Something Fishy Going on with Critical Strike

Gilliamtherogue

Edit* This bug has been fixed as of the PTS release of Thieves Guild. If this somehow breaks before/after launch I will begin using this thread again. End edit*

So I've been doing a lot of testing today and I noticed that I haven't been critting much on PTS. Currently the character I'm on has 73.6% weapon critical, but all of my attacks are reporting roughly somewhere between 40%-50% crit strike on my recount. I've tried narrowing it down to certain sources but I can't get anything truly solid. It could be broken passives, weird battle leveling mechanics, or something completely different. Here's some of my testing, I've decided not to use pictures since I have over 30 and don't want to spend the time uploading/sizing them all.

While naked I'm at 30% crit, which is accurate when I did the testing for that. Then I put on Major Savagery (10%) and saw ~40% crit chance. After that I activated one critical set bonus on jewelry and noticed the jump as well (46.5% crit chance over 200 attacks with 43% tooltip critical strike). Then I started putting Assassination abilities on my bars (2% per skill slotted and 3% when I crit, a total of 7% crit chance with my bar setup) and saw the increase as well. Up to here everything works, my character is at 50% crit chance in combat and the the average of the past 1682 light attacks is 47.6% which is pretty close.

This is where it starts to get funky. I put on two sharpened maelstrom daggers, which activates the twin blade and blunt 10% bonus. I then proceeded to kill three giants with only light attacks.
Test 1 - 64 Light attacks, 51.6% crit
Test 2- 67 Light attacks, 47.8% crit
Test 3 68 Light attacks, 44.1% crit
Average 47.83% crit chance, extremely similar to my testing without the daggers.

Then I proceeded to put on all of my armor/jewelry, 5 piece Briarheart and 5 piece Essence Thief, (10.5% crit from medium armor passive), which activated an additional crit set bonus (3% per) and remove the daggers. Character sheet crit is 60.6, so 63.6% in combat. For my sanity's sake I decided to use 3 giants/mammoths for each test since each kill takes roughly 1 minute and respawn timers are on 2 minutes.
Test 1- 65 Light attacks, 49.2% crit
Test 2- 67 Light attacks, 40.3% crit
Test 3- 62 Light attacks, 53.2% crit
Average 47.57% crit. Sound familiar?

Then I put on all my gear, 5 piece essence 5 piece briar heart, 2 maelstrom sharpened daggers. I am a total of 73.6% crit in combat. I decided to do 4 tests for this one since stuff started dying faster.
Test 1- 51 Light attacks, 49% crit
Test 2- 49 Light attacks, 46.9% crit
Test 3- 51 Light attacks, 41.2% crit
Test 4- 48 Light attacks, 52.1% crit
Average 47.3% crit. I was really upset at this point.

So either Medium armor and Dual wield passives are completely broken, Battle Leveling increases the overall amount of crit rating needed to get 1% (v16 it takes 219 rating to get 1%), Orsinium mobs are resistant to crit, or there's a new hardcap of 50% crit chance. I won't place any bets knowing this game, but this is extremely frustrating. All of my testing was done on a v16 template character, with all template gear on PTS. I tested on Mammoths and Giants in Orsinium.
Any insight is greatly appreciated.

Xeven

Always nice to see these kinds of threads. Thanks for testing and sharing your data as well as pointing out potential issues.

Gilliamtherogue

Also found this on Live, pretty sure I was reading something about weapon enchants being made to scale to whatever was highest in a recent patch, buuuut...

Xantaria

RIP PvE Stamina even more if this goes to live servers. Crit and Crit Damage was the only way to make them Garbage. So they were atleast not ***. Garbage is something. But I guess we're stepping down from being Garbage to being ***. Nice!

Xantaria

Gilliamtherogue wrote: »

Also found this on Live, pretty sure I was reading something about weapon enchants being made to scale to whatever was highest in a recent patch, buuuut...

I think that was mentioned for the 'burning' and 'poisoned' effect that your weapon enchantments procc. Those appear to be working correctly.

Needlessly to say that this is still an issue.

PaulD

It would appear the "poisoned weapon" crits are dependent on the weapon only, and take no benefit from any other boost.

Tankqull

Xantaria wrote: »

show previous quotes

Gilliamtherogue wrote: »

Also found this on Live, pretty sure I was reading something about weapon enchants being made to scale to whatever was highest in a recent patch, buuuut...

I think that was mentioned for the 'burning' and 'poisoned' effect that your weapon enchantments procc. Those appear to be working correctly.

