How much damage players deal to enemies in Diablo 4 depends on many factors. One player increased his attack power to over a million, but he realizes that it is actually useless.
In Diablo 4, you slay monsters – therefore, the damage you deal to take down monsters is an important factor. Your damage numbers depend on various aspects, including your build, your skills, and your gear.
In the game itself, you can display different types of damage, such as weapon damage and critical hit damage. In the character overview “Stats and Materials”, you can also see factors like your critical hit chance and your overwhelm chance. In addition, you have the option to toggle the damage numbers and combat texts that fly across your screens on and off.
At first glance, though, you see primarily one thing in the character overview: your attack power. A player shows on Reddit his attack power value, which he pushed to over 1 million – however, he gains nothing from it.
Looks strong but does nothing
Why doesn’t this help him? The large attack power number (specifically 1,064,667) here is certainly impressive, but compared to the top builds, it is almost useless. In the best builds, it’s about multipliers that strengthen each other. In our Tier List, you will find the strongest builds for endgame in Season 5 of Diablo 4.
So, any damage you deal should be enhanced by as many effects as possible. This ultimately results in a higher damage output than the so-called “Paper Damage,” as seen here. “Paper Damage” refers to the one million attack power that the player displays.
The “Paper Damage” in the form of attack power in Diablo 4 is a calculation of the damage you deal. It consists of offensive values, including the damage and speed of your equipped weapon.
However, skill damage, area damage, or elemental damage are not taken into account. So if you play a sorceress and have the choice between 1,000 damage or 100 damage plus x20 on frost damage, the latter is better for frost builds, even though the “Paper Damage” is lower.
In his post on Reddit, “noobeeehunter” also notes that attack power “is not everything.” Other users also discuss the high number.
“The value is a trap for newcomers”
How is such a number possible? In the comment, “Lats9” refers to the build that the author of the post plays and explains the number as follows:
Andariel builds use damage per “Dark-Shroud-Temper“, which is severely overtuned and has a much higher value than other additive values in the game, making the displayed attack power appear significantly higher. Nevertheless, it is still additive damage, and as always, the attack power you see in your display is pretty meaningless, as it does not account for things like damage to enemies under crowd control, critical damage, vulnerability damage, and many other multipliers.
What do other players say? “yung_melanin” comments in the post: “The attack power value is honestly a trap for newcomers.” The attack power is indeed the first value you see in the character overview – next to armor value and health points.
The user “KodyLapointe” says: “A DPS meter or something similar would really be a game changer, in my opinion.” And “Big_lt” also writes: “[The developers] really need to revise this value and adjust it to the current DPS so that the number updates continuously while playing. Perhaps even split it into two categories – for bosses and non-bosses – as the damage can vary greatly between single targets.”
Such numbers may look strong at first glance in Diablo 4, which can cause insecurity, especially among newer players. Additionally, there are sometimes changes to key values in the game that tend to go unnoticed in the community. Blizzard has introduced a cap for an important defensive value – and a player seems to have noticed this too late. He was sitting on an absolutely exaggerated armor value that actually does him no good. You can read more about it here: Diablo 4: Player collects far too much of the strongest defensive value, has overlooked an important change
