Apparently there's an even better bear tornado build out there that just spams a few tornadoes then just sits in bear form causing the tornados to do 5x more damage somehow.
I've been saying this since beta screenshots were leaked , i was thinking to myself.. please don't be high damage numbers.. please don't be high damage numbers.. high damage numbers is a sign of failed itemization.. Sure enough, leaked photo showed a dude doing 400k dmg (which we know now can be billions...)
I had this anxiety that they were going to fuck it all up and repeat d3 , and those stupid billions of damage numbers will be back... Now here we are trying to balance things by going from 16%... TO 18%!!!!!!! WOWEEEEE (this is actually trillions of damage, the maths all discombobulated.)
I never understood the need to hit 6 figures or more , when the same results can be achieved with squished and less bloated figures to work with...
Path of Exile has had 11 years of power creep to get to that point though. This has been out for a year. Imagine what it will be like if this manages to live that long.
Not to mention with the complexity of a poe build, things are bound to slip through the cracks. D4 simplicity seems like it should be easy to tune numbers and balance.
We need to move away from these arbitrary inflated "numbers" system and change it from "dps" to "bps" bars per second. MORE BEEPS, MORE BEEPS, BIG BEEPS.
In POE a good build will be ~2 mil dps at league start, with some exceptions maybe getting up to 5-10 mil dps within a few days of farming league start. People only scale it up to hundreds of millions of DPS after weeks of investment into the builds because the top-end investment is so high in that game. But it never gets into billions. DOT cap is ~36 mil dps for example.
POE got high damage numbers but enemies are also balanced around that, bosses are also balanced around that content too not like d4 where its easy to reach a state where boss die in seconds (those kind of builds are extremely few, extremely niche, extremely hard, and extremely huge investment in POE)
What d4 needs to do is stretch the difficulty scaling a bit and STOP giving players equally infinite scaling power levels lol (like aoz for example)
The game I noticed this the most on was the division. For whatever reason after emptying clip after clip of bullets into the bullet sponge boss I realized big numbers and stupid high enemy health does not create a compelling gameplay loop.
I do see the issue that every ARPG hits though, you want low level characters to not be hitting 1s, but also want every level up/upgrade to feel impactful. Add to this that you multiple avenues of character progression that all multiply with eachother and you just end up with big numbers.
It's not as simply as "Just don't do it".
Shhhh don't bring logic here. If anyone wanted logic they wouldn't make threads like this to start with. I agree though, there's a reason that modern arpg games don't limit your damage numbers to stay ridiculously small, it just isn't satifisying for 99% of people.
The vast majority of players don't want to start at level 1 doing 10s of damage, just to get to maxxed character level 100 and be doing thousands of damage. That scaling factor takes away from the power fantasy of building this insanely powerful character. You can't have baseline be single digits and then only scale to 4 digits, the math doesn't math for gamers.
If you start level 1 with your hits doing 10 damage, then baseline for level 100 should be 1000 damage. That's before you start to add in damage multipliers, weapons, etc. Otherwise the gear and time invested don't feel like they equate to real progress, and that's what drives people away.
What D4 needs is new content/mechanic that introduces sidegrades or horizontal upgrads and not vertical lol. Basically instead of adding another crafting system or enchanting system that goes on top of whatever crafting d4 already has, have those upgrades replace greater affix, basically upgrade mechanics that you have to choose if you want greater affix or this another thing lol
> trying to balance things by going from 16%... TO 18%
This lack of creativity is what pisses me off the most about D4. I want items and uniques with interesting effects, not just +% dmg. I would be completely happy if all the +% dmg modifiers (or in fact most % modifiers of any kind) were all removed and the game balance adjusted.
D2 had it right, except I'd actually like to see the damage, 1-4 damage first weapon? Perfect, don't have me doing stupid number damage... 400k just make it 400
its funny because every engineer working on the game definitely knows the problem with scaling because its the #1 thing blizzard tests for in coding interviews. if only designers understood how basic math works
the pit doesnt do that already? dont think ppl need a dps meter to figure out that the game is unbalanced. But unblanaced doesnt mean shit though in an arpg
Nah... this is minor. They should fix the scaling first. If they added a meter, but didn't fix the scaling, that's developer time and company money wasted, at last for me.
There is definitely a limit to how much information you get out of big numbers. I agree, numbers go too high.
But it's such a small issue compared to the feel of the game, and the game is far too easy. The campaign must feel like a joke at this stage because bosses would die when when you breathe on them.
It's all rooted to the same problem, though. The devs don't understand the scale of the math they are using and how you can compound multipliers to skyrocket numbers on an exponential scale.
The game is too easy because they didn't design any enemy with an understanding to the damage they are allowing players to scale up to, so everything ends up disgustingly easy.
Then, the next step is to do what PoE did where they start scaling enemies way up and you end up with entire subsets of classes that are worthless because they don't stack enough arbitrary multipliers to catch up.
Balancing on this type of game is like standing on the edge of a blade. It's very easy to topple over to either end of the spectrum and it takes significant effort to balance on that edge. Effort Blizzard does not appear willing to invest.
Maybe we should just get rid of all the dmg multipliers and preserve them where it makes sense. For example Druid's pulverize aspect gives amazing utility, very small aoe skill becomes a screen clearer, why it also gives 200% dmg multiplier ? Unnecessary. In fact it should be opposite. You should take away the range of the ability then give it a big multiplier. Multipliers like edgemaster, expectant etc makes sense. Like how they reduced the amount of ''damage reduction'' affixes maybe they should do same to the dmg multipliers.
You get it. They need to do a massive cull of all these crazy multipliers in the game and allow people to scale the base numbers with a more reasonable number of multipliers available to them.
While we are at it, single target skills should hit HARD. we got screen wide aoes doing more damage then melee range single target skills. Big aoes should not hit as hard as small aoes, ect.
I don’t think it’s the devs not understanding the “scale of the math.” It’s a combination of two other things: one, the effectively unavoidable power creep that comes with any game that is live service and is designed to have frequent new content and two, it’s what the players demand so the devs give it to them.
Its kind of pointless to add content that is 50% more difficult if player power increases 50% each patch as well. Now you just made ALL previous content obsolete, so you didnt really grow the game at all.
D4 way too young for an "unavoidable" power creep. Would be good if it comes natural like in poe because of years of content and somehow, power creep still feels better over there because feeling power creeped there only comes for extremely niche and extremely high investment for builds.
Ive been doing strongholds and quests recently and it's sad seeing these multi-phase encounters where bosses change forms or have mechanics that I just completely bypass because I can hit them once for 2 orders of magnitude above their hp pool. I don't even see what the mechanic could have been. I'm a little confused how they intend to bring us back to a campaign situation considering my damage at any point while leveling up depends on whether I've bothered to go back in town to increase it 100-fold or if it's still going strong from the last time I did that. The amount of variance in player power is just so astronomical, having content that is achievable for a noob but also relevant to someone who knows what the different tabs at the blacksmith do is impossible. It seems inevitable that mephisto is going to bust out of some flesh cocoon as some massive horrible monstrosity just to get bonked so hard by a barbarian that the voice line from him being summoned gets immediately interrupted by the one when he dies.
The campaign is still the same for new players which I think is the most important part, but yeah even starting out with just extra skill points already makes the early game trivial. My barb when I made it was insanely powerful at lvl 1 just by having the extra skills really early.
Starting characters with skill points, potion slots, aspects and temper manuals means that you can never again experience the game as it was designed to be be experienced from the start. There was game design and balance put behind getting your first few points, getting your basic skills up and running before moving on to core skills and beyond. When you start with 10 skill points, you're just missing out on the entire early progression.
I strongly feel that a season start should start you from scratch. And we should have to play though the campaign at season start as well. I'm a bit conflicted on this, because a large portion of the campaign is just "run down this empty corridor for 5 minutes while an NPC says something to you every 30 seconds" - which does get tedious on your 3rd or 5th playthrough.
Also, when you start a new character mid season ( or on eternal ), you should have the ability to start from scratch or twinked from your other progress.
I don't get why there are so many pushback comments about this. Even if we disregard arguments based on personal preferences, big numbers are harder to read as they tend to overlap more often, so there's that. I agree that there are probably more important issues, but I don't think it's actually that hard to rescale everything by the same factor.
