Mechanical Questions Thread

"

adghar wrote:

"

frenzul wrote:

Using projectile skills as an example... does each cast have a chance to crit or each projectile? More specifically, what about for something with multiple stages like frost blades? If the initial hit doesn't crit, could the projectiles that follow still crit?

I don't think Mark will answer this because he is a bit of a rules lawyer and so has kind of already answered:

quotation from the Book of Mark_GGG

"

Mark_GGG wrote:

"

Khornaar wrote:

wrote:
I have a question about Abyssal Cry and its interaction with critical strikes.
When does critical strike check occurs? in a moment of initial cast or in a moment of monster exploding?

Checking whether a hit is a critical strike or not is always done when that specific hit is calculated, and cannot be done at any other time, because your critical strike chance can be different for different hits.
The critical strike roll is only made once, when the skill is cast, just like most skills. All hits from the same action have the same roll, but are potentially checking against different chances to crit, so may or may not crit on different enemies.

However I love talking about crit so I am going to elaborate, in my own words.

Crit is rolled once per skill use. This means that in most cases, when you Press Button Once, either everything that happens as a result of that button press will crit, or none of the results will crit. I.e. in most cases, if the Melee Hit doesn't crit, then neither will the Projectiles, from Frost Blade.

Note that I said "in most cases." The other cases I'm talking about are conditional crits, that is, when critical strike chance depends on one factor or anothwr. The classical example is Assassin's Mark, which adds flat crit chance. Different enemies will have different critical strike chances. How is this resolved?

If you want to understand crit in this game you have to recognize that your Critical Strike Chance stat is not a Chance in the traditional sense. What that stat does in reality is set a threshold which must be passed in order to crit. Your actual random number roll is the same no matter what your Critical Strike Chance stat is.

Here's the math behind it. When you Use a Skill, which usually means one button press, you make a roll between 0 and 99.9. Then, when you Hit an enemy, you compare your roll with your Critical Strike Chance against that target. If your number is less than your Chance stat, you pass the Chance test.

Let's bring this back to the Frost Blades example. You use a Vagan's Rusted Sword with no other gear or passives. Whenever your Melee Hits crit, all your Projectile hits crit as well.

Now suppose you add jewels that make it so your Melee Critical Strike Chance 10% but your Projectile stats are unaffected, leaving ProjectIle Critical Strike Chance at 5%. This means that if you observe a melee crit, there is a 50% chance that your Projectiles crit as well. Why is this?

If your melee hit crit, you know you must have rolled between 0 and 9.9, because those are the only values that are lower than 10.0, your Melee Critical Strike Chance. But in order to get a value below 5.0, your Projectile Critical Strike Chance, you must have rolled 0 to 4.9.

Notice the beauty inherent in this system. Assuming all Hits, your projectiles are still 5%, and your melee is 10%, but you still get clustered crits, i.e. when you crit, it slams into a whole bunch of enemies at once, just like the game developers intended.

Note I had to stipulate Vagan's because Chance to Hit screws it all up a bit. In order for an Attack to crit, it must pass two Chance to Hit checks in total, one entropy based and one fully pseudorandom. The entropy based one is the actual Hit check, while the fully pseudo random one is a "crit confirm," i.e. it is a second roll that must pass in order for a crit to be allowed. This means Evasion is doubly defensive against Critical Strikes.