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Wonders, are you not doing the damage that you think that you're supposed to be doing? Have you put together a build guide and no matter what you've done, you just don't hit the same numbers that you saw that build hitting? Maybe you're
Learn why your Diablo 4 Season 14 build isn't hitting hard and how additive vs multiplicative damage affects your DPS.
Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.
Generated from the transcript and can be wrong — check the timestamp.
Key Takeaways
- Additive damage is rarer and mostly gained from the paragon board, making it crucial for high DPS.
- Multiplicative damage multiplies all additive damage, so understanding both is key to optimizing builds.
- Base bonuses like 50% critical strike damage and 20% vulnerable damage are always active when conditions are met.
- Paragon level significantly affects damage output; builds from high paragon players will outperform lower paragon players.
- Small changes in gear affixes and damage multipliers can lead to large increases in total damage.
What the video covers
- Explains why players may not be hitting expected damage numbers despite following build guides.
- Discusses the difference between additive and multiplicative damage types in Diablo 4.
- Highlights the importance of the paragon board for gaining additive damage and its impact on DPS.
- Details how critical strike damage and vulnerable damage bonuses work and their activation.
- Demonstrates gear setups focusing on critical strike chance, physical damage, and vulnerable damage.
- Shows how small percentage changes in damage multipliers can significantly increase overall damage.
- Mentions the role of glyph levels and paragon progression in maximizing damage output.
- Emphasizes the inherent base critical strike and vulnerable damage bonuses always active in combat.
- Explains the challenge of obtaining low rolls on gear for testing damage differences.
- Provides practical advice for players stuck at certain pit levels due to missing additive damage and paragon progression.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Why Your Damage Feels Low
- 01:20Understanding Additive vs Multiplicative Damage
- 02:54Paragon Board and Additive Damage Importance
- 04:21Damage Types and Gear Setup Explanation
- 05:45Critical Strike and Vulnerable Damage Mechanics
- 07:10Gear Testing: Low Rolls vs High Rolls Impact
- 08:28Damage Calculation Examples and Affix Effects
- 11:00Maximizing Damage: Glyph Levels and Paragon Progression
- 13:26Skill Ranks vs Damage Multipliers Tradeoffs
- 23:37Community and Further Resources
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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pushing the pits and you get to, let's say, pit 125 and you just cannot seem to push past it. We're going to talk a little bit about damage building in Diablo 4. A couple really small and very simple things that you can do to help
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push your damage up. I have my testing barbarian on right now. This is what I've been using to do a whole bunch of different tests. I'm going to run you through it, what I did. We're going to talk about the different types of
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damage. You're going to have two different types. You're going to have additive damage. And to see where additive damage comes from, because now it actually is a lot harder to get to, we're going to look at the wrath glyph.
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This gives you plus 15.2% increased critical strike damage. That is an additive number because it says plus.
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If it has an X, like it says on the bottom, that's going to be multiplicative. They are completely separate. Additive numbers all get grouped together, no matter what it is.
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Whether you're looking at, let's say, this increased damage to vulnerable enemies. That is actually exactly the same thing as your critical strike damage additive numbers. There's no difference. The only difference is that you have to activate it a different way.