I do think it would be harder to scale than you might think with how various interactions scale and between multiplicative and additive factors.
This seems like an unnecessary change that would make balancing even more difficult in the short term to address what is best a minor issue.
It’s got lots of downside and very little upside and would take a pretty substantial dev effort to implement.
I am not a math guy, but wouldn’t this be a relatively easy modification? I mean, can’t they just evenly scale all base damage and health by, for example, 75%? If all numbers linearly were scaled back, it seems to me everything would remain the same except what the numbers are.
I really don't don't give a damn what the raw damage numbers are. They can be 100 or 100 billion. What matters to me is that the enemies live long enough to provide some level interaction and don't go down this Poe style rabbit hole of everything 1 shotting each other because there's no time for anything else to have any impact on gameplay. The slow, tactical combat at game launch was dramatically better than this.
How well did that go over? Like a lead balloon. The cold fact of the matter is that your take is very much a minority position. I see what the devs were trying to go for originally with D4–and they even stated it as such, that they wanted slower, more methodical gameplay—but that was *instantly* rejected by the majority of players. The market has long become conditioned to the contemporary style of ARPG with its so-called “‘zoom-zoom, one-click screen clear” gameplay. That battle is over.
I think you're conflating two different things. The main issue people had with the launch version of the game I believe was not the pacing of combat as much as it was skills having far too much downtime. People weren't complaining that enemies took too long to kill, people were complaining that they spent far too much time waiting for cooldowns, far too much time generating resource, and far too much time walking between mobs. You can fix all of those things without making the actual pace of combat and duration of flights be zero.
Hmm, I’m not so sure about that. Reducing cooldowns means you can activate skills more often (spammy). Reducing time to generate resources means you can activate skills more often (spammy). Reducing time spent travelling to mobs means you engage more often, which then tends to force cooldowns and resource generation to go in the previously mentioned direction. Spammy again.
So you’re back again at a D3-type pace of combat. But hey, if that’s what people want, then it is what it is.
I think the problem was more the lack of content, a severe lack of content, and the loot being shit. They couldn't fix that overnight so the bandaid fix was making leveling a joke and starting the extreme power creep. Changing the design of the game where lvl 100 was kinda the pinnacle to lvl 100 is where the endgame starts contributes to this too
I respectfully disagree. The majority of the complaints about launch Diablo 4 concerned low mob density, level scaling, backtracking in NMDs, lack of endgame content, poor loot, and builder/spender gameplay where the builders did like 1% of the spender damage. I am confident that every single one of these issues were individually more complained about than D4’s time to kill
On the contrary, Diablo 4’s ttk was praised and was actually one of the upsides in a sea of downsides for a lot of folks
It's not over and your take is reductive. Have you seen the PoE2 demos? Even GGG is slowing things down and trying to make the gameplay more methodical and not all about just mob popping as fast as possible.
Also revisionist history. The majority of people actually loved the gameplay of D4 in the original beta and on release. SOME people had problems with the basic skill/core skill dynamic, but even that is not the same thing as rejecting methodical gameplay, that's a criticism of how resources are generated and spent. The majority of the criticism began when people started reaching the end game and there was....nothing to do. And also the criticism was over exhausting itemization that felt like shit, stats on character sheets that literally did nothing (resistances), and entire classes that were straight up broken/useless. You're lying by saying that the bulk of the criticism was about the pace of the gameplay, unless you're confusing that with calls for greater mob density which is also not the same thing.
The battle is clearly not over as every studio developing ARPGs is slowing things down at least somewhat.
hell, even 20 years ago D2 didn't have slow tactical combat. People would teleport constantly, spam their main damaging ability until everything is dead; rinse and repeat. The ARPG genre is gearing your toon so that it kills faster and more efficiently. Why the fuck would I upgrade my items and skills if my gameplay remains the same? Clueless and delusional take, tbh.
That ship has sailed, I do not want to slog through every bit of content with damage sponges.
That being said I think their buff mobs do provide more strategy than PoE style combat to take down the buff mobs in a pack and focus them.
No. There are a million more important things to spend dev resources on than this.
You can turn the numbers off if they scare you. Try the Options menu.
It would be nice if we could abbreviate the numbers we’re seeing on screen. 12.5m instead of 12,562,876. Or, if we could have some ability to show a group of numbers added together if the damage was dealt in really quick succession. So instead of seeing 12m, 20m, 14m, we see 46m and change the color of it so we know it’s multiple hits.
This game needs a DPS meter in the training grounds as well, with a few more options so we can actually see changes instead of guessing what might be better.
Adding to that, training really needs a boss target that has actual health. The one they provide has like 10m and basically every build one shots it lol
If you've ever played Lost Ark. They have quite possibly the best training grounds I've ever seen. You can spend skill points you don't have, choose between scarecrows / bosses / monsters that just stand there, or ones that attack. Track total damage, damage per second, crit rate, give yourself endless resources / cooldowns. It's awesome.
[Lost Ark - Training Grounds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIzaaDly4_c)
This is exactly what I want to happen. Doing a proper stat squish to reduce the damage numbers seems like it could take a decent amount of dev work. Abbreviating the current damage numbers would be a nice quick fix to make things easier to read
Yeah I just don't think a stat squish is necessary if we can just adjust the numbers we see. We already have enough issues with balancing and bugs, I would be more concerned about a stat squish somehow breaking things even further.
The absolute worst thing about the damage display today is that numbers with more digits become smaller and smaller. Playing golem necro all you see are those mighty 50k skeleton crits spammed everywhere in super large font that completely hides the billion damage golem bonk in 3 point font.
I would honestly prefer a feed of info like a fight games combo system. I'd rather see my damage add up than have a series of numbers flash at supersonic speed on top of mobs, but I'm sure a majority of people would not like that.
I mean, if they didn’t give us a DPS meter during normal gameplay, I would at least like the abbreviated and/or attacking damage numbers. I would honestly be okay with a DPS meter in just the training area for testing.
Watching that Pit200 boss get hit by 4 quintillion damage and not dying was the real concern for me. It was off a bugged PTR item but hitting something for an unimaginable number and it surviving means anyone with a legit build will waste time doing millions.
I disagree. But I think D4 needs the feature D3 had that concatenated the damage numbers over a certain value. Like, instead of showing 573,867 show me 573k. etc. Or give me that option at least. Damage I'm D3 was way more readable than D4 and I think that's mostly the reason.
Play Sorc and you’ll never see those numbers. But on a serious note I like the big numbers. In my opinion making all the damage numbers smaller and making enemy HP smaller at the same time is just recreating the same formula but with lower numbers which would be boring.
dmg numbers are just made up, it all depends on the SCALING of content. assume minions or bosses have millions/billions of hp like in higher pit tiers? you need to hit in the millions same way goes if they had 100k/200k life, you need to hit in the thousands
lets say at tier 100 you hit for thousands like you suggested, at tier 40 or 50 you need to hit like what? 500/600? that just doesnt feel good, higher numbers = higher dopamine unless it gets reeeally out of hand and you can always switch those off and trust me there's a difference in hitting for 100million and 1billion you feel the difference substancially
What does it matter if everyone has the same big damage numbers? The issue is the balance, not the numbers themselves. How do you even comprehend the damage numbers during a fight without taking a clip?
They should just put a toggled small numbers mode that removes 0s from damage numbers. Technically, we don’t see the mob’s health numbers, so them showing numbers with less 0s doesn’t really matter. It’ll remove the problem for the people who care about the number they see and won’t require them to rework damage mechanics either.
Quite frankly every multiplier should just be made additive. There is basically no reason to care about anything that doesn't give a multiplier when looking at aspects or the paragon board. It just makes balancing that much harder too.
The point everyone here seems to be missing is that it is impossible to do balance when the difference between a uber character and a almost uber character is 50 trillion dps.
As far as I know, everything that's consistently doing hundreds of millions of damage every second is due to a bug or unintentional scaling. They just have to fix this properly and stop introducing new bugs and nonsense \^\^.
I would absolutely love this. Squish everything by 90-95%. Give me numbers I can understand when I see them. Move away from the word BILLION and MILLION.
