Breaking Down the Critical Strike And Vulnerable Damage Change - Diablo 4

Diablo IV Posted 2023/10/15 at 3:11 PM by Tharid

last week's Campfire Chat livestreamWhy Are Critical and Vulnerable Damage Being Nerfed?Damage Bucket TheoryMost damage affixes+% Damage versus Close Enemies+% Fire DamageBig Additive Damage Bucketare their own Damage BucketsCritical Strike (50% base bonus damage)Vulnerable debuff (20% base bonus damage)This Is Blizzard's Solution

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.

baseon topadditiveIsn't This A Nerf?

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.

Why The Change Will Be Good For Diablo 4

Unlike now, good builds won't have to rely on high Critical Strike Chance/Damage values and high Vulnerable debuff uptime to deal the most damage, which increases build variety.

Making use of new exclusive sources of multiplicative damage scaling (Paragon Nodes, Unique Items) further promotes build variety and class fantasy.

Other additive damage affixes will be much more viable thanks to this change, increasing the overall variety of powerful items and, thus, the chance to find an item upgrade.

Players will deal less damage due to less multiplicative scaling, creating smaller damage numbers as a result.

Comment by 1753348So nerf crit and vuln damage again will need to completely redesigned builds that are dependant on these stats or completely ignore them, and act as if they do not exist. Which will probably be the case, and then you have the 25000 different dmg values that has business being in the game. Close dmg Far dmg frost dmg chill dmg slow dmg the problem with the game is the completely over complicated the system. For me tho after what they did in 1.0 where they completely destroyed the game and characters that people spent 100s of hours on to get people to play seasons for the battle pass nothing they do will get me to come back 0 faith in them, and when I see this post it makes me question why they need to have a session about NERFING stats they should have figured out before they released the game. We should not be having to deal with situations like this its supposed to be a seasonal fun game nothing screams fun like seeing a entire podcast about nerfing vuln and crit dmg how about you trash the entire system and start over.Comment by gglamentThey are just completely clueless on how to fix itemisation, this is starting to look more and more like D3 system, and all they are doing is that you can completely mess up your build and you still will be fine, thats just stupidComment by HenceforthI'm glad I dropped this game. Devs have no idea and will make players be more miserable. Congratulations.
Anything without critical and vulnerable feels like dog crap. I feel bad for those still playing this.Comment by johntravolta342I'm glad I dropped this game. Devs have no idea and will make players be more miserable. Congratulations.
Anything without critical and vulnerable feels like dog crap. I feel bad for those still playing this.Comment by ZeroEdgeirFor those saying this is bad design... You are factually wrong.

Critical Strike Damage and Vulnerable Damage outclassed EVERYTHING ELSE. You could not make a build work at any reasonable higher endgame content, if it did not benefit from these. This lead to itemization REQUIRING specific affixes to be "good", and any class that could use Swords, HAD TO, as they gave Crit Damage as an intrinsic modifier (unless a specific Unique was leagues better).

DoT builds were crippled because of this, as they did not crit at all, thus losing a whole damage multiplier.

Minion builds struggled because, once again, you could not impact THEIR Critical Chance.

Every class pretty much had to run the best method to apply Vulnerable in their kit, because it was too strong not to. All Sorcs had to run Frost Nova, as an example.

Now, instead of these affixes and other modifiers stacking damage multipliers to the high heavens (ie: getting 250% Critical Damage multiplier), it is now that everyone gets the 50% multiplier, end of story. Sure, some things like DoTs still won't benefit, but there are other paths now.

Every class has multiple Paragon Glyphs or Legendary Nodes that give you new, multiplicative, ways to scale damage up higher, while being build-centric, instead of stat-centric.

Examples from Barbarian (because you people clearly do not bother to read, only complain):

New Paragon Glyph
Barbarian Earthquake-oriented builds now have a 10% multiplier, PER ACTIVE EARTHQUAKE, against any CC'd enemy.

