Optimizing Offensive Stats

In Diablo 4, there are certain stats that can be deceiving, as their interactions with other stats and Aspects are not always well-defined.

Delve into Offensive Stats and shed light on their interactions, enabling you to optimize your character and unleash their full potential to get yourself closer to taking down the Echo of Lilith Uber Boss.

Understanding Offenses in Diablo 4

The way the Offensive stats scale in Diablo 4 is quite confusing at first. Some stats scale additively while others scale multiplicatively. But, before we get into the math behind damage bonuses and other modifiers, we must understand how our Base Damage is calculated.

Base Damage

The Base Damage of a skill is scaled off of the damage value on your weapon. If you hover over a skill and read the tooltip, the skill will say that it deals x% damage. To calculate your Base Damage, simply multiply the skill percentage by your weapon's DPS.

Base Damage = skill% * Weapon Damage

Damage Modifier Categories

The way we scale our damage in Diablo 4 is through Aspects, Paragon, and affixes on our gear. In order to maximize our damage, we need to understand how damage modifiers are split into categories.

Every modifier in the game either falls into a category with other modifiers or acts as its own unique multiplier.

Damage Formula

Final damage is calculated by multiplying your base damage against five categories of modifier. Each category is set to "1" by default, so you will add any additional modifiers to one.

For example: from different items, you have two critical modifiers, one at 26.2% and one at 11%. This means your total critical strike modifier is:

1 + .262 + .11 = 1.372

Once you've calculated your total critical strike modifier, multiply that into your base damage and move on to the next category!

That's all there is to it. The only exceptions:

• vulnerable damage always gets an extra 20% boost (so use 1.2 instead of 1 as the default value)
• some damage modifiers act as their own category (in the Green section below). These are added to the default value (1) and multiplied into base damage, they are not added together first.

For the math-oriented readers, here is the formula, color-coded for each section.

General Damage Modifiers (Gray)

The General Damage Modifier category consists of your conditional damage modifiers. These conditions can be class specific or generic. All of the bonuses from these stats are added together since they are all in the same category.

Vulnerable Damage (Purple)

Vulnerable Damage is the strongest modifier in the game. You can get incredibly high numbers of this stat and it is in its own category, meaning it is it's own multiplier. At the current state of the game, if your build does not have consistent Vulnerable uptime and a high Vulnerable Damage multiplier, it simply can not compete with builds that do. Try to fit this into any build for a massive damage bonus.

Critical Strike Damage (Orange)

Critical Strike Damage modifiers also exist in their own category. The base value for Critical Strike Damage is 50%, meaning Critical Strikes will do an additional 50% damage. You can also look at this as Critical Strikes deal 150% damage ((1+.5)*100).

As you can see, my Necromancer has 126.2% Critical Strike Damage as well as an additional 11.0% Critical Strike Damage with Bone Skills. Since my main damage skill is Bone Spear, Critical Strikes with this ability will deal 137.2% damage since the Critical Strike Damage with Bone Skills 'Stacks with your normal Critical Strike Damage.' Since they exist in the same category, you can add the values together.

This is the sum of all flat Critical Strike Damage modifiers that my character has. This does not include any conditional Critical Strike Damage Modifiers.

This is the bonus that we get for Critical Strike Damage with Bone Skills. These are labelled seperately in the character sheet but can simply be added together when you try to calculate your Critical Strike Damage.

Critical Strike Modifiers:

Core Stat (Blue)

The percent damage increase from your core stat is also its own category. As you can see, with 367 Intelligence, this grants me a 36.7% damage buff.

Separate Multipliers (Green)

The last category we simply call Separate Multipliers. These can come from Aspects and Passives and are usually seen with an [x] in their tooltips.

This Key Passive states that for every essence above 50, you will deal 1%[x] increased damage. In the formula above, this would fit into the category highlighted in green. This is it's own modifier and you can see even if you only have 100 Essence, this is effectively 50% bonus damage if you cast at maximum Essence.

This passive can go up to 18%[x] Critical Strike Damage against Vulnerable enemies. Even though this deals with Critical Strike Damage and Vulnerable enemies, it surprisingly falls into it's own category, making it incredibly powerful.

This is an example of an aspect that also acts as it's own seperate modifier. You can see how stacking all of these seperate multipliers can give incredible power to your character.

Conclusion

Understanding all of these modifiers and how they interact with each other is key to min-maxing your character. Modifiers that exist in their own categories are much higher priority than the modifiers in the General category. Trying to get items that roll a modifier from each is the greatest way to power up your character. Here is an example of what to look for:

If I were able to roll off Damage to Slowed Enemies for Critical Strike Damage, the item would have 4 modifiers all from separate categories. Keep this in mind while you grind away and chase those perfect rolls.