Just squish’em. Too many humongous calculations. Just cut some zeros off, there’s no need to have 241T popping off all over. Just squish it down to 2000. I like 2000, it’s a big enough number. I like 2000 even more when i can play the game without lag, and even more when i like to also play hardcore sometimes.
The numbers are astronomically silly right now. Squish them please for the love of diablo.
I’m fairly ignorant on this topic so I’m genuinely asking. Would reducing the size of the numbers actually do what your proposing?
The way I think about it is it’s more than likely the sheer number of hits/buffs/multipliers etc that are the taxing portion rather than the numbers themselves. I’m fairly ignorant on how this stuff actually works and I’m just going off of intuition so please correct me if I’m wrong.
From what I can understand from the game is 2 main things contributing to the lag from numbers.
Damage calculations and area damages ability to proc more numbers and calculations.
The amount of the number isn’t really an issue or making it lag, mainly because the supports usually cause the most lag and they don’t have much damage if any.
A support monk who has area damage, attacks 5times a second and has an aoe attack is doing 1000’s of calculations and hits a second.
Same as support DH who shoots everything on screen…
It’s Area damage, skill multipliers and the base of how this game works.
It went from the d2 style of static numbers to an inbuilt DPS system of pushing crits, bonuses, elemental and everything into one.
Given it’s a decade old and already on a bad server it was clunky on launch
You do not understand how computers work. Making the numbers smaller will NOT greatly affect the performance. It would save O(1) cpu time which is better than nothing but you will not notice any difference in lag.
no you’re wrong and dont understand my intelligence. I thoroughly tested this myself with white items.
…
Pretty sure others are well aware of how computers work. Although you are right, they don’t have an exact measure of your intellect, only your post history.
You want an accurate measurement of my intelligence? I was the top ranked online Gen player for 2 years. Gen is the most complicated character to master.
I dont do half measures.
If you nerf or crunch the numbers, the returning server response “maybe” faster very slightly. Still, server would choke if monsters don’t die easily at the face of stacked damage over time effects or massed area damage impacts as server has to check if things died for each tick damage to play death animation or positioned in range for collateral damage.
It’s barely about calculations only, but what server has to check in high monster density areas and difficulty scale of things and it’s immense right now.
Trying to crunch these numbers would take months for mathcraft to apply without causing any major changes. You may cut everything with 51% or 94% whatever, but in practical measures this apply as a buff or a nerf at different builds as you’d be ignoring potential decimals by engine restrictions.
Player damage output, player effective hitpoint, monster damage and monster health which scales up at many tiers, has to be calculated and crunched at different ratios; all individually to ensure the almost same environment and results. You can’t really go outta your way to cause an imbalance.
Let me break out the big bags of popcorn. This thread can be good. 
It’s not the size of numbers used in calculations that causes lag, it’s the amount of calculations.
Then… What has squishing numbers has anything to do with amount of calculations? Why you opened this thread? Where do we miss your “smart insight”?
I didn’t open this thread.
Just because I use the same avatar picture, I’m not Bravata.
That guy has so many alts, I can’t keep track anymore. My bad. I was expecting some witty comeback from him, I haven’t even read your name to process it.
No harm done. Keeping up with his alts is a chore for sure.
Let me see if I can answer this question a bit more specifically. Back in the old days of programming, memory was a big issue, so when you wrote a program, you’d specify the size of the number you expected that variable to handle in bits. There were different types and bigger numbers, such as billions or trillions required a bigger allocation of memory. These calculations, also took slightly longer if you had bigger variables.
Modern computers… really anything newer than 1995ish really, and certainly anything you’d buy today, have so much memory and their CPUs are so fast that this is no longer a consideration. There’s more than that, but suffice it to say, even very large numbers being calculated make no effective difference at all in CPU performance.
You spoke about “lag.” It’s a term that often gets used for hangs or other interruptions. It’s true meaning refers only to latency on your network connection between your computer and the server. However, the term often gets used to refer to any slowdown in game performance, which could include CPU or GPU bottlenecking. Since most of D3’s calculations are done client-side on your own computer, there is concern that large numbers slow down your performance. As I explained in my first two paragraphs, they don’t. As I have been informed below, the damage calculations are done server-side to avoid cheating. Your computer and mine do the graphics.
What may affect your performance (and this is seen with Firebird set and Area Damage bonuses right now), is the volume of calculations. Area damage requires MANY calculations to be done with each attack: range, then damage for each mob in range. This may indeed slow down your CPU which can only do so many calculations per second.
That said, to answer your question in the thread title:
Squishing the size of the numbers will make no difference whatsoever in reducing CPU strain. Reducing the number of calculations per second could do so, but only in certain situations like Area Damage being applied rapidly, many times over to a full screen of enemies.
Edited: to hopefully improve clarity;
2nd edit: TIL damage calculations are done by Blizz’s servers, not by the game client.
Modern chipsets work at 64 bit, which means that calculations can be done on INT64 values just as quickly as any other smaller integer size. For reference…
INT64
A 64-bit signed integer. It has a minimum value of -9,223,372,036,854,775,808 and a maximum value of 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 (inclusive).
Pay attention to the orders of magnitude difference between the maximum value the variable can hold and the number you’re saying is large…
9,223,372,036,854,775,807
0,000,241,000,000,000,000
May I attempt to demonstrate…
The answer’s 625 by the way.
I would expect the calculations are done with floating point numbers which are just as fasts as int operations with half modern chip sets.
You have a fixed length mantissa and an exponent and the size of the number has no influence on the speed of the calculation.
I am no expert, but the way I see it, what causes the lag is a sound bug.
People literally suggested replacing one of the game’s files with a HotS file with the same name, effectively removing your sound.
All of a sudden, there are no more stutters.
I didn’t found that, it was recommended to me from a friend. Try and google it.
The sound .DLL file is what’s causing the 5-10 seconds lag spikes at the client.
However, huge amounts of Area Damage calculations are done at the server end and that’s what causes lots of problems in high-end GR pushes because the server can’t do the calculations fast enough to supply the results back to the client. That’s got nothing to do with client-side DLLs.
This is exactly what i’m talking about. Why are you the only person other then me that understands how it works. Now if the devs would just understand and squish some of these numbers, maybe we could play some builds without lag.
Apparently, it was a thing that many posters here identified a poster thru an avatar picture and not the forum name here.