Diablo 4: How to Maximize Your Damage Guide (2024)

The guide breaks down all of the ways to scale your Damage in Diablo 4. This includes getting the biggest numbers possible, and what factors play into achieving that.

Like any ARPG, there’s no moment better in Diablo 4 than when your character can just dive into a group of enemies, or launch a powerful skill and just obliterate everything on-screen in an instant. It’s one of the most satisfying moments you can have with any game in this genre, and we’re going to show you exactly how to reach that power.

How Damage Works in Diablo 4

Everyone should know what damage is on a basic level, but there’s a lot more to this than you’d initially think. There are a ton of additional nuance that makes damage complicated in Diablo 4. We can best represent Damage as simply the sum of all damage bonuses, but how we acquire them and how they stack is where the tricky part comes in.

To represent Damage more accurately, we can use the following formula to approximate damage:

This likely leaves you with multiple questions, like “What is Base Damage?”, or more likely “What is a Bucket?” Well, let’s jump into that and talk about these effects.

What is Base Damage

Simply put, Base Damage is the result of taking your weapon’s Damage value and applying your skill’s damage ratio to it. This would look something like this:

WeaponDMG is the number shown on your weapon. This is shown as a DPS value, which is a result of the same Weapon Damage value, with your Attack Speed modifiers applied to it. For the sake of Simplicity though, you can just use the same DPS value shown on a weapon as a rough estimate. If you want an exact number to calculate with, this can be found in the Offensive section if your stat page.

SkillDMG is the Damage value listed in the stat sheet of your character screen. This is fairly easy to understand. On the other hand, SkillBonus is slightly more complicated but not entirely.

SkillBonus includes added damage multipliers or bonuses to the Skill itself, like those bonuses granted from upgrading the skill or art of the skill itself, as shown with Blood Surge. This work by increasing the damage ratio of the skill, before any other factors come into play.

Keep in mind some Skill Upgrades will instead fall into the Multiplicative Bucket. This is indicated by being displayed as xValue%, rather than Value%.

What about Proc Effects or effects like Thorns? Well, in those cases, the only values that matter are the values shown for the triggered effects or your total thorns. They are completely unaffected by both your Weapon or any skills you are using, barring damage multipliers

So hopefully now that base Damage is cleared up, what about those Buckets we mentioned.

What are Damage Buckets

Damage Buckets are the five categories of damage bonuses available in Diablo 4. These Buckets consist of Additive damage, Multiplicative Damage, Vulnerable, Critical Damage, and Attribute Bonus

As shown in the drawn-out equation at the start, each of these Damage Buckets are multiplicative with each other. Most buckets outside of Additive Damage and Multiplicative Damage are just a single stat.

However, the stats found in the same bucket are additive with each other. This means stacking a ton of bonuses from the same bucket will yield lower damage compared to using multiple buckets, even with lower values.

So let’s talk about each of these buckets, what they include, and how likely you will be to use them.

Attribute Bonus

Attribute Bonus is one of the few buckets that is a standalone, multiplicative bonus. This consists of the Skill Damage granted by your Class’s main stat. Most classes will generally end up wanting to stack a lot of their main stat, as well as stats in general for both this bonus, in addition to others.

For Barbarians this would come from Strength, for Rogues this is from Dexterity, for Druids it’s Willpower, and for Necromancers and Sorcerers, it would be from Intelligence.

Critical Strike

Critical Strikes are another commonly used bucket, and also only consists of a single value. The base value shown below will apply as a Multiplicative bonus to damage. This cannot be increased, outside of any effects that say otherwise.

As of Season 2, the Critical Damage Affix now only contributes to the Additive Damage Pool. This means that without a high Critical Strike Chance, this stat will be overall less valuable, being just another conditional Additive Damage.

Vulnerable

Vulnerable is another source of damage increase, applied as a debuff on enemies. The base value shown below is the amount of this stat that is a Multiplicative bonus to damage. This cannot be increased, outside of any effects that say otherwise.

As of Season 2, the Vulnerable Damage Affix now only contributes to the Additive Damage Pool. This means that without a consistent way to apply Vulnerable, this stat will be overall less valuable, being just another conditional Additive Damage.

Overpower

Overpower is a very niche damage option, being a fixed 3% chance to trigger outside of certain effects.

Overpower was also adjust in Season 2, where it now has a Multiplicative component, as well as new scaling. We’ll show the full formula below, but just note that it’s 2% Damage per 1% Base Life you have in either Bonus Life of Fortify.

See Also

Diablo 4: Rogue skill tree, all attacks and abilities

The Multiplicative part of Overpower is once again the base value shown above. All increases via the Overpower Damage Affix will be added to the Additive Damage Pool.

Additive Damage

Additive Damage, or AddDMG as we listed it in the formula above, is the sum of nearly all damage bonuses you could possibly add to a character. These bonuses are all fairly generic, ranging from the super generic All Damage to things like Damage while Berserking or Damage to Poisoned Enemies.

Every Class in Diablo 4 has access to several of these stats through gear and other bonuses from their Passive Tree and Paragon Boards. No matter the source, these effects will pool together into a single multiplier to your damage.

The Key way to tell if a stat fall in this bucket or the Multiplicative damage bucket is whether or not the tooltip for the effect reads as Value% or xValue%. Value% is Additive, while xValue% is multiplicative instead!

As of Season 2, this now Includes the Critical Strike Damage, Vulnerable Damage, and Overpower Damage as conditional Additive Damage sources. They no longer scale their respective multiplicative bonuses!

Multiplicative Damage

Multiplicative Damage, listed as MultiDMG in our formula, are the effects that apply globally, which means unless stated otherwise can affect each other across certain skill bonuses. Most of these are found as Aspects or Passives.