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Once it's activated, it's run through every single multiplier that you have already. It's not like your critical strike damage additive numbers are only multiplied by your critical strike damage bonus. They're actually going to be multiplied by everything because all
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of your multiplicative numbers multiply all of your additive damage. Your additive numbers get put into a gigantic group. So, if you do have just straight increased damage and you have straight increased critical strike damage and maybe you're running another board
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that's going to give you something to plus two dust devils, all of those get lumped into a big gigantic group of additive numbers. And then you take all those added numbers times your glyph 1, glyph 2, glyph 3, aspect 1, aspect 2,
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aspect 3. Additive is now a lot harder to come by than it used to be. Most of the additive damage that you're going to get is going to be in your paragon board. There's not a ton of other
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sources. There are some builds out there where you won't want to be running something like a critical strike chance as your temper. And then you have a chance to put something like additive damage, maybe critical strike damage bonus, 'cause that's mostly the highest
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number that you're going to get. Most of the time, a lot of times with the barbarian builds, the glove slot is reserved for your critical strike damage bonus, and there's not much else that's going to go onto those slots. So, most
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of your additive damage is going to come from your paragon board, but that will come later in the leveling process. When you're leveling most of the time and even at the point that I'm at. I'm at 265 right now. I have just barely
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started to branch out outside of the defensive nodes in my paragon board in order to fill out the glyphs to get more additive damage. Because additive damage is so rare, it actually gives you really big boosts to your build and to your
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damage. But if you're not 300, like I'm not. I'm only at 265, so I'm not even halfway to the experience needed to get to 300. Then I am actually missing out on quite a bit of damage. There's a lot
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of additive damage sprinkled throughout the board. Plus five here, plus 7.5 here. So, it's going to be a thing where if you don't have your paragon leveled up, that's a really great place to start looking at why you're not doing the same
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damage. Is the build that you're following somebody that is already at Paragon 300? If that's the case, they have a lot more additive damage than you're going to have. And they're also going to have a lot more main stat, and
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main stat is going to give you more skill damage. So, all of that is going to add up. That's going to be the first thing that you're going to look at. Is your paragon leveled? And if that's something that you're not interested in,
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then that's going to be something that will always hold you back no matter what. If you haven't pushed your paragon up, then you're going to be missing out on quite a bit of damage, more than you would think. And I did do a video on the
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difference between glyphs at 51, 100, and 150, and paragon at what would have been about 225 versus 300. That did that last season. I'll put that in the description of the video so you can check it out if you want to. It will
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still apply to this season. And we'll talk about the difference between glyph levels as well later on. So, those are your damage types. Why the heck am I standing in yellow and blue gear with several different sets of gear in my
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inventory? We're going to go over the set so you can kind of see the visual difference between how damage is built, especially around your multipliers and how a really small percent can make a pretty big difference.
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Right now, all of the gear that I have on, I have no strength on any of these pieces of gear. It's just going to be for fury regeneration, which I actually don't even need because we're going to be testing with a basic skill on my
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gloves. The first set that I have is all critical strike chance so that I can crit because we want to activate our critical strike damage bonus. And I'm going to be using War Cry. That will give me some extra damage, which we're
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all going to have that in the calculations, but it gives me vulnerable damage. How critical strike damage works and how vulnerable damage works is no matter what, if I take off all of this gear and we have no critical strike
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damage and I have no vulnerable damage on whatsoever, I still am going to have critical strike damage and I'm still going to have vulnerable damage no matter what. That's always going to be there because you get an inherent 50% increased critical
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strike no matter what. All of the time. If you make a crit, no matter where it is, no matter what gear you have on, you will gain 50% increase to that. If the enemy is vulnerable, you will always
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gain 20% more damage. Which is why it's actually kind of a big deal to have any source of vulnerable damage. Because even if you don't have a lot of vulnerable damage on your gear, which you should, when we'll get to that in a
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second, you're missing out on free damage simply by making an enemy vulnerable. So, that's a really big one to know is that these two will always give you, no matter what, they will give you a bonus as long as you can activate
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them. Activation is going to be the key for this. So, this first set of gear that I have that I'm putting on, this is low rolls, and it was actually very hard to get. I burned through so many
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materials trying to get low rolls on things versus just like okay to high rolls. This was actually much harder to put this set together than it was to put together the set that had high rolls on it. So, this set has very, very low. And
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this set is going to be your critical strike damage bonus right here. This is going to have very low. It's going to have 200% critical strike damage bonus and 104% physical damage. Now, I only went with physical and with critical strike damage
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bonus. Then, I also did vulnerable damage and I did critical strike damage. Those are the only things that are going to be changing and it's only going to change on the gloves, rings, and amulet.
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The weapons will still maintain the same every single time that we do a test. So, you're still going to have physical damage, but we're going to swap out some physical for some vulnerable. So, you can see kind of the difference that it
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makes going from not having something to having something by dropping some more of something else. So, we'll explain what all of that means.
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strike hits. That's what we're going to be doing because we're going to be testing that with all of these affixes on. So, this is going to make the enemy vulnerable and it's also going to make me critically hit at a much higher rate.
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So, we're going to hit until we get to 9,026. That's what we're going to write down here. We're going to write down 9,026.
