Make vulnerable damage additive

PC General Discussion
1

Updated based on discussion of the first 38 comments.

Suggestion: Make the vulnerable damage mod additive instead of multiplicative.

Reason:
Multiplicative modifiers, or buckets as some people are calling them, make damage numbers go exponential. This is extremely hard to balance around, and makes the leveling experience strange for “us normal folks” or “casual gamers”.

Why?
Since you have to balance around this exponential curve, it means monsters follow the exponential curve. Hence, someone that’s not aware of these multiplicative mechanics is gearing mostly linearly with some accidental elements of diversification across these multiplicative buckets, and ultimately will hit a wall when not diversifying hard enough.

Adding fuel to the flame, the game does a terrible job of explaining it, but that’s not purely the fault of the D4 team. Even content creators are struggling to make clear videos on it, and end up taking 10 minutes or more to get the point across clearly.

Question: should it be this difficult, that all your players need to go watch content creators to understand why they are hitting a wall?

Answer: no it doesn’t have to be like this.

Just make vulnerable damage % additive. This way the potential damage output range gets reduced dramatically, and it’ll be easier to balance.
Not only does it make more sense for casual gamers, it makes things like speed running and other challenges more interesting because you’re opening the doors to lower level characters killing higher level monsters. That’s because they can now rely more on skill, and less on unlocking exponentially scaling multipliers through higher level gear and leveling their Exploit glyph.

Looking forward to some healthy discussion here. And a massive thanks in advance for making the game not (slowly/quickly) turn into a D3-like 60.000% damage bonus fest.

17 Likes
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What do you propose you do about crit? Remove it?

Since under a purely additive system, any build unable to take advantage of crit as we know it conventionally would be significantly worse off relative to those that could, not that that isn’t already partially the case.

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Crit damage can simply be additive as well.
Eg 10% chance on doing 100% extra damage: when you roll a crit the 100% gets added to the single bucket of calculated damages.

MrLlama says it nicely here around 7:10 Diablo IV - How Damage is Calculated (UP TO DATE THEORY) - YouTube

It doesn’t make sense to the casual player that 30% burning damage does significantly less than 20% vulnerable damage.

If you add them all up instead of doing multiplicative, then 30% burning will in fact be better than 20% vulnerable. And people can understand that :ok_hand:

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I get what you’re saying, and I’m sure there is lots of stuff that can be improved, but catering the game to people who can’t even be bothered to research the proper mechanics and actually find stuff out for themselves is exactly how you end up with diablo 3

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For anyone looking for math clarity:

Current calculation is roughly:
Weapon damage * (1+ add up all vulnerable bonuses) * (1+ add up all crit bonuses) * (1+ add up all other damage bonuses)

What I’m suggesting:
Weapon damage * (1+ add up all vulnerable bonuses + all crit bonuses + all other damage bonuses)

My hypothesis is that this is what the affixes portray to a normal person.
And as a result from that (testable) hypothesis it would make sense to have it work like this.

And btw, this is exactly what prevents a D3 scenario.

6

That would make crit chance basically a worthless stat. Right now if I have 10% crit and 300 vuln, 300 other, and 300% crit damage then I’m doing 64x damage on a crit, and 16x on a non crit.

Under your system, on a non-crit I do 8x damage and on a crit I do 12x… So instead of a critical strike doing 400% more damage… instead you’d have it do 50% more… You’d be nerfing it by a factor of 8. You’d be literally destroying crit and any build/skill that uses it.

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The problem with making all damage mods additive is you wouldnt be able to output enough damage to kill boss sponges. They would have to nerf all boss hp to equalize the balance.

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Speak for yourself I had no issues figuring this out in D3 and I’m casual. It’s 8th grade math. Weak premise for a nerf to be honest and it makes the game shallow.

Content creators in D3 issues had zero issues explaining how multipliers worked, nearly all the content creators I’ve seen for D4 are second rate in comparison so it follows that the communication won’t be clear. Took me all of 5 seconds to figure out how Overpower and Fortify buff my Blood Surge necro, in addition to Physical, Blood, Blood Skill, Damage to Close, Damage to Far, crit, crit damage.

These different multiplier groups open up a lot more options for builds and progression. You aren’t necessarily locked out of progression because you don’t have x value of y stat.

9

no, addititive bonuses would make people do MORE damage. +50% and +50% would be +100% instead of the +75% it is now

10

Thats not how the math maths by dude. You’re gonna wanna run those numbers again

1 Like
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“That would make crit worthless”

No, they can simply balance the numbers to accommodate for the difference. The problem now is that crit is required, and it’s not clear.

