How does Diablo 4 combine damage stats?

Diablo 4 groups stats into buckets. Additive damage percentages (damage to close, while healthy, etc.) add together inside one bucket, then that bucket multiplies with separate multiplicative buckets like critical strike, vulnerable damage, and attack speed.

Why is the first point of a multiplier worth so much?

Multiplicative buckets stack with each other, but a single additive bucket suffers diminishing returns as it grows. When your additive damage is already high, a new multiplicative source (vulnerable, crit, a [x] aspect) usually beats stacking more additive percent.

How is effective crit handled?

Average crit contribution is 1 + critChance times (critDamage). Critical strike chance is capped contribution-wise by how much crit damage you have, so the optimizer multiplies expected crit into the total rather than treating crit as a flat add.

Does attack speed count as damage?

Yes for sustained DPS. More attacks per second means more total hits, so attack speed multiplies your damage-per-second even though it does not change the damage of a single hit. The optimizer treats it as a separate multiplier.

Is vulnerable damage always best?

Not always. Vulnerable is its own multiplier and is strong when you reliably apply Vulnerable, but if your additive bucket is small, additive percent can outscale it. The sensitivity table shows which wins for your exact stats.

Diablo 4 Stat Optimizer

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The Diablo 4 Stat Optimizer models the game’s real damage buckets so you can stop guessing which stat to chase. Enter your crit chance, crit damage, vulnerable damage, attack speed, and additive damage, and it returns a relative DPS multiplier plus a per-stat sensitivity table showing your best next upgrade.

How it works

Diablo 4 puts damage into separate buckets that multiply with each other, while percentages inside the same bucket simply add. A simplified but faithful model is:

critMult       = 1 + critChance * critDamage
additiveMult   = 1 + additiveDamage
vulnerableMult = 1 + vulnerableDamage      (applies when target is Vulnerable)
speedMult      = 1 + attackSpeed

effectiveDPS = additiveMult * critMult * vulnerableMult * speedMult

The optimizer computes this baseline, then nudges each input up by a fixed step and re-evaluates to measure the marginal DPS gain. The stat with the largest gain is your best next point.

Why multipliers beat raw additive

Because the buckets multiply, adding a brand-new multiplier (e.g. going from 0% to 20% Vulnerable) compounds against everything else. But piling more percent into an already-large additive bucket dilutes itself. That is the core of Diablo 4 stat priority, and this tool quantifies it for your exact build instead of relying on rules of thumb.