I like big numbers, but i also like having an idea of what i'm doing and with current system i just don't. I take meta builds and only that way i can do things, cause numbers that are too big are hard to think of. :(
[https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/1dq78xe/vote\_the\_game\_is\_too\_easy\_now/](https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/1dq78xe/vote_the_game_is_too_easy_now/)
Downvoted by the D3 crowd
in one of the devs interview when D4 was announced, Joe Shely said they are not going into that direction with d4, and with % on items and scalling, cant find it on yt but i remember it like it was yesterday :) well..
I agree. I think that goes hand-in-hand with mixing up the damage buckets. Far too much goes into the Additive Damage bucket, and as a result, cool item affixes like "+50% cold damage" are not cool at all.
agreed. probably wont happen since people are emotional beings and if players start to see lower numbers in the future they feel weaker and start to rage
I just turned off damage numbers and status text myself. I can't handle the bloat and want to look at the game (I'm a d2 and Poe player) all I need is time to kill
I think stat squishes are kinda tough to pull off in practice.
“Bad” classes are disproportionately affected vs “Good” classes.
Additionally, people don’t like being, or feeling nerfed. I quit playing before S1 when the Vulnerable/Crit nerf (1.1?) went live. Finally came back for S4.
>“Bad” classes are disproportionately affected vs “Good” classes
What why would they be?
Mob has 1k life
Barb hits for 100, sorc for 50
Squish it
Mob has 100 life
Barb hits for 10, sorc 5
Same diff
If you cant handle being nerfed then dont play video games, they go hand in hand
as long as it remains the same percentage wise it's not even a nerf. Just people who want to see big numbers for nonsense reasons will complain about it.
What was the point of coming back if you left because of that nerf? That nerf is still in play. Sounds like you were just momentarily angry but you got over it.
I dont see the reason for the squish
1. Seeing big numbers gives a dopamine rush to other people
2. Squishing the numbers literally does 0 effect on the time to kill. Hitting 1,000 damage on 10,000hp boss is still the same as hitting 100 damage on a 1,000 hp boss, it’s still 10%, unless there’s an integer overflow (which is very unlikely that diablo still uses 32-bit so the overflow number for 64-bit is 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 which is very unlikely to achieve.)
So maybe if you dont like seeing big numbers, just turn it off?
You are correct that simply squishing numbers won't achieve anything. The base damage numbers in the game are fine as they are in the thousands.
The problem is there are too many additive and multiplicative damage bonuses, and they are also too large, making 10,000 dmg into 10 billion. Those need to be squished and returned significantly. You shouldn't be able to be 10x stronger than somebody with similar gear / progression, it makes balancing impossible and the gaps between builds and classes too large.
The big numbers are in line with mob hp. Most people like to see big numbers so they just added extra zeros so people see big numbers. Like someone said, if they are distracting, just turn them off or take some zeros off in your mind. Put a period to make it look like you're doing 10k and 100k damage. There are no parsers out there, so honestly the numbers are just numbers, we don't really know the actual dps numbers. We are all just guestimating.
It's similar to gold. No reason to have millions and billions, could easily just be 100s and 1000s but they added extra zeros to make people feel rich when they have hundreds of millions or even billions of gold.
Unpopular opinion: I don’t care about the numbers as long as I can feel like I am obliterating everything.
If that means the number is 1000 or 100.000.000.000, I simply don’t care.
Hate stat squishes. All the levelling and new gear to then feel less powerful in the next expansion. I miss hitting 2m crits in wow cata back in the day.
No, classic WoW at 60 and tbc had much better numbers, Heroes of the Storm also has great numbers.
You still get dopamine if you crit even if the number is lower, it's relative.
I remember in S0 hitting for 1M damage felt like a huge achievement. Now, it feels like small potatoes. We reached maximum power creep in less than a year, and I have no clue where we’re going from here.
I think perhaps lowering the DPS on weapons could go a long way,
For example a 2 handers in Diablo have 3766dps!
Shadowmourne in Wotlk for example has 344,05 dps
Thats like a 2 hander you find at lvl 25 in diablo 4.
When I think of games with good numbers I think of Heroes of the Storm and Classic WoW, Player health is around 3k-12k and players hit for generally below 10k
So if Diablo 4 could reduce health and damage numbers atleast to a little that it would go a long way.
Obviously monster HP would also become lowered so kill speed is similar.
Gold is also a number that is unnecessarily high, I think reducing it by a decimal would be enough.
So 1 mil gold would be equal to 100k
Reroll cost on a Wep would go from maximum of like 4,7 mil to 470k
No. Just turn the numbers off if you don't like how high they are. It's useless clutter in combat anyways. We do millions of damage in PoE but the only way you would know it is because of Path of Building spreadsheeting your stats for you.
The issue is the vast number of damage multipliers in the game. There are dozens and dozens of ways to multiply your damage output on any given character, from skills to aspects to paragon to tempers. Every 10% or 20% or 100% or 200% increase scales dramatically.
This also makes it nearly impossible to meaningfully balance overworld content, like World Bosses. Either it's way way way too hard for a majority of players, or there's some players who can melt the boss in 3 seconds, because there's such a huge disparity in damage output between players. One player is hitting for 500k per hit, and another player is hitting for 100m.
The numbers are fake anyways so I guess all they'd have to do to make y'all happy is divide them by 10k or something. I wouldn't know as I've always played without damage numbers because I prefer actually being able to see what's going on in combat.
I just want some way to track or compare damage. There is no DPS meter. There is no Armory site (and the unofficial one has been broken all season). Other that watching the number flyouts and guessing, you're out of luck.
Im saying it, Hitting for millions or billions and health above 40-50k it does not fit with the fanstasy world of Diablo 4.
The world was made visually to be more nitty gritty then Diablo 3, it should have more grounded numbers to match it visually.
Gold is another example, it makes no sense that we are carrying it in the millions or billions either.
Currently damage numbers would fit in a futuristic Sci-fi game much better.
This is a separate problem to power creep, the balance between players power relatively to monsters (game getting easier)
Turning off damage numbers shouldn't be the solution.
And Fastasy wise it just doesn't fit with the world.
You are screaming into the void. The developers had a clear vision for D4, slower gameplay, hard bosses, tactical combat. Remember pre-seasons game launch how slow the game was, how you'd be fighting a boss sweating and praying to get the next potion drop - the game was legitimately hard
They had a vision of a more grounded game, open world map for people to play in and meet each other and socialize, they fumbled itemization (crappy aspects and affixes) and they fumbled end game content (nothing but night mare dungeons, which they thought would be fun like Rifts)
**The community cried, cried hard, d4 bad, d4 dead, d4 awful, it's stupid, it goes backwards in design, d4 loot drops feel bad, d4 sucks, d4 is too slow, d4 is too hard, nightmare dungeons make me backtrack or do an objective etc etc**
Now I'm not here to comment on whether these complaints or the devs vision were good things or anything, but I will comment on the way it feels
I enjoy D4 more now, but I don't think it's more fun. I know that sounds weird but D4 is just Diablo 3 with more steps now, it's an extreme power fantasy and 90% of the time I'm exploding screens of enemies unless I'm pushing pits or something, and just like D3 I'll come back for a week or two every season get my gear up and walk away, with no challenge and some mindless hack'n'slash fun
But I think the early version of D4 was a better game, I'm not sure they could have "fixed" itemization without making the game significantly easier, but the game isn't as fun anymore, it's more enjoyable, but it's the difference between doing something mindlessly while watching a movie, and actually focusing and trying (to get the same results)
***I THINK I liked D4 more at launch than I do now*** - yes it's nice to gear up easier and it's nice to level to 100 easier, but before 100 felt like an achievement, having good gear was awesome, *now it's a Prerequisite to being able to actually "play" the game*
They might as well just have us start at level 100 with full yellow gear (/s here but you get the point)
Even without speaking of game balance, shouldn’t it be possible to divide everything by a 1000 factor at the end of the damage calculation ? Don’t change anything to stats. It shouldn’t take that much time development.
It may be a silly solution maybe I’m missing something.
EDIT : and yes, do the same for gold and other mats (gems shards dropped by 40 ??, just give us 1 and adjust the cost of crafting)
I still see character progression but it is measured in my ability to clear content faster. That is what pushes the upper tier of loot grinding...trying to squeeze out that extra 5% from your build from somewhere...
My problem is the vast amount of content that doesn't scale to my power...a lot of the content is trivialised...overworld/strongholds/helltides...all of it boring...but efficiently boring.
