculated, you can make informed gearing decisions to skyrocket your damage in endgame activities. This guide will explain the commonly misunderstood damage bucket system, how it works, what each bucket does, and we’ll give some brief tips on how to increase your damage for virtually every build.
What Are Damage Buckets?
In the simplest terms possible,damage buckets is a community term that refers to different damage categories.This isn’t an actual in-game term. It has been devised by popular theorycrafters and content creators in the Diablo community to best explain how various damage modifiers behave with one another. We’ll get to the nitty-gritty on how that works later in this guide, but the gist is thatyou want to evenly spread your damage sources into each damage bucket—excluding Overpower unless you’re making an Overpower build.
There are seven damage categories in Diablo 4:
While leveling, you’ll interact with weapon damage, skill damage, and a few multiplicative damage modifiers found on your skill tree. As you get further into the endgame, you’ll start to acquire gear with critical damage modifiers, vulnerability modifiers, and affixes that give massive bonuses to your damage while you meet certain conditions (while close, while the target is burning, et cetera).Stacking the same modifier multiple times is additive, as each modifier is added with one another. However, when you start investing into multiple damage types, each bucket multiplies with one another to skyrocket your damage. This is calledmultiplicativescaling.
Additive And Multiplicative Scaling
How Can I Tell If Something Is Multiplicative?
Withadvanced tooltips enabled, hovering over a specific skill or passive will showcase either a [+] or [x] value beside the description magnitudes. [+] refers to additive values, while [x] refers to multiplicative values.
It is worth noting that these symbols don’t properly distinguish when these values are added or multiplied in the damage equation, but this should give you a rough idea of how a particular modifier will impact your DPS (damage per second).
Showcasing the differences between additive and multiplicative scaling is best done with numbers. Let’s say that your build has three sources of bonus damage, each giving +30% damage to your build. Here is how the math would work out if those were added versus multiplied together:
As you can see, the multiplicative example ended up giving us more damage.In-game, the additive example is equivalent of investing in the same damage bucket, and the multiplicative example is what happens when you invest into three buckets equally. This shows thatto maximize your damage, you want to evenly invest into as many damage categories as possible.
Some passives, Aspects, and Paragon nodes also state that they provide a multiplicative bonus to your character. Just like damage affixes, these multipliers aren’t all equal to one another.As a rule of thumb, most skill tree passives multiply a specific damage bucket, while Aspects and Paragon Legendary effects are true global modifiers.The expandable section below showcases this behavior in more detail.
Multipliers Aren’t Always Global
The best way of showcasing this is with skill tree passives. Let’s look at two different passives: the Death’s Embrace passive on Necromancer and the Glass Cannon passive on Sorcerer.
Death’s Embraceincreases your damage by 6% [x] against close targets. If we look at our character sheet, we have 13.5% close range damage without any modifiers. If this was a true multiplier, it would simply multiply all of our damage by 6% when we get near an enemy, but that’s not what happens. Instead, the close-range damage value increases to 20.3%. That’s not a straight 6% increase, so we know it’s not additive. It turns out the passive is multiplying our close range value by 6%, not our total damage by 6%. We can back this up by calculating our close range damage bonus:
1.135 x 1.06 = 1.2031
In-game, that’s showcased as a 20.3% damage increase. So in other words, this passive is multiplying our close range damage value. If you had no other damage modifiers in your build, this would be a true 6% damage upgrade. However, if you have heavy investment into other affixes in the damage modifiers bucket, you’re getting far less than 6% damage from this node. The same is true for more generic-sounding passives as well.
Glass Cannonincreases your damage by 6% [x] with one rank. It doesn’t list a conditional, so the damage bucket this falls into seems unclear. If we take a look at the character sheet, we can see that our total damage value increases when we allocate this passive, the same damage bucket Death’s Embrace falls under (damage modifiers). We can once again prove this by looking at our character sheet. We have no sources of total damage, so we are simply getting Glass Cannon’s listed value.
1.0 x 1.06 = 1.06
Do not trust your skill damage tooltips. These donotinclude conditional, critical, vulnerable, or overpower damage values, leading to wildly inaccurate numbers. The nested stat sheet in your inventoryisaccurate, however.
