Numbers, then. The Diablo franchise has pretty much always been about numbers. Even more so than Black Ops 1. Their extreme individual size has been a topic of conversation for a long time, ever since Diablo 3 reached into the billions. But that’s not what we’re talking about today.
Do You Want To See Your Damage Numbers or the Actual Game?
Big numbers are just big, but many numbers are… problematic to say the least. As LeeLucRengZedLeBFiEz pointed out in their reddit thread, once you reach a certain number of individual damage sources, it really does become a choice of knowing how much damage you’re doing and actually being able to play the game.
Now, we all know we can, in fact, turn off damage numbers in the options. But seeing our damage improve in battle is a major part of the Diablo experience. So we get to a conundrum.
The Multiplier Effect
You can see the “multiplier effect” mentioned in the thread, but that’s something different from the screen clutter we see. Basically, D4 boils down to mega-charging one skill with as many multipliers as you can. From Aspects to Uniques, support skills and so on, just focusing on one big damage skill is the way to go for the vast majority of builds. This isn’t necessarily a problem, and most ARPGs come down to this, but it does bother some people that we can’t have multiple damaging abilities. What it does mean is that the majority of the masses of numbers you see above are basically useless. If you add them all up they don’t come close to that single giant super-charged skill use, and they’re literally just clutter.
So, what do you think about the masses of damage numbers some specs clutter their screens with? Should this be addressed and the numbers added up? Or is there another solution?