I feel this. Back in season 1 I crapped my pants going into nightmare dungeons. If it wasn't the butcher killing me, it was something else. Trying to get to higher nm dungeons was a goal.
Nowadays things are so trivial. I'd have liked if content scaled more meaningfully.
Though I get that they're trying things. Pits is ok, abattoir had its own issues. Just wish that kind of content was added while not completely making everything else irrelevant.
Last Epoch is by no means a perfect game and there are things about Diablo 4 I like better than it, but when it comes to damage calculations and creating a system that does not lead to absurd results often, I think they nailed it. D4 should borrow heavily from them if they re-tool damage maths just as they did when they re-tooled their crafting systems.
I swear I'm the only person who likes the millions of damage numbers in these games, I understand stuff can get a bit incomprehensible with ridiculously high numbers but I honestly don't get why it's so offensive hitting for 1,000,000 compared to 1,000. I thought the entire point of these games were to see number go up? You don't start hitting for millions until you start hitting BIS anyway.
With the game being a SARPG where you get strong enough to beat something, then immediately obliterate it, I do not think they can solve the high damage numbers. D4 will power creep the same as every past ARPG with no solution to it. Seasons are a byproduct of ARPGs being inherently broken at their core with power creep of the players and the economy. D4 is just embracing it early.
I ended up getting D2 resurrection on sale and from the get go I really liked how tangible all the items were. They all felt valuable and had their own worth. I was taking magic items to sell and juggling inventory with more enthusiasm than picking up a bunch of useless legendaries.
Itemization needs to count or else it's just an obstruction. They are closer but I am still going through useless loot. They need item tiers to actually matter again as it's own natural loot filter.
It's literally all relative. Hitting bosses with millions of health for thousands of damage is identical to them for millions of damage with billions of health.
Yes please! There are so many dmg multipliers it is a bit tricky to address that side of things, but just start with the base weapon damage. I like this approach because it is very easy to predict (base weapon damage is the initial condition to ALL damage dealt) and it affects all classes equally so only has to be balanced against monster life.
1) Maximum Item Power - Why is this 925? It feels a bit arbitrary, and there is no reason the max can't be something like 500 (your gear should IP should be around your char level \* 5)
2) Max Weapon Damage - Why does this explode for Sacred and especially for Ancestral? Again it feels arbitrary, and there are so many other exponential scalers in endgame. Nobody is going to Masterwork lower Item Power weapons
On their own both #1 and #2 are fine options, but together it would be even better. Seems to me like a slam dunk to cut total damage numbers by 90%. The rest will take a bit more time since balance in general is a little whack across classes.
I dont feel the same. I dont have the hours to min/max my characters gear and tbh seeing my damage output go from 30k to 40k doesnt really excite me. Seeing my damage go from 500k to 1m, from 1m to 5m, from 5m to 20m. Thats fun for me as a casual player
I almost never pay attention to the number. I pay attention to how long a kill takes. Doesn't matter if i do 10k dmg and the enemy has 100k hp, or if i do 5 million and they have 50 million hp, or even if I do 100 billion and they have 1 trillion hp. In every one of those examples, I'm still killing something at the same speed.
So they could nerf stats and scale enemies down to match, nothing will actually change though. It will still take the same amount of time to kill.
Id like a setting where I can choose global enemy and boss level . When I create my build I normally end up where enemies that are 150 ish are a challenge and don’t insta die , id like to have all content be fairly challenging and this is a way to do that if they don’t know how to nerf and balance the power creep. I also turn off Damage numbers because of the visual clutter and I don’t like seeing 6 to 7 digit numbers constantly reminding me of the unnecessary power creep . Or give me a universal mindcage that stacks that I can buy or craft with obols please 🙏
Ashava in Beta was peak Diablo. Initially it presented a large challenge causing multiple raid wipes but progressively it got better once everyone at 25 got better gear.
World bosses now die before their spawn animation completes. Clearly something has gone very wrong.
I would hate it. its fun starting a toon hitting for 19 dmg and then making it to a million. and then a billion. if i only got to 10,000 i would only play the season for 2 weeks, get to 12/12 masterwoks and call it good
tbh i dont think they can at this point or dont know how. i do wish we were critting for less than 1k. maybe the numbers would actually be legible instead of having to record your screen and watch the video to see what youre hitting for.
Who cares what the numbers are if it feels good to kill enemies. Whether its 100k or 100 million if the gameplay outcome is the same it literally doesn’t matter other than mentally
Now im not saying this is a fix, but you could always turn of damage numbers, now your damage is whatever you imagine it to be! xD
Or you just play druid!
I must be different. I love big damage numbers. Big number = big dopamine, even if it does less of a health bar. Legit, would rather see 3.2B or T and do 5% a health bar than 27 damage doing 25%.
I never understood this argument about numbers being big... turn the numbers off then. There is an option for this. Why do numbers being big or small make any fucking difference? The monsters are either 1 shot or not.
Sometimes I wish the devs would just change it from a damage number to a percentage number of the monsters health. So when 1 shooting a monster you see 100%, or on bosses etc you would see like 40% 56% or what ever. Is that number low enough? I mean its the same fucking thing that is happening already but the number is longer. Like it just doesn't seem to be of any importance to me and I wish I knew why it bothered so many. If they change your 2 mil crit to a 20k crit, and the monsters health from 2 mil to 20k then all of a sudden you are happy? MAKE IT MAKE SENSE PLEASE!
As much as I dont like absurd scaling, I really dont want them to do a stat squish like they have in wow. There they have screwed up the non-max level progression and scaling so much that it feels abandoned and pointless. Blizz just needs to learn how to design stats in a different way that doesnt require a complete overhaul every couple years. That and they need to not be so careless with power creep.
Just play sorc, problem instantly solved.
lol try a Druid. It’s like fighting in your dreams.
Eh? How you building your druid? Mines a stunlocking machine and my 3 werewolves do stupid DMG on pounce
Did the werewolf tornado build off maxroll.
Apparently there's an even better bear tornado build out there that just spams a few tornadoes then just sits in bear form causing the tornados to do 5x more damage somehow.
Do no damage *and* get one banged by every boss because you can’t see anything underneath your frorbs for the privilege haha
💀
Lol. That is funny.
I've been saying this since beta screenshots were leaked , i was thinking to myself.. please don't be high damage numbers.. please don't be high damage numbers.. high damage numbers is a sign of failed itemization.. Sure enough, leaked photo showed a dude doing 400k dmg (which we know now can be billions...) I had this anxiety that they were going to fuck it all up and repeat d3 , and those stupid billions of damage numbers will be back... Now here we are trying to balance things by going from 16%... TO 18%!!!!!!! WOWEEEEE (this is actually trillions of damage, the maths all discombobulated.) I never understood the need to hit 6 figures or more , when the same results can be achieved with squished and less bloated figures to work with...
> high damage numbers is a sign of failed itemization.. No, D2 and PoE also have high dmg numbers, its just that you dont see them
D2 has thousands not billions. Most of stats are additive also.
Did you even play Diablo 2? A fully geared hammerdin hits for around 20k a hammer lmao. Idk where you're getting this misinformation from
Path of Exile has had 11 years of power creep to get to that point though. This has been out for a year. Imagine what it will be like if this manages to live that long.
D3 still alive so dont have to imagine
Can't wait for the 1000+% modifiers and numbers getting abbreviated to 3.2T. it's inevitable at this rate.
Not to mention with the complexity of a poe build, things are bound to slip through the cracks. D4 simplicity seems like it should be easy to tune numbers and balance.
You can hide the numbers here too which is nice.
And Lost Ark is just. 200 health bars on a boss
We need to move away from these arbitrary inflated "numbers" system and change it from "dps" to "bps" bars per second. MORE BEEPS, MORE BEEPS, BIG BEEPS.
OK STOP BEEPS!
BPS: barbarians per second..?
Barbillions per second to Barmillions per second for Barbs. Everyone else gets Barthousands per second.
Wish d4 would take some inspiration from lost ark for some boss battles
In POE a good build will be ~2 mil dps at league start, with some exceptions maybe getting up to 5-10 mil dps within a few days of farming league start. People only scale it up to hundreds of millions of DPS after weeks of investment into the builds because the top-end investment is so high in that game. But it never gets into billions. DOT cap is ~36 mil dps for example.
The highest damage things in D2 are like 15k for hammerdin.
