"We don't want big numbers clogging up the screen" - Joe

I’m fine with this sentiment and how the proposed handling is just giving monsters insane DR until the numbers are small - but I don’t see how that isn’t going to lead to the feeling of always being “weak” as you level as the “sheet” damage a player will have at level 100 has to be insane (millions … billions… maybe even trillions of damage) when you look at a single item from the livestream (Overkill) and realize this ONE item will hit over 25,000dmg on it’s own before multipliers from:

  • Stats
  • Gear
  • Aspects
  • Skill Modifiers
  • Paragon Board
  • Glyphs
  • Glyph multipliers
  • Potential Snapshot Calculations of Combination Strings

On paper we will be hitting mobs for Billions of damage. Which means to get the numbers “down” as Joe says as we level every monsters “Damage Reduction” stat has to go higher and higher. It’s actually insane to try to calculate getting the potential existing sheet DPS down to realistic numbers from Damage Reduction. Let’s assume because of the massive multipliers everywhere that we will be hitting for 25 Billion damage (a fraction of Diablo 3 …but looks well possible for Diablo 4 given the recent items shown) and they want that number to be reasonable - let’s say 900,000 damage because more than 1 million as Joe states starts to get “dirty” on the screen and takes away from the aesthetic.

  • The Monster’s DR at level 100 would have to be 99.999964%

They are playing with fractions of fractions of 1% just to get the potential sheet DPS down under 1 million damage shown on screen.

Given the early Beta of those numbers already being nearly achievable at level 25 “Base” item damage and Overkill having 6x that much on its own item base. I’m generally concerned they don’t have this managed well.

Simply put why are items at such low level doing so much base damage? Why does base damage have to be in the 100s and 1000s?

  • Last Epoch - end game weapons have sub-150 base damage on almost every weapon.
  • PoE end game items range within the low 100s of base damage.

Diablo 4 we had base items over 500 at level 25. And Overkill with a base range up to 3,000 at level 100.

Just pull the base numbers down - it doesn’t need to be that high.

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After seeing the new glyphs and what numbers they use, i cant argue with the feel that blizzard has thrown the “we dont want big numbers out of the window”

It looks more and more that aspect multipliers will matter much less in the grand sheme of things. Paragon and especially glyphs seem to scale much better.

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Leaked footage shows a barb, supposedly using a bug, hitting 12 mil with every hit and his max being 27 mil. We won’t be getting into billions. This dude was one-shotting basically every enemy and two-shotted the boss. He was on highest difficulty and considering both endgame testers and the devs have said it’s supposed to be somewhat difficult, I don’t think we are going to be hitting those numbers. If we are, I expect rapid nerfs to whatever is causing it.

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Closed beta numbers were in the billions…

Look for the KFC Barbarian (leaked video has the images of Colonel Sanders in Chad form) if it’s still up, doing the “end game” boss for the beta with a hammer of the ancients build hitting billions and one shotting the dungeon boss.

look at github, the have some examples of a fully leveled glyph.

For example:

  • for every 5 int within range you get a 19.2% increase in damage to all conjuration damage.

PoE some builds are doing over 100M dps. People don’t complain about big numbers. Why? Because they don’t see the numbers. Solution for D4 if you don’t like big numbers? Turn off the damage numbers.

Big numbers are not a problem at all. It increases the range at which they can divide the game into separate categories of difficulty. In PoE this is 16 divisions plus how many more you would consider the endgame bosses. This adds longevity to the content and flexibility to the player to tackle content that is appropriate to them while being able to be rewarded appropriately.

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Are you trolling? People do dmg in the millions in POE. What a bizarre take.

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KFC footage is the footage I’m looking at. Maybe the billions version is the one where he’s using the bug. But the number he hits the boss with is 24,837,100 which is millions. As far as I can tell, his game is scaled to 95 for some reason as it says 95 next to the world tier, but he is level 100. This might have something to do with the numbers being so high and the enemies dying so easily.

It’s additive damage and people wanted more power on their character anyways.

I still can’t imagine them letting damage hit the billions, and I doubt the hardest difficulty is supposed to have every enemy fall over with one hit.

Though I suppose the Devs said enemies in nightmare dungeons can go up to level 150 at max, so maybe they needed semi-high numbers for a fully geared out character to fight that.

i really dont like the big numbers either. and items giving huge % bonuses is lame. it’s exactly like diablo 3 and they specifically said it wouldn’t be like that.

Yes, and that is with items that are 1/6th the base damage of Diablo 4’s which is the point.

I just wish they’d give us some actual level 100 gameplay that shows what they are aiming for. I don’t care if it’s curated or they just show us 5 minutes of random 100 gameplay, just something that shows what we should expect.

You guys surely understand that if you turn damage numbers off in the interface settings that it just makes the game feel like you’re playing Diablo 2, right?
The physical numbers are the issues, not the damage you’re actually putting out. Play for 10 minutes with the numbers turned off and you’ll feel like you’re playing a different game.

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even if that is the case, they probably killed the paragon versatility with it, if it just boils down to focus on Glyphs.

I dont like where this is going.

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I think they are so closed about it because the endgame is not either “finished” or it’s really far simpler and shallow than we are expecting so they don’t want any backlash to impact their launch sales.

If that ends up being the case, they’ll likely nerf them. They could also be like the rare nodes and have higher requirements for each board you progress through.

Considering the datamined stuff we have is from a beta that was likely 6-7 months old, I wouldn’t be surprised if the bonuses look very different when we get them.

Until the moment where having or not having certain item powers makes an 800% damage difference thanks to silly damage calculation.

Numbers don’t mean anything. How it feels means everything

The point is that the big number doesn’t matter. The big numbers are actually better because it allows them to subdivide the game into more difficulty brackets. That gives each player more flexibility in choosing a difficulty and reward structure that benefits them. Small numbers allow cheese like being able to solo the game naked ala D2.

nope they shouldnt start like that.

If you inflate the numbers right from the start, it gets more and more pigeonholed into %increase > everything else, if the scaling gets out of hand.

My take on the matter is people aren’t actually against the damage numbers themselves but against Blizzard’s design philosophy being completely lazy in implementation rather than trying to actually design the game around specific breakpoints in which the game difficulty scales.

Sure, some may actually dislike these million, billion, trillion damage scales, but for the most part it’s mostly just distaste for bad design.

If Blizzard actually scaled the game around these massive numbers, as ChillinSpree said -

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