Updated Legendary Nodes
Barbarian's Decimator no longer gives 2H Slashing weapons a chance to make enemies Vulnerable, but now give you a 10% multiplier for 5 seconds after making an enemy Vulnerable, and Overpowering a Vulnerable enemy is worth a separate 10% multiplier.

Barbarian's Hemmorhage, instead of being a 12% damage multiplier to targets Bleeding more than 3 seconds, is now a way to make Bleeding Damage scale, with a 15% multiplier, based on your Vulnerable Damage modifier. This means Bleed-focused Barbarians can stack Vulnerable to get more damage on their Bleeds, and also more damage added via Vulnerable.

Barbarian's Blood Rage now gives the added effect when you kill a Bleeding enemy, to give you a damage multiplier equal to 25% of your Damage while Berserking modifier. So now stacking that gives you not just a damage bonus while Berserking, but also a multiplier on kill.

They are giving you AGENCY on how you get your damage multipliers, and decoupling a lot of them from gear. As it should be. Gear should not be the defacto way to get the big damage multipliers. In fact, they never should be (that is the Diablo III problem). These things being tied to the Paragon Glyphs and Legendary Nodes, means everyone CAN get them, with just time and investment, no RNG. Eliminating the equipment statistical crutch that was Crit Damage and Vuln Damage as multipliers, that basically ruined any amount of build diversity, especially if a build cannot benefit well from them.

Hell, the single biggest change this did was unlocking the Sorcerer's second Enchantment slot: Devouring Blaze being an Additive Critical Damage bonus now, instead of Multiplicative, means that the Burning application requirement of Fire Bolt as an enchantment has lost most of it's value.

Judge it after you use it. Judging it on just reading the notes is absolutely idiotic. Yes, you will do less with your Eternal Realm characters existing builds. But now you can actually USE other builds than just the Crit/Vuln spamming options that have dominated the pre-Season and Season 1. They were the problem, when two stats were so much stronger than anything else, that it didn't matter what else you did, you could not overcome the gap. Now you can.Comment by h347hA solid change here despite mid gamers QQing about it.

The idea of having multiple multiplicative damage stats was a bad idea in the first place so dialing them back and making other builds competitive is a great idea. With how easy the game already is and the massive gain in ilvls for season 2 I feel like the power creep is going to make most builds "viable" alone.Comment by FusedSlayerPlayers will deal less damage due to less multiplicative scaling, creating smaller damage numbers as a result.Comment by ZeroEdgeirPlayers will deal less damage due to less multiplicative scaling, creating smaller damage numbers as a result.Comment by DGAPwarriorThis just makes crit damage and vuln damage dead affixes on weapons/rings outclassed by any other additive damage like close/core damage unless it rolls ridiculously high compared to those. Still a good change. You can now ignore vuln damage on classes that have bad uptime of vulnerability like barb/sorc.Comment by KerathrasThere should never have been multiplicative stats to begin with and the game should have launched balanced around all stats being equal rather than in different buckets. While this is a good change for the long term health of the game it comes far too late (game is already dead and has been pretty much on arrival) and I have no faith they will be able to implement it properly which will result in a mess as have all of their previous attempts to fix the game.Comment by immoralsoulPlayers will deal less damage due to less multiplicative scaling, creating smaller damage numbers as a result.Comment by STLkrolic2020they do will get me to come back 0 faith in them, Comment by cyclonewarThey need to fix the text on some items then. Like "The Grandfather" uber item still says % (for critical strike damage), which means that it is it's own multiplier. It should say +%.Comment by RaecaredNerfing the good stats doesn't suddenly make all the other stats feel good. DMG to Distant, DMG to Close, DMG to Crowd Control, DMG to Slow, etc is so incredibly lame. You just end up compromising on slight variations, plus it makes crafting annoying. Bloated affix system makes me just not even want to play for future seasons if they do introduce crafting.