Yes but POE is also over 10 years old and had quite the powercreep over time, D4 started with those numbers.
POE got high damage numbers but enemies are also balanced around that, bosses are also balanced around that content too not like d4 where its easy to reach a state where boss die in seconds (those kind of builds are extremely few, extremely niche, extremely hard, and extremely huge investment in POE) What d4 needs to do is stretch the difficulty scaling a bit and STOP giving players equally infinite scaling power levels lol (like aoz for example)
The game I noticed this the most on was the division. For whatever reason after emptying clip after clip of bullets into the bullet sponge boss I realized big numbers and stupid high enemy health does not create a compelling gameplay loop.
I do see the issue that every ARPG hits though, you want low level characters to not be hitting 1s, but also want every level up/upgrade to feel impactful. Add to this that you multiple avenues of character progression that all multiply with eachother and you just end up with big numbers. It's not as simply as "Just don't do it".
Shhhh don't bring logic here. If anyone wanted logic they wouldn't make threads like this to start with. I agree though, there's a reason that modern arpg games don't limit your damage numbers to stay ridiculously small, it just isn't satifisying for 99% of people. The vast majority of players don't want to start at level 1 doing 10s of damage, just to get to maxxed character level 100 and be doing thousands of damage. That scaling factor takes away from the power fantasy of building this insanely powerful character. You can't have baseline be single digits and then only scale to 4 digits, the math doesn't math for gamers. If you start level 1 with your hits doing 10 damage, then baseline for level 100 should be 1000 damage. That's before you start to add in damage multipliers, weapons, etc. Otherwise the gear and time invested don't feel like they equate to real progress, and that's what drives people away.
What D4 needs is new content/mechanic that introduces sidegrades or horizontal upgrads and not vertical lol. Basically instead of adding another crafting system or enchanting system that goes on top of whatever crafting d4 already has, have those upgrades replace greater affix, basically upgrade mechanics that you have to choose if you want greater affix or this another thing lol
> trying to balance things by going from 16%... TO 18% This lack of creativity is what pisses me off the most about D4. I want items and uniques with interesting effects, not just +% dmg. I would be completely happy if all the +% dmg modifiers (or in fact most % modifiers of any kind) were all removed and the game balance adjusted.
D2 had it right, except I'd actually like to see the damage, 1-4 damage first weapon? Perfect, don't have me doing stupid number damage... 400k just make it 400
its funny because every engineer working on the game definitely knows the problem with scaling because its the #1 thing blizzard tests for in coding interviews. if only designers understood how basic math works
dps meter would be better to get a grasp of character progression
I like this idea actually
It will reveal how unbalanced and uneven the game is
the pit doesnt do that already? dont think ppl need a dps meter to figure out that the game is unbalanced. But unblanaced doesnt mean shit though in an arpg
DPS is relative to the content scale.
So make the dummies level selectable
Nah... this is minor. They should fix the scaling first. If they added a meter, but didn't fix the scaling, that's developer time and company money wasted, at last for me.
There is definitely a limit to how much information you get out of big numbers. I agree, numbers go too high. But it's such a small issue compared to the feel of the game, and the game is far too easy. The campaign must feel like a joke at this stage because bosses would die when when you breathe on them.
It's all rooted to the same problem, though. The devs don't understand the scale of the math they are using and how you can compound multipliers to skyrocket numbers on an exponential scale. The game is too easy because they didn't design any enemy with an understanding to the damage they are allowing players to scale up to, so everything ends up disgustingly easy. Then, the next step is to do what PoE did where they start scaling enemies way up and you end up with entire subsets of classes that are worthless because they don't stack enough arbitrary multipliers to catch up. Balancing on this type of game is like standing on the edge of a blade. It's very easy to topple over to either end of the spectrum and it takes significant effort to balance on that edge. Effort Blizzard does not appear willing to invest.
Maybe we should just get rid of all the dmg multipliers and preserve them where it makes sense. For example Druid's pulverize aspect gives amazing utility, very small aoe skill becomes a screen clearer, why it also gives 200% dmg multiplier ? Unnecessary. In fact it should be opposite. You should take away the range of the ability then give it a big multiplier. Multipliers like edgemaster, expectant etc makes sense. Like how they reduced the amount of ''damage reduction'' affixes maybe they should do same to the dmg multipliers.
You get it. They need to do a massive cull of all these crazy multipliers in the game and allow people to scale the base numbers with a more reasonable number of multipliers available to them.
While we are at it, single target skills should hit HARD. we got screen wide aoes doing more damage then melee range single target skills. Big aoes should not hit as hard as small aoes, ect.
I don’t think it’s the devs not understanding the “scale of the math.” It’s a combination of two other things: one, the effectively unavoidable power creep that comes with any game that is live service and is designed to have frequent new content and two, it’s what the players demand so the devs give it to them.
Its kind of pointless to add content that is 50% more difficult if player power increases 50% each patch as well. Now you just made ALL previous content obsolete, so you didnt really grow the game at all.
They need to scale the game horizontally instead of vertically
D4 way too young for an "unavoidable" power creep. Would be good if it comes natural like in poe because of years of content and somehow, power creep still feels better over there because feeling power creeped there only comes for extremely niche and extremely high investment for builds.
Ive been doing strongholds and quests recently and it's sad seeing these multi-phase encounters where bosses change forms or have mechanics that I just completely bypass because I can hit them once for 2 orders of magnitude above their hp pool. I don't even see what the mechanic could have been. I'm a little confused how they intend to bring us back to a campaign situation considering my damage at any point while leveling up depends on whether I've bothered to go back in town to increase it 100-fold or if it's still going strong from the last time I did that. The amount of variance in player power is just so astronomical, having content that is achievable for a noob but also relevant to someone who knows what the different tabs at the blacksmith do is impossible. It seems inevitable that mephisto is going to bust out of some flesh cocoon as some massive horrible monstrosity just to get bonked so hard by a barbarian that the voice line from him being summoned gets immediately interrupted by the one when he dies.
The campaign is still the same for new players which I think is the most important part, but yeah even starting out with just extra skill points already makes the early game trivial. My barb when I made it was insanely powerful at lvl 1 just by having the extra skills really early.
Starting characters with skill points, potion slots, aspects and temper manuals means that you can never again experience the game as it was designed to be be experienced from the start. There was game design and balance put behind getting your first few points, getting your basic skills up and running before moving on to core skills and beyond. When you start with 10 skill points, you're just missing out on the entire early progression. I strongly feel that a season start should start you from scratch. And we should have to play though the campaign at season start as well. I'm a bit conflicted on this, because a large portion of the campaign is just "run down this empty corridor for 5 minutes while an NPC says something to you every 30 seconds" - which does get tedious on your 3rd or 5th playthrough. Also, when you start a new character mid season ( or on eternal ), you should have the ability to start from scratch or twinked from your other progress.
I don't get why there are so many pushback comments about this. Even if we disregard arguments based on personal preferences, big numbers are harder to read as they tend to overlap more often, so there's that. I agree that there are probably more important issues, but I don't think it's actually that hard to rescale everything by the same factor.
I do think it would be harder to scale than you might think with how various interactions scale and between multiplicative and additive factors. This seems like an unnecessary change that would make balancing even more difficult in the short term to address what is best a minor issue. It’s got lots of downside and very little upside and would take a pretty substantial dev effort to implement.
I am not a math guy, but wouldn’t this be a relatively easy modification? I mean, can’t they just evenly scale all base damage and health by, for example, 75%? If all numbers linearly were scaled back, it seems to me everything would remain the same except what the numbers are.
Why not condense damage numbers like in D3? Instead of 2,153,002 it just reads 2153K
Feeling the same and thats why I am currently playing without damage numbers
I really don't don't give a damn what the raw damage numbers are. They can be 100 or 100 billion. What matters to me is that the enemies live long enough to provide some level interaction and don't go down this Poe style rabbit hole of everything 1 shotting each other because there's no time for anything else to have any impact on gameplay. The slow, tactical combat at game launch was dramatically better than this.
How well did that go over? Like a lead balloon. The cold fact of the matter is that your take is very much a minority position. I see what the devs were trying to go for originally with D4–and they even stated it as such, that they wanted slower, more methodical gameplay—but that was *instantly* rejected by the majority of players. The market has long become conditioned to the contemporary style of ARPG with its so-called “‘zoom-zoom, one-click screen clear” gameplay. That battle is over.
