Crit rating vs crit damage and hard caps

M_TeK_9 · December 2015

Can someone please explain what the % on my character sheet actually means, what crit rating does, and what happens if the % on my sheet is too high?

Shelgon · December 2015

When you crit something it does (I think) 1.5 more damage (or more depending on champion points or mundus). The percent you see on your sheet is the chance you toon has to crit. Nothing happens if your crit is too high, people have ran around with 100% crit chance.

zornyan · December 2015

You don't really wanna go over 60% crit for pvp, or 70% ish for pve since after that point you're giving up a chunk of raw damage.

Your base multiplier is 50% or 1.5x more damage, there are passives such as the NB hemmorage passives that adds 10% to this, champion points add a small percentage, and the mundus stone the shadow can increase it by up to 18% with all divines gear too.

Think the 'cap' as such is a 2.0 modifier when using all above options combined.

willymchilybily · December 2015

crit chance % is obviously the odds that a skill gets a critical hit increasing the damage by 50% (x 1.5) . Crit rating is a number that is modified by your character level to give crit chance %. i believe the forumula is along the lines of:

CR = critical strike rating (the number)
LVL = character level 1 to 49 (VR1=50, VR16 = 65)

Crit as % = CR / ((2 x LVL x(100+LVL))/100)

so your V16 hunding's rage that gives 665? crit rating on set bonus 2 and set bonus 4
(665/((2 x 65 (100+65))/100)) = 3.1% crit.

Crit damage increases the amount of damage the critical does when it goes off. using say the shadow mundus adds 12%. with divines legendary gear on all 7 armor pieces it adds or 18.3% , 100 points into precise strikes gives 25% which now actually gives the full 25% more crit damage so with both of those

1.5 + 0183 +0.25 = 1.933 so now you go from 1.5 crit damage base multiplier to 1.933. This is essentially a hard cap only because there are no further ways to increase crit damage permenantly open to all classes.

A skill like trap beast giving buff or war horn morph. would have increased it more,. but its temporary

crit chance has no hard cap. and in theory it would be possible to hit 100% with the right race/class (eg. khajit/NB). but there is diminishing returns to high crit set ups where the increase in crit chance and crit damage is under cut by the loss in weapon damage you could otherwise get.

a good example is the champion points mighty and precise strikes. the maximum damage buffing you can get from these champion point items is heavily weighted towards mighty not matter your critical chance.

people will tell you values (50% 60% 70%) at which point one is better than the other. but this mostly stems from the mundus stones and people telling other people information without understanding it themselves.

As you increase critical chance you do more damage from more crits but at some point it is better to buff your critical damage rather than your critical chance is the theory. This is true for using the mundus stones to compare going theif mundus gives 11% crit chance going shadow 12% Crit damage. obviously at low crit chance (below 30%) you arr better buffing critical chance than buffing critical damage as crits are so rare. At about 47% the critical chance (without a mundus stone) you get about equal damage from increasing that crit chance by a further 11% or by increasing your crit damage by 12% this is likely where the magical 50% crit chance use shadow came from. but this come from the assumption of perfect distribution of chance.

Personally i rock the thief still because it allows me to keep high crit chance 70-80% and it allows me to have penetration on my weapons. Especially in PvP. Id rather every move from my burst crit rather than have the one that does crit hit for an extra 1k more damage at most

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M_TeK_9 · December 2015

Thank you all very much.

kylewwefan · December 2015

I have seen this in other posts with a lot of math and values and real time use from PC users. There is no way to see these things on console, but what I gathered from everything I've seen; it doesn't make much difference in your build raising Crit over 50%. On console you can see these values only on the character selection.
For me that means raising weapon damage base is more beneficial in most cases rather than Crit. That helps to decide how many and what type of armor sets I want to choose to use. It also makes difference in what traits to use and what kind of potions are best for different circumstances.
That's about enough to make my head spin. Oh, and the numbers go completely crazy if you're not VR16 in PVP area cyrodil.