Diablo 4 / IV / IIII / Fore / Cope / Seethe

BoozeCube said:

Or they could just skip the need to shorthand it all together by making the numbers reasonable in the first fucking place. I don't know why that is so difficult for Blizzard but then again they hire trannies and steal titty milk at work so reason and logic has been gone for ages.

Click to expand...

But then players may have fun using lower level items like they did in Diablo 2, how on earth are Blizzard going to drive engagement metrics without endlessly scaling up gear to replace the old gear?

If the gear you pick up each has +1% damage, math dictates that sooner or later you're going to get ridiculous numbers. Thing is, doing 39,896,167 damage and doing 100 damage is exactly equal if it still does 50% of a creature's health. The actual numbers mean absolutely nothing mechanically.

The amount of people who think seeing 51.5T damage on a hit is bad is exactly equal to the amount of people who think doing 515 damage on a hit is too low.

BoozeCube said:

Click to expand...

Well. You've defeated my argument soundly. I guess I'll see my way out.

Xevy said:

The big number thing is a bit annoying. D3 helped by shortening it with M's, B's, and T's after the numbers so everything was more manageable. I'm guessing they go that route later but they want people to see omega numbers early on so they can feel themselves "powering up". What it will also do is get people mad that X class hits for 39 trillion and Y class only hits for 3 trillion, even if it hits 10x more often. Because people dumb.

Click to expand...

If I remember correctly that was a setting option, which I am going to guess is going to be available in D4 as well.

j00t said:

If the gear you pick up each has +1% damage, math dictates that sooner or later you're going to get ridiculous numbers. Thing is, doing 39,896,167 damage and doing 100 damage is exactly equal if it still does 50% of a creature's health. The actual numbers mean absolutely nothing mechanically.

The amount of people who think seeing 51.5T damage on a hit is bad is exactly equal to the amount of people who think doing 515 damage on a hit is too low.

Click to expand...

The damage numbers are all arbitrary. If the designers wanted they could have attack values and defense values interact so that overall damage does whatever they want. There's no reason it HAS to be exponentially increasing damage countered only by absurd HP pools.

Captain Suave said:

The damage numbers are all arbitrary. If the designers wanted they could have attack values and defense values interact so that overall damage does whatever they want. There's no reason it HAS to be exponentially increasing damage countered only by absurd HP pools.

Click to expand...

Yeah, that's my point. They COULD design it in such a way that the numbers NEVER change, but that doesn't feel good when you get upgrades. So they just decided to let the numbers get higher and higher. We weren't hitting for 30 trillion back when the game released, but they added higher difficulties and just let the numbers ramp up.

I'm not saying it was the right choice, just that it's a superficial choice that has no bearing one way or the other

j00t said:

Yeah, that's my point. They COULD design it in such a way that the numbers NEVER change, but that doesn't feel good when you get upgrades. So they just decided to let the numbers get higher and higher. We weren't hitting for 30 trillion back when the game released, but they added higher difficulties and just let the numbers ramp up.

I'm not saying it was the right choice, just that it's a superficial choice that has no bearing one way or the other

Click to expand...

I do think it matters when the numbers are so high and out of everyday experience that it's hard for people to to evaluate them intuitively when they're flying all over the screen. I agree that having things flat would be boring, but the progression could easily have been linear-ish vs exponential. Just look at Elden Ring.

It doesn't bother me enough to change my opinion of the game, but it does seem like a design choice I would have made differently.

Damage should be displayed in percent.

Or better yet, letters.

Even better, both. Imagine how exciting it would be to finally hit something for Z%! Upper case would be crits.

FOH has become the hub of pure innovation!

The people yearn for Slash!

The numbers hardly matter. Sure it feels good against lower content or something, but when your at the end and it still takes lots of hits to kill something even if you are hitting for 1 trillion at once for maybe 50 billion but 20 times in fast succession. If it just does 1% of a mobs health, just bleh. As long as their coding can handle it. D3 had issues with large desnity and trying to calculate it all against every mob. Mainly in group content and higher GRs.

Iirc d3 was in the trillions towards the end, but you could abbreviate it or leave it as a huge number to screenshot for click bait.

Hateyou said:

My Fidelity account would beg to differ.

Click to expand...

Don't worry, inflation will take care of that.

Its not the size of the numbers but how you use them.

If you've ever gotten hardcore into parsing logs for WOW, you see different specs and builds have different damage profiles throughout a fight. Good balance is when fight design (or content loop) aligns with differing damage profiles and everyone can feel useful or be "the best" on certain encounters, or certain parts of the encounter, or differing types of content loops (solo, dungeon, challenge mode, achievment gathering, mapping, bossing, league mechanic x vs league mechanic y)

Harder to do in an ARPG because you don't generally design around single Raid encounters, but not impossible.

BoozeCube said:

Diablo 2 didn't even have damage numbers on the screen and it defined a fucking generation. Anyone who thinks you need to see

Is a grade A fucking moron.

Click to expand...

Grade A% moron.

BoozeCube said:

Diablo 2 didn't even have damage numbers on the screen and it defined a fucking generation. Anyone who thinks you need to see

2341341239487023149871301983471203498711093284703498704982371093248710349834 DAMAGE SPLIOSION RAWR BIG DICK flashing on the screen Is a grade A fucking moron.

Click to expand...

SO turn them off. Problem solved.