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And then we're going to put on the high critical strike damage set. So that high critical strike damage set, we're going to do it without vulnerable damage. It's just going to be physical. So when we put this on, we're going to wait our 5
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seconds for our cool down on our war cry. And then we're going to pop war cry and then we're going to attack. So 11,300.
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When you're doing these tests, you want to make sure that you have damage variance turned on. This makes it so that the range on your weapons gets negated. this 3,70 to the 4,66.
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It now puts it at a nice even spot and it g takes away that range. So you always see the exact same amount. So I'm always going to see that without my war cry up and without enemies being
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vulnerable, I'm going to see the same amounts of hits every single time. So we're going to write down 11,300 here.
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This was our big hit. And you can see just losing that 50% critical strike chance and losing some of that physical damage, we lost a total of 20% off of our total overall damage.
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So now we're going to add in the vulnerable damage. And we're going to start with the low rolls for vulnerable damage. And we're going to put that gear on. This is as low as I possibly could get it to go. And when we make enemies
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vulnerable and we are going to attack, we're doing 10,700. So, we're going to go and we're going to enter in our 10,700.
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And you can see we're actually doing more than the critical strike damage with physical damage with only 2% total more of your damage multipliers on your gear. So, with that 2% more, it actually gave us an 18% increase to how much we
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did. And we actually lost over 50% physical damage and gained 50% vulnerable damage, but we gained a 20% increase to damage. So, let's go look at the high vulnerable damage and see how much that increases.
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So, when we put on this high vulnerable damage gear, let's pop our war cry. And we're going to do 14,200.
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So, 14,200 damage. That comes out to a 20 almost 26% increase by dropping some physical damage, adding in vulnerable damage, but only gaining a total of 7% over the total cumulative of your damage multis, a 26% increase, and it's about a
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25% increase over the high versus the low. So, really big changes. And it does look like, okay, well, for this one, we dropped your almost 65%, but we only lost 24%.
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But this is your overall damage. And the big takeaway from this is that as you add in your aspects, it's going to exponentially increase that growth that you're going to see, that gap will always remain at about that 26% with the
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way that this is all set up. But that 26% equals more and more and more and more damage the more that you're adding in aixes and you're adding in aspects.
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And we haven't even talked about greater affixes, which we're going to get to in just a second. For this, if we did these hits, let's look at your vulnerable damage and your critical strike damage only. So, if we did your 11,300,
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this is kind of a very general way of how damage is built. And this is doesn't include a whole lot of things. So this is not a damage calculator. This is not taking into consideration strength. It's not taking into consideration the weapon
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skill. It's not taking into consideration ranks to your weapon. This is just if we did this damage and we multiplied it by each of the aspects that we can put on our gear, how much damage that would increase by. We
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started with 11,300. And if we ran that through every single one of these aspects, it would end up with 1.67 million damage from 11,300. So you can kind of see how this starts to really ramp up. If we took just this 14,200
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through the exact same ones, we're now doing a whole 500,000 damage more. Now think about this. If you're doing 10 trillion damage and you want to get your damage up, you want to increase those hits. If you just gained
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that 25% from going from no vulnerable damage to vulnerable damage, you're going to do 2.5 trillion damage more than what you were doing before. So that's really, really big. And that does not include any greater affixes. Greater affixes
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give you a 25% increase to the base of whatever your aix is that you're going to be adding. So for example, if we look at this, the range is up to 50%. So if we have that increase, we're going to
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gain your 50 times your 1.25, you're going to get 62, which fortunately it does round up and it gives you 63%.
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That is going to add up a ton if you don't have greater affixes. If we had full greater affixes and we increased your 11,300 times your 1.25 and we did 14,125, we're now basically at where we're at by
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adding in that vulnerable damage. But then that vulnerable damage, if we did 14,200 * the 1.25, we get 17,750.
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And then that gives us almost 2.65 million damage versus the 2.17. So just adding in those greater affixes, if you don't have those, that's extra damage on top of that that you're missing. And then if you take your
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masterwork on top of that for every rank of quality, your gear is going to get a 1% increase to those stats. And then when you put your masterwork working crit, which a masterworking crit means that it's this orange number, if you put
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a masterworking crit into your gear with a greater aics, you go up to 100% critical strike damage multiplier all the way up from 34%.