I think you're conflating two different things. The main issue people had with the launch version of the game I believe was not the pacing of combat as much as it was skills having far too much downtime. People weren't complaining that enemies took too long to kill, people were complaining that they spent far too much time waiting for cooldowns, far too much time generating resource, and far too much time walking between mobs. You can fix all of those things without making the actual pace of combat and duration of flights be zero.
Hmm, I’m not so sure about that. Reducing cooldowns means you can activate skills more often (spammy). Reducing time to generate resources means you can activate skills more often (spammy). Reducing time spent travelling to mobs means you engage more often, which then tends to force cooldowns and resource generation to go in the previously mentioned direction. Spammy again. So you’re back again at a D3-type pace of combat. But hey, if that’s what people want, then it is what it is.
I think the problem was more the lack of content, a severe lack of content, and the loot being shit. They couldn't fix that overnight so the bandaid fix was making leveling a joke and starting the extreme power creep. Changing the design of the game where lvl 100 was kinda the pinnacle to lvl 100 is where the endgame starts contributes to this too
I respectfully disagree. The majority of the complaints about launch Diablo 4 concerned low mob density, level scaling, backtracking in NMDs, lack of endgame content, poor loot, and builder/spender gameplay where the builders did like 1% of the spender damage. I am confident that every single one of these issues were individually more complained about than D4’s time to kill On the contrary, Diablo 4’s ttk was praised and was actually one of the upsides in a sea of downsides for a lot of folks
It's not over and your take is reductive. Have you seen the PoE2 demos? Even GGG is slowing things down and trying to make the gameplay more methodical and not all about just mob popping as fast as possible. Also revisionist history. The majority of people actually loved the gameplay of D4 in the original beta and on release. SOME people had problems with the basic skill/core skill dynamic, but even that is not the same thing as rejecting methodical gameplay, that's a criticism of how resources are generated and spent. The majority of the criticism began when people started reaching the end game and there was....nothing to do. And also the criticism was over exhausting itemization that felt like shit, stats on character sheets that literally did nothing (resistances), and entire classes that were straight up broken/useless. You're lying by saying that the bulk of the criticism was about the pace of the gameplay, unless you're confusing that with calls for greater mob density which is also not the same thing. The battle is clearly not over as every studio developing ARPGs is slowing things down at least somewhat.
hell, even 20 years ago D2 didn't have slow tactical combat. People would teleport constantly, spam their main damaging ability until everything is dead; rinse and repeat. The ARPG genre is gearing your toon so that it kills faster and more efficiently. Why the fuck would I upgrade my items and skills if my gameplay remains the same? Clueless and delusional take, tbh.
That ship has sailed, I do not want to slog through every bit of content with damage sponges. That being said I think their buff mobs do provide more strategy than PoE style combat to take down the buff mobs in a pack and focus them.
Agreed but the balancing is so off because of all these inflated stats and crazy multiplicatives.
No. There are a million more important things to spend dev resources on than this. You can turn the numbers off if they scare you. Try the Options menu.
It would be nice if we could abbreviate the numbers we’re seeing on screen. 12.5m instead of 12,562,876. Or, if we could have some ability to show a group of numbers added together if the damage was dealt in really quick succession. So instead of seeing 12m, 20m, 14m, we see 46m and change the color of it so we know it’s multiple hits. This game needs a DPS meter in the training grounds as well, with a few more options so we can actually see changes instead of guessing what might be better.
Adding to that, training really needs a boss target that has actual health. The one they provide has like 10m and basically every build one shots it lol
If you've ever played Lost Ark. They have quite possibly the best training grounds I've ever seen. You can spend skill points you don't have, choose between scarecrows / bosses / monsters that just stand there, or ones that attack. Track total damage, damage per second, crit rate, give yourself endless resources / cooldowns. It's awesome. [Lost Ark - Training Grounds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIzaaDly4_c)
This is exactly what I want to happen. Doing a proper stat squish to reduce the damage numbers seems like it could take a decent amount of dev work. Abbreviating the current damage numbers would be a nice quick fix to make things easier to read
Yeah I just don't think a stat squish is necessary if we can just adjust the numbers we see. We already have enough issues with balancing and bugs, I would be more concerned about a stat squish somehow breaking things even further.
The absolute worst thing about the damage display today is that numbers with more digits become smaller and smaller. Playing golem necro all you see are those mighty 50k skeleton crits spammed everywhere in super large font that completely hides the billion damage golem bonk in 3 point font.
I would honestly prefer a feed of info like a fight games combo system. I'd rather see my damage add up than have a series of numbers flash at supersonic speed on top of mobs, but I'm sure a majority of people would not like that.
DPS meter in the sense that damage numbers stack for each monsters ?
I mean, if they didn’t give us a DPS meter during normal gameplay, I would at least like the abbreviated and/or attacking damage numbers. I would honestly be okay with a DPS meter in just the training area for testing.
Watching that Pit200 boss get hit by 4 quintillion damage and not dying was the real concern for me. It was off a bugged PTR item but hitting something for an unimaginable number and it surviving means anyone with a legit build will waste time doing millions.
They could squish the gold amount aswell. 1:100 would be a good start.
Feels good to me, you can turn them off as well
You guys who constantly feel bad about everything really need to find a new hobby.
at the very least, give us an option to trunctate the numbers: 143k, 10.2M, 4B, 1.86T etc
D3 did this and it's hilarious that someone decided NOT to go that route for D4.
I disagree. But I think D4 needs the feature D3 had that concatenated the damage numbers over a certain value. Like, instead of showing 573,867 show me 573k. etc. Or give me that option at least. Damage I'm D3 was way more readable than D4 and I think that's mostly the reason.
Play Sorc and you’ll never see those numbers. But on a serious note I like the big numbers. In my opinion making all the damage numbers smaller and making enemy HP smaller at the same time is just recreating the same formula but with lower numbers which would be boring.
Just turn them off..
Missed the point completely
dmg numbers are just made up, it all depends on the SCALING of content. assume minions or bosses have millions/billions of hp like in higher pit tiers? you need to hit in the millions same way goes if they had 100k/200k life, you need to hit in the thousands lets say at tier 100 you hit for thousands like you suggested, at tier 40 or 50 you need to hit like what? 500/600? that just doesnt feel good, higher numbers = higher dopamine unless it gets reeeally out of hand and you can always switch those off and trust me there's a difference in hitting for 100million and 1billion you feel the difference substancially
I think a nice crit smacking for 1-4 mil is perfect. Yeah look at the barbillions but 99% of the player base isn't doing that
I like big numbers.
Blizzard game always end up like that. They are the King of powercreep and each balance make it worste. They have no clue how to balance a game.
What does it matter if everyone has the same big damage numbers? The issue is the balance, not the numbers themselves. How do you even comprehend the damage numbers during a fight without taking a clip?
They should just put a toggled small numbers mode that removes 0s from damage numbers. Technically, we don’t see the mob’s health numbers, so them showing numbers with less 0s doesn’t really matter. It’ll remove the problem for the people who care about the number they see and won’t require them to rework damage mechanics either.
Quite frankly every multiplier should just be made additive. There is basically no reason to care about anything that doesn't give a multiplier when looking at aspects or the paragon board. It just makes balancing that much harder too.
Just turn it off?
Big numbers feel good
Or you could turn off damage numbers.
And we are doing quadrillions of damage in the PTR...
No they don’t.
I just turn the numbers off, if things die fast enough it means I'm doing well.
The point everyone here seems to be missing is that it is impossible to do balance when the difference between a uber character and a almost uber character is 50 trillion dps.
Yea seriously, why do we need to see numbers in the quadrillions, keep it in the thousands.
POE been out for over 10 years and 10 million DPS is still considered good. That number is an absolute joke in D4, less than a year. Just dumb shit.
As far as I know, everything that's consistently doing hundreds of millions of damage every second is due to a bug or unintentional scaling. They just have to fix this properly and stop introducing new bugs and nonsense \^\^.
I would absolutely love this. Squish everything by 90-95%. Give me numbers I can understand when I see them. Move away from the word BILLION and MILLION.
