Dagoth_Rac wrote: »

Both are somewhat misleading. A 10% increase to base 50% crit damage multiplier? Is that an increase to 60% (50% + 10%) or 55% (50% + 10% of 50%)? As someone who writes financial software, and where this kind of ambiguity is common, I think the best tooltip would probably be something like, "Increases your critical damage rate by X basis points."

Waffennacht wrote: »

Well knowing that ZoS is moving away from multiplication modifiers into linear ones.

Example, using innerlight with undaunted mettle doesn't give you 10% and then another 3% with that 10% added, both only consider your base magicka.

Knowing this, I would assume all modifiers are or will become linear (correct terminology? )

mesmerizedish wrote: »

I don't know exactly how sneak attacks work, so I won't comment on your crouched example, but in the normal example, you're doing 11.4% more critical damage, which is close enough to 10% that it can probably be accounted for by the random element of damage rolls.

I imagine you got your 5.3% result because you calculated the increase over the total damage rather than the critical damage. Critical damage is just the extra damage on top of base damage.

mesmerizedish wrote: »

Avran_Sylt wrote: »

mesmerizedish wrote: »

I don't know exactly how sneak attacks work, so I won't comment on your crouched example, but in the normal example, you're doing 11.4% more critical damage, which is close enough to 10% that it can probably be accounted for by the random element of damage rolls.

I imagine you got your 5.3% result because you calculated the increase over the total damage rather than the critical damage. Critical damage is just the extra damage on top of base damage.

Ah, I should've mentioned I had the Serpent Mundus on at the time, with a bonus of 17% Critical damage. which is why I went off of the difference between having the passive active or not. In total I had up to 27% increased Critical Damage with the passive, 17% without.

None of that changes the fact that you're doing 11.4% more critical damage, not 5.3%

I do think there's some ambiguity here, but it's not the problem you suggest it is. Your misunderstanding is in what "critical damage" means. There's no way to interpret "10% more critical damage" to mean "10% more total damage on a critical hit," which is what you've done.

The real issue is the manner in which this bonus stacks with other like bonuses. Just based on how video game damage formulae tend to work, I'd bet that all "critical damage bonuses" are combined additively, not multiplicatively. If that's the case, then neither how it's currently worded nor how you suggest it be worded would be truly accurate.

I'll run through some modeled examples because I need a calculator to work with your damage numbers :P

Let's say an attack does 100 damage. Baseline crits deal 50% additional damage, so that's 50 critical damage for a total damage of 150.

Base: 100
Critical: 50
Total: 150

Now, if we take your passive that gives 10% bonus critical damage, the thing that those words mean would be:

Base: 100
Critical: 50 * 1.1 = 55
Total: 155

The way it probably works is, in fact, the way you think it works (10% assassination passive bonus, plus 17% Serpent stone bonus means critical damage is 50 + 10 + 17 = 77% bonus), but "Increases your critical multiplier by [x]%" would mean 50% * 1.1 * 1.17 = 64.4%. Coincidentally, this means the exact same thing as does the current text.

Just apropos of nothing, you must have more critical damage bonuses than the Serpent stone, because even without the assassination passive your crits are still hitting for 88% more than the base value.

When I originally cast my vote, it was guided by the answer to the question "does the problem OP describes exist," which is a firm "no." But now I've actually worked through a bit of math and there probably is a problem, but it's a problem that exists in every English-language game that deals with flat percentages rather than describing bonuses in terms of "crit rating" or the like. There's no good way to communicate "add 10 to the percentage" as long as the percentage is, you know, a percentage.

The best unambiguous solution would be to make crit damage just a scalar rather than a percentage, i.e. make the base "0.5" and word the passive as "Increases your critical multiplier by 0.1."

That's not going to happen, so I think, as much as I hate to say it, we're going to have to settle for the ambiguity.