Builds that utilized Critical Strike Damage and Vulnerable Damage have been disproportionately powerful. This is because these stats were previously calculated as part of separate damage buckets that were fully multiplicative when combined with other damage bonuses. In order to promote greater build diversity, we are changing how Critical Strike, Vulnerable, and Overpower damage is calculated. These damage types will now always have a baseline multiplicative bonus. Additional sources of bonus Critical Strike Damage, Vulnerable Damage, or Overpower Damage will be additive to your other damage bonuses. Overpower will also receive additional additive damage based on your Maximum Health and Fortify amounts. This change represents an overall decrease in damage output, so we are adjusting monster scaling to ensure that the best Class builds are still as powerful as before. This change is not intended to lower the power of the best builds, but rather allow more builds to reach that same level of power. We have also added a variety of mechanics to classes that encourage them to chase other stats for multiplicative bonuses, rather than always chasing Critical Strike and Vulnerable Damage.
How damage is calculated in Diablo IV is also receiving an overhaul. Before, damage sources such as Critical Strike Damage, Vulnerable Damage, and Overpower Damage were in different buckets, and when these buckets mixed with each other, the full amount of bonus damage from each bucket was multiplied together.
This meant the most effective way to increase your damage was to get as much bonus Critical Strike Damage and bonus Vulnerable damage and then Critically Strike Vulnerable enemies. Because access to these two buckets was generally more attainable than something like Overpower damage—which has a fixed chance to occur at 3%—most builds that did not take advantage of this multiplicative synergy fell behind.
This is all changing with Season of Blood. There will still be different damage buckets, but now only the base amount of bonus damage that these methods provide will be multiplicative. The rest of the bonus damage to these categories will be additive when they are combined. The base bonus multiplicative damage these categories provide are:
Additionally, we fixed some issues with how Overpower damage is calculated, so in Season of Blood it will be much more competitive as a damage source compared to before.
Your character profile will also display this bonus damage, though the math is a little complex under the hood. Here’s a breakdown of how it works with the following example:
In this case, we are showing how much bonus Vulnerable damage the player will inflict on an enemy. The player gets the standard x20% bonus damage that Vulnerable Damage provides, and they have an additional +18.0% from gear and no other bonus Vulnerable damage. The calculation to find their total bonus Vulnerable damage would be the following:
(1 + additive bonus) * (1 + 1st multiplicative source) * (1 + 2nd multiplicative source) * (1 + 3rd multiplicative source) – 1
In this example, the equation would be:
= (1 + .18) * (1 + .2) -1
= (1.18) * (1.2) – 1
= 1.416 – 1
= .416, or 41.6%
In the interest of avoiding extremely long tooltips, they will not specify any additional multiplicative sources of damage. These types of damage bonuses are uncommon overall, so it’s less vital to include on a tooltip. If the damage bonus value doesn’t match up based on the additive bonus alone, it is likely from having a multiplicative damage bonus on your character.
So what does this all mean? With these changes we expect the following to happen:
Since we’re lowering the baseline bonus that players get for mixing damage types, this also creates an exciting design space where we can reinsert that multiplicative damage via other methods where the player has the choice to opt into, and build around, that power. Our overall goal with these changes is to reward players for investing into their primary vector of damage—and to be competitive for doing that—while also giving them tools to find other vectors of damage scaling as they customize their character and progress further in the game.