Critical Strikes and WM - The REAL mechanics

All too often, I read and hear about people regularly misinformed about how WM works with criticals, and I find it worth posting a short explanation in here to provide the actual story into how these work.

WM is designed to MULTIPLY your current base critical attack chance and damage for a POWER used in the window of opportunity when your mastery attack hits your target.

Lets break this down a bit here.

WM multiplies your BASE critical attack chance and damage - the chance is multiplied by 360% (or 3.6) and the magnitude chances depending on which mastery combo you use. HOWEVER, it is NOT a 360% chance to hit for critical damage!

If a player has only the base 5% critical attack chance (no SP bonuses, gear affinities, or iconic innates), this means that on a WM combo, their might ability only has an 18% chance to crit. The WM combo itself? This percentage to deal critical damage on those weapon attacks is UNAFFECTED and remains at 5%.

Now, when you raise your critical attack chance, each 1% you raise will grant you a 3.6% chance increase with your superpower in your WM combo. Therefore...

5% base critical chance
3% critical chance, iconic ability
15% critical chance of SP innates
5% critical ability chance off gear affinities

With ALL of these obtained, your base critical attack chance for your abilities are 28%. If you use this with WM, this chance becomes 100.8% - meaning GUARANTEED to crit.

-------------------------------------------------------------

The reason I explain all of this is because although guaranteed crits are entirely possible, it is NOT something that happens just because you use WM. Those critical chances you may be missing can be enough to cause crits to actually no longer be guaranteed.

If your base critical ability chance is below 28%, you no longer have guaranteed critical hits on your WM ability.

------------------------------------------------------------

As far as magnitudes go for critical hits, they also use the same multiplying mechanics, just the multiplier values are not known and vary depending on the WM combo of your choice.

Furthermore, be aware that WM weapon attacks do NOT have any sort of extra modifiers on those attacks - they only go off your base critical attack chance and damage.

Because of all this, PLEASE grab your critical chance bonuses for DPS. These are important to everyone, regardless if you spam a WM combo and cant be bothered with might.....or you rely on those might moves. Guaranteed criticals are powerful, but you MUST have enough base critical chance for them to be guaranteed.

Hope you might have learned something. Feel free to comment, discuss, complain, or otherwise.

Good info to know

i was trying to explain this to someone the other day adn could not figure out how, it sounded good in my head but the way it came out was confusing, this help alot thanks for the example.

the guaranteed part has to be wrong, i've had everything specced since wm dropped and every so often i'll throw wm hit, get the crit window on a single target and get a measly 500 or so, when i crit however, it's upwards of 1800. I do crit alot more than i miss but, i do miss.
Meaning, it's not "guaranteed" but a much more probable chance than a slight one.
Good guide otherwise, i hope a lot of people read it.

if you want to get a little deaper in you, you can also loss, 2 citical attach chance to come out with 100.8% chance to crit with WM and add 12 more precor might or if your luck 50prec/50might togather. or you can over mod one of your Yellow or Blue sockets and gain 23 prec or 24 might depeding on what you like.

That likely has more to do with crit mag variation. I'll see crits vary widely with WM, but they're still listed as crits.

@ ForumJunky

While this idea may not affect the guaranteed part for your might ability for the WM combo, a lower critical chance still affects your DoT's (excluding initial hit) and all weapon attacks, which do produce the majority of your damage for most players - all of these still operate off only your base critical chance/damage values.

@ DoIAmuseYou

Various issues can prevent WM's bonus from activating. Most of them involve having a robot sidekick or a pet summoned from any power tree. Trinket pets do not impact WM, but those other pets remove the bonus crits from WM.

A few abilities also for some reason don't see a boost either. Mass Terror in mental is one such example.