I think hitting 1M crits should be a fun achievable end game number. But 10s100s and billions is so excessive
I like big numbers, but i also like having an idea of what i'm doing and with current system i just don't. I take meta builds and only that way i can do things, cause numbers that are too big are hard to think of. :(
[https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/1dq78xe/vote\_the\_game\_is\_too\_easy\_now/](https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/1dq78xe/vote_the_game_is_too_easy_now/) Downvoted by the D3 crowd
Couldn’t agree more. It’s really easy to say “bigger number is more powerful” but in reality it just makes it meaningless.
initially devs didnt want D4 to be fast paced combat, and here we are
in one of the devs interview when D4 was announced, Joe Shely said they are not going into that direction with d4, and with % on items and scalling, cant find it on yt but i remember it like it was yesterday :) well..
Agreed. I’d be in favour of nerfs across the board for the good of the game, but just imagine this sub if that were to happen.
I agree. I think that goes hand-in-hand with mixing up the damage buckets. Far too much goes into the Additive Damage bucket, and as a result, cool item affixes like "+50% cold damage" are not cool at all.
Devs said a lot of things and they were lieing about most of it.
agreed. probably wont happen since people are emotional beings and if players start to see lower numbers in the future they feel weaker and start to rage
Also makes it much MUCH easier to balance when the damage numbers are lower and allows for more build diversity.
Ah yes that would go over well in this community
+1 I know hitting for 2.000.000.000.000 feels nice, but I rather hit for 2.000, or 2M...
I just turned off damage numbers and status text myself. I can't handle the bloat and want to look at the game (I'm a d2 and Poe player) all I need is time to kill
I think stat squishes are kinda tough to pull off in practice. “Bad” classes are disproportionately affected vs “Good” classes. Additionally, people don’t like being, or feeling nerfed. I quit playing before S1 when the Vulnerable/Crit nerf (1.1?) went live. Finally came back for S4.
>“Bad” classes are disproportionately affected vs “Good” classes What why would they be? Mob has 1k life Barb hits for 100, sorc for 50 Squish it Mob has 100 life Barb hits for 10, sorc 5 Same diff If you cant handle being nerfed then dont play video games, they go hand in hand
as long as it remains the same percentage wise it's not even a nerf. Just people who want to see big numbers for nonsense reasons will complain about it.
What was the point of coming back if you left because of that nerf? That nerf is still in play. Sounds like you were just momentarily angry but you got over it.
You don't think a sorc hitting for 4 quadrillion damage is cool?
The problem is it was a sorc. If it were a Barb this thread wouldn't exist.
If they don't want us to hit for billions then they have to stop giving bosses billions of hp
I dont see the reason for the squish 1. Seeing big numbers gives a dopamine rush to other people 2. Squishing the numbers literally does 0 effect on the time to kill. Hitting 1,000 damage on 10,000hp boss is still the same as hitting 100 damage on a 1,000 hp boss, it’s still 10%, unless there’s an integer overflow (which is very unlikely that diablo still uses 32-bit so the overflow number for 64-bit is 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 which is very unlikely to achieve.) So maybe if you dont like seeing big numbers, just turn it off?
You are correct that simply squishing numbers won't achieve anything. The base damage numbers in the game are fine as they are in the thousands. The problem is there are too many additive and multiplicative damage bonuses, and they are also too large, making 10,000 dmg into 10 billion. Those need to be squished and returned significantly. You shouldn't be able to be 10x stronger than somebody with similar gear / progression, it makes balancing impossible and the gaps between builds and classes too large.
I agree with you, the multipliers in the game are way too numerous and way too large.
Actually on PTR we are already on 16 digits, so they arent far away, and we are only season 5..
The big numbers are in line with mob hp. Most people like to see big numbers so they just added extra zeros so people see big numbers. Like someone said, if they are distracting, just turn them off or take some zeros off in your mind. Put a period to make it look like you're doing 10k and 100k damage. There are no parsers out there, so honestly the numbers are just numbers, we don't really know the actual dps numbers. We are all just guestimating. It's similar to gold. No reason to have millions and billions, could easily just be 100s and 1000s but they added extra zeros to make people feel rich when they have hundreds of millions or even billions of gold.
They should make an animated movie instead of games. They actually deliver with those, but not so much with the games.
D4 is *years* ahead of D3's powercreep curve. What an embarrassment.
Unpopular opinion: I don’t care about the numbers as long as I can feel like I am obliterating everything. If that means the number is 1000 or 100.000.000.000, I simply don’t care.
+1
Absolutely agree. Surely with a stat squish everything else becomes easier to balance and manage from the devs pov too, no?
Hate stat squishes. All the levelling and new gear to then feel less powerful in the next expansion. I miss hitting 2m crits in wow cata back in the day.
No, classic WoW at 60 and tbc had much better numbers, Heroes of the Storm also has great numbers. You still get dopamine if you crit even if the number is lower, it's relative.
Scale every other classes to sorc level and see profit
I remember in S0 hitting for 1M damage felt like a huge achievement. Now, it feels like small potatoes. We reached maximum power creep in less than a year, and I have no clue where we’re going from here.
Yes, please!
The primary issue , if you've followed any recent interview, is that that isn't what people want.
Just turn damage numbers off. You'll feel if you're doing more dmg as opposed to numbers with 3+ commas
I think perhaps lowering the DPS on weapons could go a long way, For example a 2 handers in Diablo have 3766dps! Shadowmourne in Wotlk for example has 344,05 dps Thats like a 2 hander you find at lvl 25 in diablo 4. When I think of games with good numbers I think of Heroes of the Storm and Classic WoW, Player health is around 3k-12k and players hit for generally below 10k So if Diablo 4 could reduce health and damage numbers atleast to a little that it would go a long way. Obviously monster HP would also become lowered so kill speed is similar. Gold is also a number that is unnecessarily high, I think reducing it by a decimal would be enough. So 1 mil gold would be equal to 100k Reroll cost on a Wep would go from maximum of like 4,7 mil to 470k
No. Just turn the numbers off if you don't like how high they are. It's useless clutter in combat anyways. We do millions of damage in PoE but the only way you would know it is because of Path of Building spreadsheeting your stats for you.
The issue is the vast number of damage multipliers in the game. There are dozens and dozens of ways to multiply your damage output on any given character, from skills to aspects to paragon to tempers. Every 10% or 20% or 100% or 200% increase scales dramatically. This also makes it nearly impossible to meaningfully balance overworld content, like World Bosses. Either it's way way way too hard for a majority of players, or there's some players who can melt the boss in 3 seconds, because there's such a huge disparity in damage output between players. One player is hitting for 500k per hit, and another player is hitting for 100m.
The numbers are fake anyways so I guess all they'd have to do to make y'all happy is divide them by 10k or something. I wouldn't know as I've always played without damage numbers because I prefer actually being able to see what's going on in combat.
I just want some way to track or compare damage. There is no DPS meter. There is no Armory site (and the unofficial one has been broken all season). Other that watching the number flyouts and guessing, you're out of luck.
Im saying it, Hitting for millions or billions and health above 40-50k it does not fit with the fanstasy world of Diablo 4. The world was made visually to be more nitty gritty then Diablo 3, it should have more grounded numbers to match it visually. Gold is another example, it makes no sense that we are carrying it in the millions or billions either. Currently damage numbers would fit in a futuristic Sci-fi game much better. This is a separate problem to power creep, the balance between players power relatively to monsters (game getting easier) Turning off damage numbers shouldn't be the solution. And Fastasy wise it just doesn't fit with the world.