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It's a really big increase. So if you're missing out on those, that is going to be something that's really important for you to do if you haven't master worked your gear. If you haven't picked the correct aics to masterwork, you're going
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to be missing out on a lot. By correct aics, how damage works with your multipliers.
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You don't want to put all of your eggs into one basket. You don't want to put everything that you have into your critical strike damage bonus. Critical strike damage will always be higher. The rolls just end up being higher no matter
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what. It's just how this is going to work. you always have pretty low vulnerable damage because the vulnerable damage can only roll in certain places.
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In my case, physical damage, which this will apply to everything, physical damage or any element, physical damage is considered an element, falls under the same category. Physical, fire, shadow, whatever it is that you're doing, poison damage, all of that falls
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under the element category. And all damage is under that category as well. So all damage is going to be exactly the same. So, this will apply to everything, whether you're using a damage overtime multiplier, a vulnerable damage multiplier, which vulnerable damage
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multiplier is on every class. And most of the time, you're going to be trying to have some sort of way to make enemies vulnerable. So, for this example, if I put everything into critical strike damage bonus, and I hit for 10 damage, I
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would do 163. But if I spread those multipliers out, which is never going to look like this spread, but if I spread them out, you see that we did almost three times the damage with only 750% total for the damage multipliers versus
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the 870 total that we were accumulating on this build. So, a lot of the perception is if you want to have bigger crits, you need to put your points into critical strike damage multiplier, which is actually incorrect. You want to get
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as many of the lower multipliers that you have, which in this case will pretty much always be vulnerable damage, and you want to beef those up as much as you can to do more damage. If you're missing something that may not be fully maxed
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out, maybe you're missing 1% here, or maybe your Ramladi is not a mythic yet, and you have a 47%. My intercom is missing 2% here. If that's the case, think about how all of this works and how all of this adds up. If you were to
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just take off 10% here, 5% here, 3% here, 2% here, how much of a difference that's going to make in your overall damage.
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Having all of your aspects maxed, if that's not the case, which sometimes it's not, I still don't have max aspects, so sometimes it is a little bit harder to do. But if you're just trying to figure out why you're not hitting so
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hard, these are a lot of the things that you're going to have to look at. For your glyph levels, we're going to look at this wrath glyph. Now, wrath works in a way that I think a lot of people don't
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expect it to work. It says increased critical strike damage by 17%. Now, that increases as you level it up, but this increased critical strike damage has nothing to do with your critical strike damage multipliers.
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This also gives you a lot of additive damage, which is really great because we don't have any, which we talked about already, but this is a completely separate line. So, if we were to add in your wrath glyph, and we added in wrath,
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and this is going to be a 17 for me, just 17%. and we take this equals this time 1.17.
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We now gained almost 400,000 damage on top of it just by adding in that wrath glyph because it doesn't get added in to my critical strike damage multipliers that's on my gear. It's completely separate. So having this and if I was to
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look at the levels, 8.6 six is what you get at level 51. So if we were to do this equals this times 1.086, we go down and we gain 277,000.
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And then if we were to go up to the max, which is by 20. So we're at 2.27 million. And then we're going to max that glyph out times two 1.2. We now go up to that 2.5 million. So it's a pretty big
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significant jump. And then every single one of your glyphs if you were to add in every single one cuz all five of them have multipliers on the bottom. Think about how much damage you could possibly be missing simply by having your glyphs
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here and then more than doubling the power of that glyph. It's a really big difference that you're going to be missing out on. [snorts] Getting your glyphs to 150 can be challenging and it can be tedious and it can be a grind.
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But again, this is just to show you where some of your damage may be missing if you're not 100% sure why you're not hitting like the guide is. So, for a quick recap of everything that we've talked about, your vulnerable damage is
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going to come with a 20% increased damage no matter what, as long as you make enemies active. Your critical strike damage bonus comes with a 50% increase as long as you can activate your critical strike chance. You're going to have as much additive damage as
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you possibly can, but that's going to come later on with a paragon board when you level it up. You should be going into defensive nodes first. That's really the only way you're going to survive moving up. You may have the
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damage, but you may not have the survivability on your gear. When you're looking at your damage multipliers, you're going to try to get as absolutely high of a roll as you possibly can. Moving into greater affixes cuz that's going to help
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increase the level. Your aspects need to be as high as they possibly can. If you they're not high, then you're going to be missing out on some damage. So, you want to work on maxing those out. Doing it in the cube is a really great way to
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just upgrade everything to a legendary. Super helpful. I have thousands and thousands of mats to upgrade, so I can go and level up some of those as well.
