Mechanics · Combat rules

Player versus Player

What changes when your target is a player instead of a monster — the 17% damage rule for players, mercenaries and pets straight from the difficulty table, where it sits in the damage chain, and how Crushing Blow and Open Wounds are scaled down against people.PvPduelhostileDifferent against players

How it works

Against a monster your damage is your damage. Against another player the game multiplies every hit by a percentage from its difficulty table before anything else happens, and a few on-hit effects are scaled down on top of that. The mechanics pages mark each stat with how it behaves against players; this page is the rule they point to.

The damage rule

The percentages are the same in every difficulty (difficultylevels.txt):

Who hits whom	Damage dealt
Player → player	17%
Player → mercenary	100%
Player → Prime Evil (Diablo, Baal, Mephisto)	100%
Mercenary → player	17%
Mercenary → mercenary	25%
Mercenary → boss	50% in Normal, 35% in Nightmare, 25% in Hell
Pet (minion, summon) → player	17%
Prime Evil → player	100%
Prime Evil → mercenary	200%
Prime Evil → pet	400%

So a 6,000-damage Fist of the Heavens lands for about 1,020 on a player, and a mercenary or a Valkyrie hits a player with the same sixth. The cut is the first step of the defender's chain, before Energy Shield, resistances or damage reduction (Taking Damage): a shield or a resistance then works on the reduced hit, which is why an Energy Shield Sorceress spends a sixth of the mana in a duel that she would in the field for the same spell.

damage against a player = hit × 17 ÷ 100, then the defender's chain as usual

Effects that are scaled down against players

[[crushing-blow]] takes 1/10 of a player's current life from a melee hit and 1/20 from a ranged one, against 1/4 and 1/8 for an ordinary monster (the Basin's table; mercenaries are treated as players here).
[[open-wounds]] bleeds a player at a reduced rate, and a ranged hit bleeds half of what a melee hit does.
The table also gives a hit-react buffer of 10 for a player hit by a player (PlayerHitReactBufferVSPlayer), the same as against monsters, and caps a mercenary's stun at 13 (MercenaryMaxStunLength).

What does not change

Your resistances and their caps, the 50% cap on Physical Damage Reduction, absorb, blocking, chance to hit and every breakpoint are the same rules against a player as against a monster. A duel is the same game with one multiplier at the front.

The percentages above are the table's. Other player-versus-player rules the community has measured over the years (shortened stun, chill and curse durations, leech against players) are not in the game's tables and are left off this page until a source we can cite covers them.

Written from the game's tables (build 3.3.93847) and the cited pages; a per-level table is computed from skills.txt and skilldesc.txt by the same evaluator the skill pages use. A “legacy rule” is a published engine rule no table proves; a “game table” is read from the table named. · Report incorrect data