For example: is it clear that on a character with some random stats, an attack with 100% crit damage (assume a crit hit is rolled) and 0% poison bonus damage does more damage than a non-crit with 100% poison bonus damage?
No, that’s not clear to a normal person playing this game.

And the difference isn’t linear and thus fine, the difference is exponential and required to be exploited as you try to level to 100.

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Lol, “just balance it?” How do you balance nerfing crit by a factor of 8??

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Balancing by a factor of 8 right now is easier than balancing all builds across all levels going forward for all the game’s life.

That’s a simple fact, and if you disagree it’s probably because you don’t understand the math :sweat_smile:

The dev team would have no problem balancing this and certainly don’t need my input, but as an exec summary since it was asked:
They can easily run 10 million Monte Carlo simulations and balance all monsters’ life pools according to the outcomes of that.

14

Crit has been the same in every game in every rpg since i can remember and im old lol. Why change crit now? just because 1 person doesnt like it in 1 game? are you gonna say go change crit on every forum for every game? lol good luck changing what crit stands for lol

15

You said something is “easier.” That’s almost always subjective, and one in which math seldom comes into play.

But anyway… If “crit damage” is no more powerful than “damage to cc’d/vulnerable/close etc” enemies, then there is no way you could balance “crit chance” around that… when there are guaranteed ways to apply all the other statuses but “crit” is only a percent to proc.

Unless you just multiplied the % increase/range for crit damage on every stat by x… in which case you’ve done exactly nothing lol…

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uhh it’s not a math issue, it’s a clarity issue.

also lol @ “it took me 5 seconds to figure out what took the community months of rigorous testing”

1 Like
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On the idea that crit might become useless (which it wouldn’t), this could be a nice way to get rid of lucky hit chance and make all those juicy lucky hit proc effects happen on crits instead.

I use lucky hit all the time, but again during the betas people were bumping their heads against the walls because it is unnecessary complex.

Simplying it all into the same proc could be a nice quality of life change.

Then again, I don’t want to change the topic and don’t have a particularly hard stance on it, since it doesn’t lead to a wall in progressing through the game.

“ uhh it’s not a math issue, it’s a clarity issue.”
What exactly is unclear? Happy to elaborate

18

Crit is a % chance to do extra damage. Crit damage is the bonus you get from that proc. Without crit damage, crit % does nothing and vice versa. There is no other modifier on the list with a condition even remotely as restrictive. Vulnerable can be applied 100% of the time, same with CC, slow, poison, etc etc etc. ALONG WITH the status effect that comes with slow, poison, vulnerable etc etc.

Crit is only damage, nothing more, and only on the proc. So you’re suggesting making crit damage, which is only damage, and only relevant when it procs, exactly as powerful as every other damage stat.

And you really don’t understand why that’s an issue?

19

Yeah it’s not an issue because like you said, the damage % for crits can be adjusted upwards if desired.

Also just for exhaustiveness: yes monster health pools would need to be adjusted downwards accordingly. You can’t bring damage down from exponential to linear without adjusting the health pool of the monsters. I’ve explained above how to do that, and the team would be very capable to do so since the math is quite simple.

Perhaps you can elaborate:
-Why should a proc hit with 100% extra damage do more damage than another non-proc hit with 100% extra damage to healthy monsters?
-why should +30% vulnerable damage do more than +100% damage to an injured enemy?
It just doesn’t make sense. The front end natural text and the backend math aren’t aligned here…

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I mean I don’t think they should remove multiplicative bonuses (some are so baked into the game that it wouldn’t even make sense to) but it’s very obvious that it’s harder to balance multiplicative damage bonuses than additive ones.

This is why a game like borderlands 3 has notorious scaling issues in its mayhem difficulty (mobs get up to 100X more health at highest mayhem setting), because in that game nearly every stat is multiplicative with every other stat. So you have a situation where a single accessory with god rolls can multiply your damage by 5x versus one with bad rolls, and you have multiple gear slots that all compound with each other. How do you balance around the fact that a character with god gear does 10, 20, 50x or more as much damage as one with starter gear? Builds that have access to a type of damage called “splash damage” in bl3 (either through their weapon choice or their skill tree) are WAY stronger than those that don’t, because it has its own completely separate multiplicative damage bonus that allows you to have like an x500% damage multiplier just for having the tag “splash damage” somewhere in your build. This is very comparable to “vulnerable damage” in d4, where builds that don’t have access to vuln damage are utter trash, because they do like 1/6 as much damage as builds that do.

Multipliers are a fun way to add a ton of power to characters, but it can very easily result in a very rigid metagame if there is not enough variety in the types of multipliers builds can use.

2 Likes