the power of criticals

[pokerjunky]

i had started to maximize my first character's critical skills but it seemed much weaker than my other options. i haven't pinned down the exact math on this but it seems like, on average, i always do more damage from maximizing the power of normal hits than from maximizing critical hits. maximizing critical hits means hitting the enemy less often as well as weaker normal hits. getting a critical on an already damaged enemy often means a lot of 'wasted' damage. hitting a wounded enemy for twice their total hp doesn't make them more dead. if it took more total hits then where is the advantage?

what is the highest % chance of criticals we can get to? what is the best damage/hit trade-off you guys have seen?

[Piggy the Slayer]

Firm believer in high base damage. With the amount of damage resistance enemies have on the road to Remgard its vital to have high base damage otherwise a fight just drags and you lose HP. High AC and AD are IMO the way to build a dangerous hero. Lots of HP helps too. Criticals are great but a hero can still be very strong without them. Nothing new here.

[Sarumar]

Criticals were overpowered before version 0.6.11. Thats why so many still have crit build. I stil love crit, it is nice to wipe out severall enemyes in single round

There are not max % in crit chance, but making it over 40% is really hard.

[Mino]

I agree the critical hit system isn't as powerful as it used to be, but I still find it helpful. If you can get your effective critical chance to over 25% (the more over the better), then you get an average of 1 out of 4 attacks being a critical hit. Using the Dagger of the Shadow Priests and Jewel of Fallhaven, you'll have 4 attacks once you've got 2 levels of Combat Speed (or max AP of 12), or until then you can use speed potions.

That critical hit is helpful against some of the very high HP creatures like the brutes and arulirs from the newest update. So if you're going for a critical hit build, unless you're trying to meet requirements for other skills, I would only use skill points on More Criticals, and ignore Better Criticals (the multiplier becomes less important as you build up your base AD, so its the chance you want to focus on). And of course, get all the critical chance boosting equipment you can (one of which is quest based).

But also remember some monsters are now immune to critical hits so you might want to switch weapons for something that gives you a higher AC and AD for them.

[Wyrmspawn]

Firm believer in high base damage. With the amount of damage resistance enemies have on the road to Remgard its vital to have high base damage otherwise a fight just drags and you lose HP. High AC and AD are IMO the way to build a dangerous hero. Lots of HP helps too. Criticals are great but a hero can still be very strong without them. Nothing new here.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember that you had a critical build that could hit into the 600s... That seems pretty powerful to me, and while critical hits may be a little bit of a gambit at the moment, offering no help against undead creatures, IMO it should be very fun to one-shot all of the enemies in the game by lvl 40.

[Piggy the Slayer]

I did have such a character but they met a violent death by the side of a motorway. Decided to leave criticals for now. Although hitting for 600+ is great. That character did base damage of over 100.

Dont leave your pocket unzipped when doing silly speeds on a motorbike.
My new build will end up much stronger.

[Mino]

Sorry to hear about your phone Piggy, and that's some good advice.
I'd also suggest that everyone sign up for something like Drop Box or Google Drive (since its probably safe to assume we all have a Google account) so you can occasionally upload your save files to the cloud in case you need to put it on a new/different device.

Or you can just e-mail it to yourself, which is what I used to do before cloud storage.

[Thystonius]

Sorry to hear about your phone Piggy, and that's some good advice.
I'd also suggest that everyone sign up for something like Drop Box or Google Drive (since its probably safe to assume we all have a Google account) so you can occasionally upload your save files to the cloud in case you need to put it on a new/different device.

Or you can just e-mail it to yourself, which is what I used to do before cloud storage.

+1, email to myself is the old skool way but both google Drive and DropBox are nice.

I use DotSP with some crit hit equipment, gives me 21% crit chance (1 in 5 hits) and that helps a lot against big hp enemies. Some pieces with crithit are so much worse than others that I left those out, I have helmet, vest and boots with high AC and BC.

Not putting points in more crit until I know for sure the high level skills are getting useful (Concussion, Taunt, Bone Fracture, etc.)