Both of those passives adjust damage buckets on your character, but these multipliers vary based on our investment into that given damage bucket; they aren’t global modifiers. In general,most skill tree passives multiply specific damage bucket values.From our limited testing, it appears that the only true global damage modifiers that exist are Legendary Aspects and certain Paragon Legendary nodes, although there are exceptions to both sources as well.We cover this more in the “Each Damage Bucket Explained” section.
Related:Diablo 4: Armor And Resistances, Explained
Each Damage Bucket Explained
This section explains how each individual damage bucket works and common sources of that given modifier.Excluding Overpower Damage, all of these buckets multiply with one another.
Weapon And Skill Damage
The first two damage buckets are weapon damage and skill damage.
Since you deal damage through skills in Diablo 4, both buckets are closely linked with one another.To increase your weapon damage, find weapons with a higher item power.you may also use the Blacksmith vendor to upgrade your items, improving their item power up to +25 over their base value.
You can increase your skill damage through skill ranks.Beyond your initial skill ranks, you can equip items with +Rank affixes to further level your skills. An exact list of affixes can be found atd4builds.gg.
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Damage Modifiers
This damage bucket is the largest of the bunch and the easiest to invest in.Nearly every affix and Paragon Glyph falls into this bucket.Some notable damage modifiers include:
While not an exhaustive list, that should give you a good idea of what falls into this damage category. As a general rule of thumb,if the damage bonus has a listed condition, it falls into this category.
It’s also worth noting thatskill tree passives that list conditional damage increases will modify this bucket; they arenotglobal modifiers.For example, the Death’s Embrace passive on Necromancer multiplies your “damage to close enemies” value by a set amount. It doesnotmultiply all of your damage while in close range. This makes most skill tree passives less impactful than they might seem.
Primary Stat
Every class in Diablo 4 has a primary attribute that scales their damage.Your class' primary stat counts as a separate damage bucket, multiplying your damage by your primary stat divided by ten. For example, a Sorcerer with 1,000 Intelligence would deal 100% [x] more damage with their skills.
Critical Damage
Attacks in Diablo 4 have a chance of critically striking the target, multiplying the attack’s damage based on your critical strike damage. All characters start with a base critical chance of 5% and a base critical damage modifier of 50% (a 1.5x multiplier).Critical damage multiplies all damage you deal, but it requires investment in both critical chance and critical damage.
You can increase your critical strike chance by investing in the Dexterity stat, equipping items with +critical strike affixes, speccing into certain skill tree passives, and by using certain Legendary Aspects like theElementalist Aspect for Sorcerer.Your critical chance cannot exceed 100%.
Critical damage can be increased through item affixes, certain Legendary Aspects, and specific skill tree passives. There is no limit to how much critical damage you can stack on your character.
Critical Damage Multiplicative Scaling Behavior
Conditional critical damage bonuses are unaffected by critical damage multipliers.
For example, the Devouring Blaze passive for Sorcerer grants 30% [x] critical damage against burning enemies. If you have 100% critical damage and 200% critical damage with fire skills, only the 100% generic critical damage bonus will be affected.
Vulnerability Damage
Certain skills will inflict the vulnerability debuff, causing them to take increased damage.Vulnerable targets receive 20% more damage by default, increased through vulnerability damage modifiers.These are commonly found on weapons, rings, and certain Paragon Board nodes. The Exploit Glyph also increases vulnerability damage for all classes.
Since vulnerability is its own damage bucket with a low base modifier,vulnerability damage is arguably the strongest affix in Diablo 4.A few sources of vulnerability can increase your vulnerability damage to 150-200%, a dramatic DPS increase if you’ve invested in the other damage buckets.
Overpower Damage
Overpower is treated as a separate source of damage and is unaffected by all damage buckets, even critical damage.
Overpower is the last and strangest damage bucket in Diablo 4. It’s best to not think of overpower as a damage bucket but rather an entirely different damage type.Every attack has a 3% chance to overpower, adding your character’s HP and Fortify pool to the attack.This added value is the last thing that occurs in damage calculation, so it isnotaffected by any of the other damage buckets.
You cannot increase your overpower chance, although there are certain skills that can guarantee an overpowered hit. Overpower damage can be increased by scaling your HP, investing into Fortify sources, increasing your Willpower stat, or by increasing your overpower damage stat. Once again,overpower is not affected by vulnerability, critical damage, weapon damage, skill damage, or non-overpower damage modifiers.Despite the unique text color that appears when you land a critical overpower hit, that critical damage only affects the base skill andnotthe overpower damage that’s added.
