Blizzard decided that for Season 11 they are changing how defenses work in Diablo 4 with a new stat called Toughness. The goal is to make Health, Armor, and Resistances more meaningful and give players a better view of their survivability.
Toughness represents the total damage you can take after accounting for all damage mitigation sources. It appears under your character stats, right beneath Attack Power, with hover-over details for each damage type.
What Is Changing
- Armor and Resistances are now rating systems with diminishing returns at higher values.
- Armor reduces all damage types, not just Physical.
- New Damage Resistance type: Physical Damage.
- Torment tier penalties for Armor and Resistances have been removed.
- Skills and Paragon Nodes that provide Damage Reduction now boost Armor or all Resistances multiplicatively.
The goal is to make survivability a meaningful choice, encouraging players to gear defensively when they are climbing difficulty tiers. So to make it simple, you should now have it easier to build your defense, and the possibility to go for a more tanky build, at the possible cost of power.
Player Feedback – “Tough, but confusing”
On Reddit, players have mixed reactions:
- Many argue that Toughness is meaningless without context, since the number alone does not show what difficulty you are geared for.
- Some suggest mapping Toughness to a rough difficulty level, e.g., “P35” for the max Pit tier survivable for 30 seconds or something like that.
- Others like that hover details show per-element defense, helping compare upgrades, but feel the top-level number lacks clarity.
- A few pointed out that Hardcore and new players might struggle with this system if they expect exact guidance from the stat. It does not give you that, and can be very confusing.
Among the community ideas, there was also color coding. This would give you a small indication on how you are doing, depending on the tier you are in:
- Red = You will die
- Yellow = You will suffer
- Green = You will live
Others argue that we should just “play and see” instead of relying on a number. And they are not entirely wrong. Too many people focus on what exact numbers show up, but forget that sometimes, you just have to see for yourself.
Toughness is an attempt to bring together multiple defense stats into a single metric, but the discussion shows that is can be a real challenge to balance between something flexible and also clear enough for everyone. Players want a stat that is going to be helpful, without being so confusing.
For now, the PTR is live, and the best way to see how Toughness feels is to log in, try it out, and see how your builds feel against the new system!
