Watch Diablo 4 fail to compute after one player's Barb does well beyond the highest amount of damage possible
One Diablo 4 player has caused the game to forget how to calculate damage after they did so much of it in such a short span of time.
Diablo 4 is a very competent game, so it’s certainly amusing to see it, well, sort of break as a result of the amount of damage one player managed to do. The game is currently hosting its latest Public Test Server (PTR), allowing players to get early hands on with the revamped progression system, new gear and many of the improvements coming to the game with Season 6 and the Vessel of Hatred Expansion.
PTRs are designed for players to break them, find bugs, and report… unusual occurrences. In many cases, this particular test has been rougher than previous PTRs, but it’s also been responsible for some of the funniest content.
If you follow Diablo 4 content on YouTube and Twitch, you’ll no doubt be familiar with how certain creators like to break the game with some clever build ideas. This desire to find the most broken builds ramps up considerably during PTR tests, for obvious reasons.
This latest discovery, however, may be the game’s wildest ever. Content creator Rob2628 recently managed to effectively cause the game to cease calculating damage, after they dealt so much of it, the numbers disappeared.
Rob2628’s design caused the game to start showing infinity symbols, rather than actual damage numbers. The content creator is known for devising these sorts of clever builds, but this one goes beyond anything anyone had seen before.
If you know your Barbarian builds, you’ll definitely guess that much of that power is thanks to Thorns, which this particular build makes great use of. Alongside boosting max life, it also incorporates a new Key Passive that grants even more Thorns the longer you continue attacking.
Pair this with stacks of Tough as Nails (another passive that boosts Thorns damage), and you get that ridiculous display. Tying all that together are two Runewords - which is a new feature coming to Diablo 4 with Vessel of Hatred. Combined, they create earthquakes around the character, and add more life (feeding back into Thorns). It’s honestly a little silly to see the synergy in action.
What’s particularly funny here is that many of the changes in patch 2.0/Season 6 are supposed to cut down on the obscene damage numbers players have gotten used to over the past several months. Blizzard wanted numbers to be easier to parse, and for stats to matter.
Obviously, this recent discovery is caused by a bug, which Rob2628 suspects in the video (though without knowing exactly how), and it’s likely to be fixed well before the expansion is officially released on October 8.