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We've officially hit the endgame of big damage numbers in Diablo 4, folks. Thanks to a busted combo in the action RPG's latest PTR server, one dedicated player cooked up the biggest number the game can feasibly handle, and then blew straight past it into the realm of literal infinity. The game just throws out the symbol for infinity instead of an actual damage number, like a white flag in the face of unfathomable DPS.
Regular Diablo scientist Rob2628 shared this mathematical breakthrough this week, after a Chinese player shared it via bilibili, and I'm knowingly breaking the laws of news writing just to express these unholy numbers to you in full.
Rob reckons the biggest number that Diablo 4 can register, on account of this being the limit for what "can be represented by a 128-bit unsigned integer," is this:
- 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,455
The largest single number he was able to capture on camera was this:
- 333,515,323,498,366,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
By my math, Rob was roughly seven bazillion damage short of the theoretical limit, but he didn't stop there. This obscene damage output was enabled by a bizarre and unintended interaction between a few skills, and since that combo can be stacked up without limit, Rob was able to scale straight to infinity. I'm not going to get into the concept of large and small infinities in this article, so we're just going to call this the practical damage limit of Diablo 4.
As Rob explains in the breakdown embedded above, Barbed Carapace gives you 10% thorns damage for eight seconds each time you spend 25 Fury, the Barbarian's main resource. Casting a cooldown-based skill also causes your thorns damage to be applied as physical damage to nearby enemies for five seconds. Spam more skills, stack more thorns.
This is where the skill Tough as Nails comes in. This skill provides a flat increase to your thorns damage, and when enemies hit you, they'll take an additional 15% thorns as bleed over five seconds. For some reason, this skill just bugs out if you invest more than 30 points into it on the PTR, causing the damage effect to stack up endlessly. Luckily, you can rack up extra points using bonuses from armor affixes.
Rob augments this further with Legendaries that add effects like Imprinted, another source of AoE thorns damage, and life scaling to further boost thorns. Cooldown reduction improves ability uptime, crowd control effects pull enemies into the thorny AoE, and hyper armor-esque Unstoppable to keep the train rolling through crowds. The result is a build that endlessly ratchets up the DPS each time you use skills.
My favorite part of all this is that, if you strip out the game-breaking damage numbers and bugs, this is just a classic Whirlwind Barbarian strategy. It's the same engine under the hood. Rob put it best: "As long as we keep spinning, it keeps going."
Blizzard said Diablo 4's Vessel of Hatred PTR will be more "broken" than ever before, and it wasn't kidding. Fans also found a method to get to level 60 in just 20 minutes.