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Your glyphs, if they're not maxed out either, your glyphs are going to be missing out on some damage. Glyphs are also a great source of added damage, which we talked about before. So, you do want to max out those glyphs as much as
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possible. Your talisman, same exact thing. All of these little X's and multipliers, this gives you 13% increase to damage. That's going to be a completely separate line than everything else. adding in your set bonuses where you're going to gain 600%
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increased damage. That's gigantic, but it doesn't always work for every single build. Like I cannot run this build with Celig. I can't run fury because it's going to give me maximum life. So I miss out on that 600%. So it's really knowing
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your class, but making sure that you add in as many multipliers as you possibly can as high as they can go. Then there's things like knowing your class is going to maybe let's say for the barbarian giving me more max resources going to
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give me more damage than adding ranks to my skills because your skill ranks do matter. You want to get as high of a skill rank as you can but at some point it might be detrimental because you're sacrificing another stat. There's so
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much that goes into this and these training dummies are really really going to be your best friend. And here is the icing on the cake. If you have the expansion, and this does not include uniques, you can go to the cube, any
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legendary piece of gear that you have, you can create exactly how it says in your planner, exactly how you want it to be. You're going to need the materials for it. And Hell Tides is absolutely amazing for that materials. It's the
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best place to go get them. But if you have enough materials, you go to the cube and you create the exact perfect piece of gear. I have a guide that'll be in the description of the video as well,
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which is a full craft. Show you every single piece of gear and I put it all on and I was still able to go into Torment 12 with all of the gear that I crafted.
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So, that'll be in there. Use the cube to create your first starter set of gear.
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You can't make greater affixes in the cube when r-rolling gear, but that's going to give you all of your base.
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That's going to give you this baseline of damage. And then once you have gotten this baseline of damage where my affixes are all very close to being maxed, the only thing I can do now is go out and
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find greater aics gear. That's your next set. So the cube is your starter. Then you're going to hit everything else and try and find all of those best pieces of gear. This is the first time doing a video like this for me. So if you did
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find it helpful, let me know. I will absolutely do some more in the future.
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If you're looking for a really great deep dive into how damage works, all of the calculations, there are a lot of really great content creators out there that put a lot of effort into creating damage calculators, comparison tools,
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all of that stuff. So, make sure that you get out there and search around.
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This was just a basic overview of how to look at building your character, not really necessarily the math behind it.
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just some really good ways for you to visualize how your character's damage gets built and why you might just be missing some of the damage that you think that you should have. If you haven't yet, make sure you click on the
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link in the top of the description of the video for the Discord server. We have an incredibly active server. There are people in voice chat every single day. They're all playing. We have a class channel for every single class out
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there. If you're looking for some help with your builds, you want to theory craft, it's a really great place for you. We have an incredibly active trade chat. People are trading items all day long and it's much easier to do it in
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the trade channel here than it is to interact on the websites that are out there or even sometimes just using trade chat in game. We do have three in-game clans. We just reset the queue, so it's at the lowest point that it has been in
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a very long time. So, if you're looking for an in-game plan, you can hop into the queue. All you have to do is leave your battleet tag. You don't have to leave a reason whatsoever. Just put it here cuz everybody is welcome. We do
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treat Discord as the clan. So, we don't do any events through in-game clan. So, if you're in Discord with us, you are part of the clan. That's all I got for you today. Hopefully, you found this video helpful. If you did, make sure you
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share with your friends. Thank you everybody for watching. I'm live every night. I would love it if you stopped by, said hi, here you crafted with me.
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Catch you on the clip side.
Topics:Diablo 4Season 14damage buildingadditive damagemultiplicative damageparagon boardcritical strike damagevulnerable damagebuild guidebarbarian