I get that, but with 165 sp and all crit chance/magnitudes specced it's kinda hard to believe it crit for about 500 flat which lead me to "it probably didnt crit at all"
your reasoning could as well be right, hits in this game vary so much i find it hard keeping a realistic value with any single power.

hmm, just dawned on me the % modifiers from powers may be the cause to my problem. ie: no modifier no damage bonus, flat hit.
@gunny
I know certain pets take away the weapon mastery crit damage (dont get me started on that mess) but, ive been running the robot sidekick while moonlighting dps on my quantum troll and i can say with some certainty that it doesnt take away any crit chances. I almost always hit in the 5-7ks (sometimes higher) with handblasters and have zero issues getting crits from the combo window, 3-4k more often than not. and that toons stats are modest at best, mostly 91gear modded sythetic V's (color coordinated of course ) and 166sp .

@ DoIAmuseYou

I'll try this again.
The WM critical strike bonus only applies to the MIGHT damage that is applied in that combo window. This is the ONLY guaranteed critical hit possible.

As far as any weapon attacks such as your handblasters.... they follow only your base critical chance and damage percentages. The best you can get for weapon attacks and DoT's is 30% critical chance, and 127% critical attack damage - unless you use a trinket or ability buff to temporarily raise them.

For example:

Handblaster combo > arrow fling. I use Pyrokinesis in the combo window. Heres what happens with that 30% chance:

Charged Blast - 30% chance
Meteor Blast - 30% chance
Arrow Fling - 30% chance
Pyrokinesis initial hit - 108% chance
Pyrokinesis DoT 1 - 30% chance
Pyrokinesis DoT 2 (burning) - 30% chance

That 108% is the ONLY hit affected by WM. This is the same with any ability. Therefore, the abilities that benefit the most from WM are abilities that do the most initial damage, because that is the only thing affected by the WM bonus. The rest all use your base critical values.

So your 5-7k handblaster hits, are crits - by using your 30% crit chance.

As for your 3-4k crits you describe with your ability window.... how are you spending your 166SP? Do you have at least 13 critical chance purchased from your SP trees? Its pretty commonplace people actually choose to master an extra weapon or two instead of getting all of the criticals - an ill-advised decision because of this.

If you do not have at least 13% critical chance from SP, you don't have guaranteed crits for that initial hit for your abilities. That will be the reason you see something different from what I describe.

"i'll try this again"
My issue was getting hits for 500 you assumed and still assume i'm not specced right, fine.
That was to my main toon, and i've already figured out (with help from Remander) it's probably because at the time i have no % modifiers going and im getting a FLAT crit, A crit none the less but, with no modifiers. That part was literally right above the post to you, how'd you miss it?
btw, thanx remander.

the 3-4k hits i referenced were from another toon in regards to you saying the robot sidekick hurts your crit chances i figured that was implied but, it's another toon.
It stats were only there to highlight to you that the robot sidekick doesnt effect your crit bonuses.

Yeah I've had to tell people this multiple times in-game. It's a 3.6x crit multiplier, not 360% crit chance! Whoever wrote the description must be a math geek, because the average person probably won't know that from reading it. I had to read it a few times myself to figure it out.

Although it's funny that people think it has a 360% crit chance. What do they think the extra 260% does?

Yeah, Robot Sidekick has no effect the WM buff. That's only "improved" pets, like Fury, Swarm, and Crystal.

EDIT: Well, according to Tunso, Swarm isn't really a pet (though it was described as such, when WM dropped). It's really just another DoT along the lines of Nature's poisons.

Isn't the iconic only 3% crit chance? That would give you a total of 28% or 29% depending on which power tree you specialize in.

I know that a lot of people use this reasoning to not mod for their crit socket affinities, which is sad. You are losing out on criticals on things that are unaffected by the WM window including the combo itself.

It saddens me that people can read that description and not figure out what it actually means.

all i was saying is that you can still get 100% on your WM crit chance and use 2 SP for somthing else. never did i say dont spec into all your crit chances.

I wasn't saying you were saying that. Just a small rant about people that think that way.

Thank you, I was certainly one of the misinformed.

Oh man, we need Math 101. I am a Math geek and let me tell you that % means to divide number by 100. 360% means 360/100=3.6 Whereas 360 means 360. Therefore 360% crit chance means 3.6 times multiplier.

Uh you might not have understood what I said. You basically just repeated my post while insulting my level of education.