Spiritborn Dealing Trillions of Damage - Interaction Stacking in Vessel of Hatred

wowhead.com:

Since the release of Vessel of Hatred and the Spiritborn, players around the world have been constantly trying to break the Spiritborn's class meta. In a recent video, Diablo creator Rob2628 showcases a Chinese Diablo 4 player dealing up to 21 trillion damage with their Spiritborn. Despite the much-needed number squish with Vessel of Hatred,

Less than a week after the release of Diablo 4's first expansion, it appears that these kinds of insane damage numbers are already a reality again — but how? We try to break down the two primary interactions that seem responsible for situation at hand.

Best Spiritborn Builds Rob's Youtube Video

Viscous Shield

Like most Quill Volley builds, including our Quill Volley Endgame Build Guide, the showcased build seems to rely on a damage interaction created by Viscous Shield.

Usually, this Legendary Paragon node's maximum damage potential should be a 33% multiplicative damage bonus because the maximum value of a Barrier in Diablo 4 is capped at 100% of your Maximum Life (so 1% for each 3% of that barrier equals 100%/3 ~ 33%).
However, Viscous Shield seems not to take your Barrier percentage-based value but both your Base Health as a base value and your Maximum Health as the scaling value for its damage calculation. With that in mind, the following seems to happen:

• At Level 60, a player has 400 Base Life.
• We will not get 1% damage for each 3% of our Barrier value, but instead 1% damage for each 12 Health (3% of 400 Base Health).
• As a result, the Viscous Shield damage multiplier won't cap out at 33% because it doesn't follow the maximum Barrier value of 100%.
• Instead, Spiritborn players can infinitely scale this multiplier by simply increasing their Health.
• For example, using Viscous Shield with 6000 Health will result in a 500% damage multiplier. With 12000 Health, using the node will result in a 1000% damage multiplier.
• Ultimately, Spiritborn players want to achieve two things through their build setup: Infinite Barrier