Diablo 4’s second season Season of Blood significantly changes how Critical Strike Damage, Vulnerable Damage, and Overpower Damage work in the game.

Here’s what it looks like and how you can benefit from it.

On a very surface level and without going too much into detail, the six multiplicative damage buckets consist of your:

• Base Damage, in relation to your Core Stat, Weapon, and Base Skill Damage
• Additive Damage bonuses, marked by the plus sign [+%]
• Multiplicative bonuses from uniques, aspects, paragon nodes, and glyphs, noticeable by the x [x%]
• Critical Strike Damage
• Vulnerable Damage
• Overpower Damage

With the start of Season 2, these three damage buckets now have fixed multipliers (Critical Strike Damage x50%/Vulnerable Damage x20%/ and Overpower Damage x50%), depending on your current life percentage, with their damage related bonus affixes on your gear becoming additive.

Until now, focusing on these three damage affixes on your gear was indispensable to stay competitive and deal the most damage possible while disregarding steps from any other buckets that could have event eventually enabled a wider build variety.

As you have probably noticed, this often meant that the best-in-slot stats for Diablo 4 Items, like weapons, rings, and gloves, should always have carried at least one of these crit and vulnerable stats. If you didn’t know about this before, don’t worry, this won’t be necessary anymore.

This stats prioritization implicitly limited the possibility of exploring other viable builds with additive damage bonuses or stats, like attack speed, lucky hit chance, damage overtime effects, and more.

For this reason and to enable players to explore builds beyond the critical, vulnerable, and overpower concepts, all three damage buckets have been adjusted and cap as shown before.

Let’s recap again quickly. Damage to vulnerable will always deal 20% multiplicative bonus damage. Critical damage will always be a 50% multiplicative bonus damage. And overpowered damage will deal up to 50% multiplicative bonus damage, depending on your current life percentage.

These are fixed multipliers and do not depend on your gear anymore more, meaning you could have 0% crit, vulnerable, and overpower damage affixes on your gear or Paragon Boards while still benefiting from these multiplicative bonuses to their full extent.

On the contrary, stack these attributes like you might have done before. For example, with 150% Critical Strike Damage and 200% Vulnerable Damage will still apply the same multiplicative bonuses, namely 50% Critical Strike Damage and 20% Vulnerable Damage, resulting in a maximum multiplicative damage bonus of 80%.

In short, the multiplicative damage buckets (Critical Strike Damage, Vulnerable Damage and Overpower Damage) will stay relevant and valuable if your build easily allows you to trigger them, but not at all cost anymore. What you need to know, though, is that if you want to make a powerful build, you’ll need to have plenty of Diablo 4 Gold.

As alternative build combinations without critically striking, vulnerable marks or overpowering can eventually outperform them. Their equivalent damage affixes on gear and Paragon Boards also remain useful if you have effects that can scale and benefit from them.

But to also reiterate on that, they will be treated as additive damage bonuses now and not directly contribute to their equivalent damage buckets any longer.

Although this change decreases the overall damage output, as shown in the example, the monster scaling has also been adjusted so that the noticeable impact should be comparably low to what this drastic change initially looks like.

In addition, the multiplicative bonuses will increasingly focus on any bonus damage from your items, aspects, and updated paragon nodes, including new glyphs, focusing even more on providing multiplicative bonuses to the existing additive bonuses.

You can see this with the examples with multiplicative ultimate skill bonus damage on the new No Witnesses legendary paragon node and multiplicative conjuration skill bonus damage based on other bonus damage stats for the new Elemental Summoner legendary node.