When playing any RPG, there are going to be a number of different stats and effects you’ll need to understand if you hope to build your character to the fullest. The Diablo series is notorious for taking this standard and dialing up the complexity to eleven.

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After getting a couple of hours into Diablo 4, you may find yourself wondering about the Overpower stat. We’ll explain how it works and how to use it to your advantage below.

What Is Overpower Damage

Chances are you’ve read the Overpower Damage description provided in-game and are still not quite sure what it does. Don’t worry, you are not alone. Quite simply put, Overpower Damage is an additional damage type that gets added to your offensive skills. There is only a 3% chance that it will trigger with each attack, but once it does, the additional damage it provides will be based on a combination of your Life and Fortify stats.

Your Life stat is simply the total amount of health you have. Fortify is a bit trickier to understand since it is typically only available for the Barbarian, Druid, and Necromancer classes. In a nutshell, Fortify can be triggered by these classes and will provide an additional layer of health for a short period of time, making it harder to take them down in the heat of battle.

In addition to the damage determined by your Life and Fortify stats, Overpower Damage also stacks with the skill that triggered it by adding a base value of 50% of that skill damage on top. This means that the more powerful the skill, and the more upgraded it is, the Overpower Damage will scale with it proportionally, rather than by a fixed amount.

While not the largest contributor, increasing your Willpower will also increase your OP Damage.

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Improving Overpower Damage With Gear

While you can’t increase the 3% chance base stat of Overpower Damage triggering, you can influence it with special effects on your weapons and armor. Most commonly, you won’t find effects that influence the chance though, but rather the amount of damage Overpower inflicts.

Despite it being an unnecessarily confusing stat, it is an incredibly important one to pay attention to as it can give you regularly powered-up hits against tough enemies. Although you do need to balance this with other important stats and effects on your armor and weapons, if you happen to get a drop with a high boost to your Overpower Damage, don’t be so quick to throw it away.

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Improving Overpower Damage With Gems

While your chance of finding gear that improves Overpower Damage is fairly high, you can also more directly improve this stat by socketing your gear with the right gem. When viewing each type of gem, you'll notice that they provide different buffs depending on what kind of item you socket them into.

Currently, the only gem that influences Overpower Damage is the ruby. Since Overpower Damage is directly related to your attacks, the only way to take advantage of this effect is to socket a ruby into a weapon. Not all weapons have sockets, but you can add them to your favorite weapon by visiting the Jeweler in any large town. To add a socket, you'll need to have the rare material - Scattered Prisms.

Improving Overpower Damage With Skills

In addition to the gear and gem boosts you can use to influence your Overpower Damage, there are a handful of skills that trigger or scale with them as well. Since Overpower Damage is most often triggered using strong physical type attacks, only the Barbarian, Druid, and Necromancer have skills that will directly influence this stat. Below, we have a full list of all skill tree abilities and upgrades that influence Overpower Damage.

Next: Diablo 4: Level Scaling Explained