Diablo IV is a game about imprisoning evil behind the gates of hell and making the numbers skyrocket. Kill enemies get stronger, kill more enemies get even stronger. This is the endless cycle at the center of Blizzard’s hit action RPGbut recently players have managed to take that logic to an absurd conclusion and uncovered an overpowered druid build capable of over a billion damage.
“HIGHEST DAMAGE EVER RECEIVED IN DIABLO 4!!!!” tweeted Twitch streamer Moxsy on July 7th. It was accompanied by a screenshot showing nine-digit numbers on the screen and a YouTube Link to footage It shows Moxsy’s Druid doing over 1 billion damage. While it’s not certain if this was the worst damage ever (disruptions excluded), it didn’t take long to surpass that number.
A day later, Moxsy was back with a profit of over 1.8 billion. “Holy shit!” He tweeted, significantly more in the Zone than ever before. Shortly thereafter, Member of the Maxroll team boiler broke the 2 billion damage barrier. Another player, SquishyWarrior943, appears to have more than doubled that amount, raking in nearly $5 billion. As forbes Writer Paul Tassi mention, thatthe Druid build is touted as the fastest enemy to come in Diablo IV at the moment. So what is it made of?
Moxsy has one YouTube video break it down in detail. It revolves around a “double dip interaction” that allows for “crazy ramping damage”. The key is an aspect called Stormclaw, which causes critical hits with Shred to deal 20 to 45 percent of damage dealt as lightning damage. This is paired with Waxing Gibbous so 100 percent of hits are critical hits. Since Shred allows the druid to deal 100 percent vulnerable damage, that means it deals double damage to vulnerable enemies.
What’s unique about this pairing is that the double damage against vulnerable enemies is effectively counted twice – the first time and the second time each of the other effects, like Stormclaw’s lightning damage, apply. The result is roughly a fourfold multiplier to everything else Moxsy means when he says he’s “double dipping.” The more global damage modifiers his druid has, the more often he can benefit from this double dip.
An update for this build called “Lightning Shred Druid 2.0“takes it a step further by using the grizzly rage aspect to transform into a dire werewolf. This allows shred to be spammed more often thanks to a reduction in Spirit costs. Another aspect called Rampagaging Werebeast increases critical damage by 10 percent per hit. The math starts to blur from there, but having those pieces in place, smashing through enemies quickly eventually allowed players to rack up billions of dollars in damage per hit.
“What causes the damage to increase so much,” he asked in a recent video. “Honestly, I wish I could explain. It seems pretty random, it seems pretty buggy. The most important thing to make it more consistent I think is that in Grizzly Rage you have to kill a lot of things and create a snowball effect.”
Whether that’s what Blizzard intended, which seems highly unlikely, is another question entirely. The bill is so flawed that it seems inevitable that the developers will intervene with a patch to somehow optimize it. Meanwhile, however Druids continue to rule at the top Diablo IV as overpowered late-game killers. At least for a while. We’ll see how things pan out when Malignant Season comes out from July 20th.
Correction 7/11/2023 7:13pm ET: Maxroll teammate Boiler broke 2 billion, not Echohack.