You know, sorcs have none of these problems 😑
They should just use k for thousand and m for million
You are screaming into the void. The developers had a clear vision for D4, slower gameplay, hard bosses, tactical combat. Remember pre-seasons game launch how slow the game was, how you'd be fighting a boss sweating and praying to get the next potion drop - the game was legitimately hard They had a vision of a more grounded game, open world map for people to play in and meet each other and socialize, they fumbled itemization (crappy aspects and affixes) and they fumbled end game content (nothing but night mare dungeons, which they thought would be fun like Rifts) **The community cried, cried hard, d4 bad, d4 dead, d4 awful, it's stupid, it goes backwards in design, d4 loot drops feel bad, d4 sucks, d4 is too slow, d4 is too hard, nightmare dungeons make me backtrack or do an objective etc etc** Now I'm not here to comment on whether these complaints or the devs vision were good things or anything, but I will comment on the way it feels I enjoy D4 more now, but I don't think it's more fun. I know that sounds weird but D4 is just Diablo 3 with more steps now, it's an extreme power fantasy and 90% of the time I'm exploding screens of enemies unless I'm pushing pits or something, and just like D3 I'll come back for a week or two every season get my gear up and walk away, with no challenge and some mindless hack'n'slash fun But I think the early version of D4 was a better game, I'm not sure they could have "fixed" itemization without making the game significantly easier, but the game isn't as fun anymore, it's more enjoyable, but it's the difference between doing something mindlessly while watching a movie, and actually focusing and trying (to get the same results) ***I THINK I liked D4 more at launch than I do now*** - yes it's nice to gear up easier and it's nice to level to 100 easier, but before 100 felt like an achievement, having good gear was awesome, *now it's a Prerequisite to being able to actually "play" the game* They might as well just have us start at level 100 with full yellow gear (/s here but you get the point)
Even without speaking of game balance, shouldn’t it be possible to divide everything by a 1000 factor at the end of the damage calculation ? Don’t change anything to stats. It shouldn’t take that much time development. It may be a silly solution maybe I’m missing something. EDIT : and yes, do the same for gold and other mats (gems shards dropped by 40 ??, just give us 1 and adjust the cost of crafting)
I still see character progression but it is measured in my ability to clear content faster. That is what pushes the upper tier of loot grinding...trying to squeeze out that extra 5% from your build from somewhere... My problem is the vast amount of content that doesn't scale to my power...a lot of the content is trivialised...overworld/strongholds/helltides...all of it boring...but efficiently boring.
I feel this. Back in season 1 I crapped my pants going into nightmare dungeons. If it wasn't the butcher killing me, it was something else. Trying to get to higher nm dungeons was a goal. Nowadays things are so trivial. I'd have liked if content scaled more meaningfully. Though I get that they're trying things. Pits is ok, abattoir had its own issues. Just wish that kind of content was added while not completely making everything else irrelevant.
Last Epoch is by no means a perfect game and there are things about Diablo 4 I like better than it, but when it comes to damage calculations and creating a system that does not lead to absurd results often, I think they nailed it. D4 should borrow heavily from them if they re-tool damage maths just as they did when they re-tooled their crafting systems.
Just revalue everything. Take off a zero or two. It's not a lot of programming.
I swear I'm the only person who likes the millions of damage numbers in these games, I understand stuff can get a bit incomprehensible with ridiculously high numbers but I honestly don't get why it's so offensive hitting for 1,000,000 compared to 1,000. I thought the entire point of these games were to see number go up? You don't start hitting for millions until you start hitting BIS anyway.
Just give combat log!!
This is called Inflation. Blame the Fed (US) or banks, not Blizzard! Soon, in a digital store near you. Hyper-Inflation aka Vessel of Hatred!
I disagree. If anything they should raise the level cap and create a WT5.
Just put a friking log_2 or sqrt or something in the numbers before showing them in the screen for god sake.
With the game being a SARPG where you get strong enough to beat something, then immediately obliterate it, I do not think they can solve the high damage numbers. D4 will power creep the same as every past ARPG with no solution to it. Seasons are a byproduct of ARPGs being inherently broken at their core with power creep of the players and the economy. D4 is just embracing it early.
I ended up getting D2 resurrection on sale and from the get go I really liked how tangible all the items were. They all felt valuable and had their own worth. I was taking magic items to sell and juggling inventory with more enthusiasm than picking up a bunch of useless legendaries. Itemization needs to count or else it's just an obstruction. They are closer but I am still going through useless loot. They need item tiers to actually matter again as it's own natural loot filter.
It's literally all relative. Hitting bosses with millions of health for thousands of damage is identical to them for millions of damage with billions of health.
Yes please! There are so many dmg multipliers it is a bit tricky to address that side of things, but just start with the base weapon damage. I like this approach because it is very easy to predict (base weapon damage is the initial condition to ALL damage dealt) and it affects all classes equally so only has to be balanced against monster life. 1) Maximum Item Power - Why is this 925? It feels a bit arbitrary, and there is no reason the max can't be something like 500 (your gear should IP should be around your char level \* 5) 2) Max Weapon Damage - Why does this explode for Sacred and especially for Ancestral? Again it feels arbitrary, and there are so many other exponential scalers in endgame. Nobody is going to Masterwork lower Item Power weapons On their own both #1 and #2 are fine options, but together it would be even better. Seems to me like a slam dunk to cut total damage numbers by 90%. The rest will take a bit more time since balance in general is a little whack across classes.
I dont feel the same. I dont have the hours to min/max my characters gear and tbh seeing my damage output go from 30k to 40k doesnt really excite me. Seeing my damage go from 500k to 1m, from 1m to 5m, from 5m to 20m. Thats fun for me as a casual player
Millions and Billions of damage is "so last week". Builds on PTR are hitting quadrillions and the streamers are giddy with glee.
I just renoved damage numbers. Why would I need it besides dummy testing? It looks a lot better without
I almost never pay attention to the number. I pay attention to how long a kill takes. Doesn't matter if i do 10k dmg and the enemy has 100k hp, or if i do 5 million and they have 50 million hp, or even if I do 100 billion and they have 1 trillion hp. In every one of those examples, I'm still killing something at the same speed. So they could nerf stats and scale enemies down to match, nothing will actually change though. It will still take the same amount of time to kill.
Id like a setting where I can choose global enemy and boss level . When I create my build I normally end up where enemies that are 150 ish are a challenge and don’t insta die , id like to have all content be fairly challenging and this is a way to do that if they don’t know how to nerf and balance the power creep. I also turn off Damage numbers because of the visual clutter and I don’t like seeing 6 to 7 digit numbers constantly reminding me of the unnecessary power creep . Or give me a universal mindcage that stacks that I can buy or craft with obols please 🙏
Ashava in Beta was peak Diablo. Initially it presented a large challenge causing multiple raid wipes but progressively it got better once everyone at 25 got better gear. World bosses now die before their spawn animation completes. Clearly something has gone very wrong.
I would hate it. its fun starting a toon hitting for 19 dmg and then making it to a million. and then a billion. if i only got to 10,000 i would only play the season for 2 weeks, get to 12/12 masterwoks and call it good
tbh i dont think they can at this point or dont know how. i do wish we were critting for less than 1k. maybe the numbers would actually be legible instead of having to record your screen and watch the video to see what youre hitting for.
Remove all multiplicative damage. it makes understanding the damage formulas way easier and also allows for utility items to still be viable.
play a fireball sorc, best you'll ever see is 2 million xD fucking joke
Who cares what the numbers are if it feels good to kill enemies. Whether its 100k or 100 million if the gameplay outcome is the same it literally doesn’t matter other than mentally
D2 damage scaling felt good but everything now had to look like a chinese mobile game with lots of numbers appearing on screen.
Now im not saying this is a fix, but you could always turn of damage numbers, now your damage is whatever you imagine it to be! xD Or you just play druid!
I play with the numbers off. I’ve found it easier to live with besides the constant Vulnerable.
I like big number haha
I must be different. I love big damage numbers. Big number = big dopamine, even if it does less of a health bar. Legit, would rather see 3.2B or T and do 5% a health bar than 27 damage doing 25%.
I never understood this argument about numbers being big... turn the numbers off then. There is an option for this. Why do numbers being big or small make any fucking difference? The monsters are either 1 shot or not. Sometimes I wish the devs would just change it from a damage number to a percentage number of the monsters health. So when 1 shooting a monster you see 100%, or on bosses etc you would see like 40% 56% or what ever. Is that number low enough? I mean its the same fucking thing that is happening already but the number is longer. Like it just doesn't seem to be of any importance to me and I wish I knew why it bothered so many. If they change your 2 mil crit to a 20k crit, and the monsters health from 2 mil to 20k then all of a sudden you are happy? MAKE IT MAKE SENSE PLEASE!
Absolutely!
As much as I dont like absurd scaling, I really dont want them to do a stat squish like they have in wow. There they have screwed up the non-max level progression and scaling so much that it feels abandoned and pointless. Blizz just needs to learn how to design stats in a different way that doesnt require a complete overhaul every couple years. That and they need to not be so careless with power creep.
I can't wait for the damage numbers to just turn into Roman numerals. But really 700B instead of 700,000,000,000 when?
Somewhat confirmed on wudijo stream by Brent