Needlessly to say that this is still an issue.

thats a relic of the pre stamina increasement patches where all dots, poisons, burns etc where handeld as "magica based" attacks and thus rely on you magic crit rate wich with ~19% is in a acceptable range... (increase your spell crit and it will rise)
needs to be changed to the bigger stat though...

OrphanHelgen

I have tested critical chance with rapid strikes and not light attacks, and it seams to be working with that.
Funny math about crit, is that if you have more then 50%, you should get "free crits" compared to your chance stats, since its more likely to crit then not to crit. Hard to explain that, but anyway, thanks for great post.

Another thing I want to add since we are on the subject of chances.
I have been playing around with legerdemain and justice achievements lately.
Last night I had 6 unsuccessful pickpockets in a row with 85% chance. I do not believe that is a coincidence. I know I should think so, but its fascinating how many unsuccessful pickpockets you get compared to successful.

Cuyler

ESO - where math is a guideline, not an exact science. thanks for looking into this

nimander99

Didn't they say we would never be able to exceed 50% skill increase? 50% mitigation... 50% crit... 50% spell mitigation etc. It sounds like they may have fixed the problem that was with it after mod 6 dropped.

Gilliamtherogue

nimander99 wrote: »

Didn't they say we would never be able to exceed 50% skill increase? 50% mitigation... 50% crit... 50% spell mitigation etc. It sounds like they may have fixed the problem that was with it after mod 6 dropped.

They said that they fixed an issue where mob mitigation was capped at 50% just like player's mitigation was. Now NPC's can have over 50% damage reduction, but they shouldn't be resistant to crit. After impenetrable got reworked as a stat, there are no in game sources to decrease the chance of being hit, only the severity of critical hit damage. Not to mention that was a PvP only stat and no mobs could get a hold of it as a stat.

OrphanHelgen wrote: »

I have tested critical chance with rapid strikes and not light attacks, and it seams to be working with that.
Funny math about crit, is that if you have more then 50%, you should get "free crits" compared to your chance stats, since its more likely to crit then not to crit. Hard to explain that, but anyway, thanks for great post.

Another thing I want to add since we are on the subject of chances.
I have been playing around with legerdemain and justice achievements lately.
Last night I had 6 unsuccessful pickpockets in a row with 85% chance. I do not believe that is a coincidence. I know I should think so, but its fascinating how many unsuccessful pickpockets you get compared to successful.

I actually noticed the issue when I was testing the Maelstrom Daggers and noticed Rapid Strikes was hardly critting, and then tested Rending Slashes as well which was the same. On PTS none of my recounts are anywhere near the amount of critical I have, even if I'm using a large test number like before (anywhere from 100-1000, the more the better) it always gets somewhere around 47%. There are a lot of possibilities to why this could be happening as I stated, but taking shots in the dark does no good. Time to call in the big guns, @ZOS_RichLambert , @ZOS_GinaBruno , @ZOS_JessicaFolsom can any of you shed some light on these reports? Let me know if you need me to do any additional testing for you guys, always a pleasure to help out.

Keepercraft

Just RNG.

Gilliamtherogue

Keepercraft wrote: »

Just RNG.

No, RNG would mean that occasionally I'd see MORE than my crit, and much closer results to it. But the fact that I spent two hours killing mobs to get those numbers and never once went over 60% crit when my crit was at 73.6% is proof that something is wrong. Here's even more testing I just did today, with an additional 8% crit from Cyrodiil. I wanted to make sure it wasn't just Orsinium. Lots of pictures here, apologies.







This however doesn't throw out battle leveled area idea, as templates don't have access to (solo) non battle leveled areas with enough mobs to test these things. If some people wanted to help me in something like vICP/vWGT just face tanking trash while I get numbers I could check there too.

Gilliamtherogue

Another update. Tested Craglorn mobs and found similar results. I have the same crit as I did before, nothing changed, 73.6% weapon crit in combat and here's the results.


In comparison to Live, where I have 78.8% crit due to a slightly different armor setup


I don't think having 5.2% more crit is supposed to unlock a 30% crit difference. This is not merely "RNG".

Kartalin

OrphanHelgen wrote: »

Another thing I want to add since we are on the subject of chances.
I have been playing around with legerdemain and justice achievements lately.
Last night I had 6 unsuccessful pickpockets in a row with 85% chance. I do not believe that is a coincidence. I know I should think so, but its fascinating how many unsuccessful pickpockets you get compared to successful.

Statistically speaking the probability of 6 failures in 6 attempts with an 85% chance of success is .00001139.
GG ZOS.

Elder_III

This sounds pretty serious - I'm not the greatest tester, but I can do some testing via Template as well. I'll need to get some addons installed for the PTS, but I would be happy to test some numbers.