Much like Additive Damage, every class in Diablo 4 has access to this bucket in several ways. The most common sources that get added to this multiplier are Skill Tree passives and Legendary Aspects. However, unlike additive bonuses, these will all stack multiplicatively, meaning they can scale your damage much higher! This also applies to effects that multiply other bonuses as well, like Critical or Vulnerable Damage.

The way we are typically able to tell if a bonus is Multiplicative is by looking for the tooltip for the effect to read as xValue%! There are a few exceptions to this that sort of break this rule, like the Attribute bucket listed above being shown as an Additive bonus, when in fact it’s another Multiplicative Damage source!

Let’s use Sorcerer’s Greater Chain Lightning as a basic example of how this would play out, which states “Each time Chain Lightning bounces, it deals x5% increased damage for its duration.” And let’s just say it has a base damage of 5000, and triggers Unbroken Tether so it bounces a total of 8 times after the initial hit.

Normally, you’d look at this and say okay, that final hit will deal 140% damage, as 5% x 8 = 40%. Instead, it’s 1.05 ^ 8 damage instead, or ~148% damage. This is because each bounce increases the damage by that x5%, and not just increment the multiplier by 5%. This results in ~7390 damage, as opposed to the 7,000 it’d be if it weren’t a multiplicative bonus. It seems pretty small, but adds up when you consider this is just one effect in a vacuum.

How to Increase Your Damage Output in Diablo 4

So now that we have an idea of what these buckets are let’s cover how best to use them. With the general information covered, let’s go back to that Original Formula at the beginning of the guide. You know, this one:

So, based on what was talked about increasing damage will be a matter of three main objectives:

1. Increasing Base Damage.
2. Getting a good amount of Additive and Multiplicative Sources
3. Consistently applying Vulnerable and getting Critical Strikes.

Base Damage isn’t going to be a huge concern. Base Damage will increase naturally over time as we progress. The only thing to keep in mind here is to keep a lookout for weapons that offer an increase to DPS, but don’t make sacrifices in other areas like Attributes or other bonuses. Once you get to higher levels, these upgrades will become much less frequent.

We can however seek to boost our Overpower Damage, which can increase our damage. However, without a consistent way to trigger overpower, it sits at a mere 3% chance per attack. This is trigger per attack, so an AoE skill will Overpower all enemies hit by that particular skill, which is worth keeping in mind.

All classes have a variety of useful Additive and Multiplicative damage sources. Having both is important, but so is not heavily leaning into one over the other. It’s often best to not good too heavy into stacking additive bonuses, beyond just a couple lines here or there on gear. Since every Multiplicative source of damage is its own multiplier, generally you’ll want to get it if it benefits your build.

Finally, a big takeaway here is that if your class has easy access to Critical Strikes and or Vulnerable, take them! Every class can and should build around these for the most power they can get. No matter the build, work in the most viable source you can of these multipliers, as they will dramatically increase your damage!

However, if your options are limited and infrequent, you can choose to ignore them since they now have fixed multiplicative bonuses, rather than ones that can scale. There’s no reason to waste affixes on them anymore.

Example Buckets

Let’s use a Barbarian as an example. They have plenty of access to both Vulnerable and Crit to fill the first three buckets out. This is easy enough to achieve without much help, but make sure to get Vulnerable Damage, Critical Strike Rate, and Critical Strike Damage to make them as strong as possible!

For Additive Damage, Barbarians can very easily pick up Damage to Close enemies, Damage vs Bleeding, or Damage with Physical as super easy ways to fill up this bucket. It’ll be reliable for most Barbarian builds and be easy to stack up.

For Multiplicative bonuses, the best example of this for Barbarian is their Unbridled Rage Key Passive. This adds a massive x135% damage bonus, making it a powerful multiplicative bonus. They do have options from other aspects and such as well, but we’ll stick with this as an easy example.

Example Calculation

If you’re looking for a perfect scenario of potential damage, let’s say we’re playing a Barbarian build that is able to both consistently apply Vulnerable, as well as Critically Stike often. We’ll assume hit lands as an Overpowering Critical Strike against a Vulnerable enemy.

We’ll also assume Overpower triggers when have 500 Life and Fortify, with our base Life being 250. We’ll also assume a base damage of just 100, with a skill ratio of 100% for 100 base damage. Then we get the Unbridled Rage Key Passive for an x135% bonus for the Multiplicative Damage. This results in the following calculation:

This ends up being 100 Base damage multiplied by 235% from Unbridled Rage, 150% for Critical Strike, 150% for Overpower, 120% for Vulnerable, and finally the added 300% Overpower Damage added as flat damage. which results in 423 damage. This is over 4 times our base damage!

This is a pretty nice increase overall, for what will likely be very little investment in the later stages of the game.

Keep in mind that in the later stages of the game, this will be scaling up several thousand base damage instead of just 100. There will also be a lot more additive damage bonuses not being applied here.

Now if we add the Overpower to this, this results in a bonus 150% multiplier and the additional additive damage bonus of 300 damage, giving us a final total of 934.5 damage. This is nearly 10 times our base damage!

The only downside to Overpower is that it’s a flat bonus, and very unreliable without specifically building around it and using Skills, Aspects, or other effects to force it.

Being Flat damage that scales with Bonus Life and Fortify also means it can fall off late game, as you need to stack Life and be able to quickly build Fortify to maximize its bonus. However builds are are able to stack up Life, build Fortify, and consistently Overpower have one of the better additive damage scaling in the game.

We’ll keep this guide up-to-date as new information becomes available which could result in a change in the number of buckets, or how different values interact in general.

Not sure which class to pick? We have an excellent guide to all Classes in Diablo 4 that will help you choose the most suitable one for your playstyle. Check out our Diablo 4 Build Guides to learn how to maximize your performance while leveling and in the Endgame.