'Infinite damage' strikes again as Diablo 4 players overthrow the tyranny of mathematics with an exploit that grants sorcerers the power of the gods: 'No way that they leave that in the game'

Ludicrous damage numbers are back in Diablo 4's latest season and once again they're so out of whack they can only be described as "infinite".

This time it's sorcerers who can stack up so much bonus damage that the game spits out incomprehensible strings of digits when their attacks land. Monsters in the upper echelons of Diablo 4's hardest dungeons explode before they take their first breath. There is simply nothing in the game that can stand a chance, which means we probably won't have long before Blizzard puts a stop to it.

The exact mechanics of how Diablo 4 players have managed to defeat math again is mostly a mystery. We only know what steps are required to exponentially raise your damage until the game can't calculate it anymore. It's a puzzling combination of a sorcerer passive skill, a new seasonal power, and taking a dungeon portal at the right time.

Diablo 4 streamer and sorcerer expert Mekuna has a video explaining how to set it up, but Korean player wony is the one who first discovered the bug. Mekuna's method requires rushing through a dungeon until the portal to the next floor appears. From there, you need to build up a passive called Enlightenment by casting skills of different elements until it activates. Once it's going, you simply take the portal to the next dungeon and then repeat the steps for several minutes until your damage numbers are sufficiently ridiculous.

Normally, Enlightenment rewards you for cycling through different elemental skills by boosting all your elemental damage at once for a few seconds. But for some reason the seasonal power that swaps your highest elemental damage with a specific one of your choosing breaks everything when you load into a new area while Enlightenment is active. You can see the numbers in Mekuna's character sheet jump up from around 1,000% bonus damage to 400,000% after taking a portal a few times.

As long as you don't take a portal without Enlightenment active, your damage will keep ramping up until the numbers stretch across the screen. Players like Mekuna compete on community leaderboards to clear the highest tiers of the Pit and it's usually impossible for anyone to kill the monsters in tiers higher than 120 before the timer runs out. With this bug, tier 150 takes less than a minute.

"Hopefully that's going to be fixed quickly," Mekuna says in the video. "We don't need that in the game."

Blizzard hasn't acknowledged the bug, but this one is so egregious I fully expect a fix before the end of the week. Even if Diablo 4's endgame competitive scene isn't why most people play the game, there's no way it's going to allow something that makes the action RPG grind for more and more power this meaningless. If you're playing sorcerer, have fun while you can.