Gilliamtherogue

"Fixed an issue where Critical values were displaying higher values than intended on Battle Leveled player characters." from the PTS patch notes of 2.2.2. This could be a potential issue going on, where v16 characters are being effected by this despite not being battle leveled and taking a hit in crit values when they shouldn't be. Just a theory however.

cschwingeb14_ESO

But I don't think a display issue explains that. You should have a much higher crit than 50% even if there is a display bug:

10% base
10.5% medium
12% CP
6% briarheart
7% precise
10% DW passive
12% thief (did you have this mundus up?)
10% Major Savage
3% Minor Savage
X% NB skills

Even without mundus, you're well above 50%.

ZOS, anything?

nimander99

What I was trying to say above was aren't we, the players, capped at 50% increases? Meaning if I have 67% crit then 17% of that is pointless?? I thought that happened with mod 6... maybe I'm wrong and misunderstood that?

kojou

nimander99 wrote: »

What I was trying to say above was aren't we, the players, capped at 50% increases? Meaning if I have 67% crit then 17% of that is pointless?? I thought that happened with mod 6... maybe I'm wrong and misunderstood that?

The screenshot from "live" shows damage stats with what looks to be the correct amount of Crit, so what the OP is noting is a discrepancy between "live" and "PTS."

I am also very interested in what the answer to the OP's concern is. I run my Nightblade as a high'ish crit build, so if I am going to be capped at 50% in the next patch then I am going to change some gear etc.

Also if it is intentional to limit players to 50% then the character sheet should show in some what that the build has reached the cap by making the number a red 50% and not mislead players to think that they are getting benefit from running gear with crit when they are not.

Gilliamtherogue

Running a 50% crit cap will literally mean that stamina builds are forced over 50% crit into useless stats that they cannot rellocate into other power, effectively killing their competitive DPS. Stamina builds excel at two things and two things only right now; AoE and Burst. AoE because steel tornado/acid spray are the two best AoE abilities in the game, able to hit many more targets than Impulse/etc, as well as having higher raw damage. Burst because they have access to stealth mechanics (not really prevelant in trials, but I sometimes pull 40-50k burst on mobs like Crematorial Guards in vWGT because I can sneak attack) and because we have access to so much crit chance and crit hit damage. These two stats are the only power we have after the penetration nerf, meaning if they get nerfed we lose our entire strength, and this game goes back to Elder Staves Online (already sort of is since the past 2 major patches have heavily favored caster builds in every regard minus what I mentioned) and I will pretty much throw in the towel.

OrphanHelgen

I just tested, rapid strikes gives correct amount of crit based on my stat.
But anyway, it would be cool if they capped crit at 50%, gives me a reason to go swords instead of daggers. Poor khajiits tho.

Gilliamtherogue

cschwingeb14_ESO wrote: »

But I don't think a display issue explains that. You should have a much higher crit than 50% even if there is a display bug:

10% base
10.5% medium
12% CP
6% briarheart
7% precise
10% DW passive
12% thief (did you have this mundus up?)
10% Major Savage
3% Minor Savage
X% NB skills

Even without mundus, you're well above 50%.

ZOS, anything?

I had Shadow, not Thief. Also I had sharpened because I tried making over 50 toons and didn't get a single precise dagger from the box they give, and gave up. My total crit was 73.6% crit in combat, meaning I had as you stated
10% base, 10.5% medium, 12% CP, 6.1% briar hearth, 10% daggers, 10% major savagery, 4% from relentless and soul harvest (NB passive), 3% minor savagery, 8% khajiit.

I should be seeing much higher crit on these mobs than what I was averaging at (47.6%) so something is going on.

Gilliamtherogue

OrphanHelgen wrote: »

I just tested, rapid strikes gives correct amount of crit based on my stat.
But anyway, it would be cool if they capped crit at 50%, gives me a reason to go swords instead of daggers. Poor khajiits tho.

10% Base, 12% Champion Points, 10% Major Savagery, 3% Minor Savagery, 7.5% if 5/7 medium armor, 10.5 if 7/7. We're already at 45.5. Now Khajiits and Nightblades by default have 57.5% crit chance, meaning 7.5% crit is useless and there's nothing we can do. Then precise becomes a dead trait, thief becomes a dead mundus stone, daggers become a dead weapon choice, crit bonuses on gear is wasted. This effectively kills tons of options and forces all builds to follow the same boring path. This is not "cool" nor is it a smart choice to make on their part, especially when they always try to emphasis choice making in character progression/build creation.

Gilliamtherogue

OrphanHelgen wrote: »

I just tested, rapid strikes gives correct amount of crit based on my stat.
But anyway, it would be cool if they capped crit at 50%, gives me a reason to go swords instead of daggers. Poor khajiits tho.

