Diablo 4 Season 6 stat squish was a swing and a miss in PTR

Modified Sep 17, 2024 17:03 IST

One of the changes revealed to be coming with Diablo 4 Season 6 was a pending stat squish. The developers didn’t want players dropping billions and trillions of damage with ease. Unfortunately, the situation has gotten worse in the PTR with players hitting in the quintillions. In fact, someone reportedly hit “infinite damage” at one point during the testing phase. However, it’s important to remember this is likely caused by certain bugs and interactions the developers didn’t intend.

Nonetheless, it has caused some players to worry and others to simply laugh about how ridiculous it all is. At this time it’s unknown what our actual damage is going to look like in D4 Season 6 when it launches. However, if it stays the same way, the stat squish might be an utter failure.

Diablo 4 Season 6 wants to cut down the damage number bloat, attempt fails in PTR

If you look carefully, you can see infinite symbols instead of numbers (Image via Blizzard Entertainment/@Rob2628)

On the surface, it feels like Diablo 4 Season 6 has not cut down on damage at all, with the PTR’s stat squish. However, that feels a bit disingenuous to say. The 1-50 grind, according to players, worked just fine, and the stat squish did exactly what the developers intended. However, the result is vastly different at the highest level of gameplay, with Runewords, Tempering, and Glyphs.

Players who were using maxed-out builds could easily hit for quintillions of damage. A few players even reportedly hit for “infinite damage”, but this was likely caused by a bugged interaction. Hence, these issues should be ironed out by the time Diablo 4 Season 6 launches.

After all, the purpose of a PTR isn’t to just play the game early, but to find bugged interactions, features that don’t work, or things that perhaps work so well that they should be adjusted. It appears that most are using something that is glitched and infinitely stackable, to deal as much damage as humanly possible.

Players are likely double-dipping into a variety of multipliers, or using things that are bugged, to deal trillions of damage and beyond. The amount of powerful gear, Runes, and Glyphs accessible on the PTR is far beyond what an average player is likely to see without some intense grinding.

There are still a few weeks to go before Season 6 launches, and it’s hard to know for certain if the stat squish is going to work. Will Runewords or the updated Glyph/Paragon system break things? There’s no 100% way of knowing until the patch drops officially. Although it does sound like the stat squish was a failure in D4 on a surface level, we'll have to wait and see the final results on launch.

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Edited by Shraman Mitra