Diablo 4 is a very good game, so it’s certainly interesting to see it crumble due to damage caused by one player. The game is currently hosting its latest Public Test Server (PTR), giving players early access to a revamped progression system, new gear, and many of the improvements coming to Season 6 and the Ships of Hate expansion.
The PTR is designed to let players hack them, find bugs, and report… anomalies. In many cases, this particular test was rougher than previous PTRs, but it also produced some of the most interesting content.
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If you follow Diablo 4 content on YouTube and Twitch, you’ll no doubt be familiar with some of the creators’ penchant for breaking out the game with some clever building ideas. For obvious reasons, the desire to find the most broken version was greatly heightened during PTR testing.
However, this latest discovery may be the craziest one the game has ever seen. Content creator Rob2628 recently managed to effectively make the game stop counting damage, and after they’d dealt so much damage, the numbers disappeared.
Rob2628’s design caused the game to start showing an infinity symbol instead of actual damage numbers. The content creator is known for designing clever builds like this, but this one goes above and beyond anything anyone has seen before.
If you know your barbarian builds, you’ll no doubt guess that most of the power is due to thorns, and this particular build takes full advantage of them. In addition to increasing your maximum health, it also includes a new key passive that allows you to gain more Thorns the longer you keep attacking.
Pair that with a bunch of Tough As Nails (another passive skill that boosts Thorns damage) and you get that ridiculous display. Tying all of this together are two Runewords – a new feature of hate vessels in Diablo 4. Combined, they create earthquakes around the character and add more health (feeding back to the Thorns). Honestly, it’s a little silly to see the synergy in action.
What’s particularly interesting here is that many of the changes in Patch 2.0/Season 6 should reduce the annoying damage numbers that players have become accustomed to over the past few months. Blizzard wants numbers to be easier to parse and statistics to matter more.
Apparently, this recent discovery is caused by a bug, which Rob2628 suspects in the film (although the exact cause is unknown), and is likely to have been fixed before the expansion’s official release on October 8.