@OrphanHelgen What is your crit by the way? Can you post more specifics please? Template or made character, level, where you tested, perimeters of gear/build/etc, mob types. The more details the more we can hopefully focus in on the problem.

kojou

One thing you might want to try if you haven't already is to check various passives individually and see if some passives are bugged (wouldn't be the first time) rather than there being a cap.

Next time I get into PTS I will try some things as well.

Also, did you report the issue as a /bug yet? We may get more attention to the issue if someone has it in their queue to check it out.

OrphanHelgen

Gilliamtherogue wrote: »

show previous quotes

OrphanHelgen wrote: »

I just tested, rapid strikes gives correct amount of crit based on my stat.
But anyway, it would be cool if they capped crit at 50%, gives me a reason to go swords instead of daggers. Poor khajiits tho.

@OrphanHelgen What is your crit by the way? Can you post more specifics please? Template or made character, level, where you tested, perimeters of gear/build/etc, mob types. The more details the more we can hopefully focus in on the problem.

Yeah I can post pics tomorrow. I have 69% crit , 5 hundings, 4 night silence, all legendary, orc DK, daggers precise.

Xantaria

ZOS ... acknowledge this issue ... It is the most serious one so far!!!

Teiji

Xantaria wrote: »

ZOS ... acknowledge this issue ... It is the most serious one so far!!!

@Xantaria will be fixed with Thieves Guild DLC don't worry.

oryxnamder7

this is sounds like a very serious issue..................

Malmai

Gilliamtherogue wrote: »

So I've been doing a lot of testing today and I noticed that I haven't been critting much on PTS. Currently the character I'm on has 73.6% weapon critical, but all of my attacks are reporting roughly somewhere between 40%-50% crit strike on my recount. I've tried narrowing it down to certain sources but I can't get anything truly solid. It could be broken passives, weird battle leveling mechanics, or something completely different. Here's some of my testing, I've decided not to use pictures since I have over 30 and don't want to spend the time uploading/sizing them all.

While naked I'm at 30% crit, which is accurate when I did the testing for that. Then I put on Major Savagery (10%) and saw ~40% crit chance. After that I activated one critical set bonus on jewelry and noticed the jump as well (46.5% crit chance over 200 attacks with 43% tooltip critical strike). Then I started putting Assassination abilities on my bars (2% per skill slotted and 3% when I crit, a total of 7% crit chance with my bar setup) and saw the increase as well. Up to here everything works, my character is at 50% crit chance in combat and the the average of the past 1682 light attacks is 47.6% which is pretty close.

This is where it starts to get funky. I put on two sharpened maelstrom daggers, which activates the twin blade and blunt 10% bonus. I then proceeded to kill three giants with only light attacks.
Test 1 - 64 Light attacks, 51.6% crit
Test 2- 67 Light attacks, 47.8% crit
Test 3 68 Light attacks, 44.1% crit
Average 47.83% crit chance, extremely similar to my testing without the daggers.

Then I proceeded to put on all of my armor/jewelry, 5 piece Briarheart and 5 piece Essence Thief, (10.5% crit from medium armor passive), which activated an additional crit set bonus (3% per) and remove the daggers. Character sheet crit is 60.6, so 63.6% in combat. For my sanity's sake I decided to use 3 giants/mammoths for each test since each kill takes roughly 1 minute and respawn timers are on 2 minutes.
Test 1- 65 Light attacks, 49.2% crit
Test 2- 67 Light attacks, 40.3% crit
Test 3- 62 Light attacks, 53.2% crit
Average 47.57% crit. Sound familiar?

Then I put on all my gear, 5 piece essence 5 piece briar heart, 2 maelstrom sharpened daggers. I am a total of 73.6% crit in combat. I decided to do 4 tests for this one since stuff started dying faster.
Test 1- 51 Light attacks, 49% crit
Test 2- 49 Light attacks, 46.9% crit
Test 3- 51 Light attacks, 41.2% crit
Test 4- 48 Light attacks, 52.1% crit
Average 47.3% crit. I was really upset at this point.

So either Medium armor and Dual wield passives are completely broken, Battle Leveling increases the overall amount of crit rating needed to get 1% (v16 it takes 219 rating to get 1%), Orsinium mobs are resistant to crit, or there's a new hardcap of 50% crit chance. I won't place any bets knowing this game, but this is extremely frustrating. All of my testing was done on a v16 template character, with all template gear on PTS. I tested on Mammoths and Giants in Orsinium.
Any insight is greatly appreciated.

So what they stealth nerfed crit ?