Critical Rating

Critical Rating

Overview

Critical rating is an "Offence" stat.

Critical rating (CR) determines a character's (or NPC's) chance that any normal attack they make will be a critical hit. This is distinct from critical multiplier or magnitude, which determines how much extra damage a critical hit does. Many skills alter their own critical chance in addition to the base critical chance determined by CR.

Critical rating is converted into a percentage chance to land a critical hit with an attack. The equation that governs this conversion has built-in diminishing returns. This means it takes a larger increase in critical rating to go from 5% to 6% than from 1% to 2%. The percentage chance to crit also depends on your enemy's level. The equation used is:

• % = Critical Rating / ((1190/3) * Enemy's Level + Critical Rating)

More information about differences in this formula, based on level, can be found here: Rating to percentage formula

To reverse the calculation and find out how much CR you need to reach a certain percentage, use this formula:

• CR = ((1190/3) * Enemy's Level * %) / (1 - %)

So if you want to have 10% critical percentage against a level 65 enemy, you put in ((1190/3) * 65 * 0.1) / (0.9) = 2864.8 CR.

At the time of this writing, the highest level of any enemy in the game is 68, so the CR needed to completely max out one's critical hit chance is 4760; against lvl 65 enemies, it's 4550.

In-game experimentation suggests the following magnitudes for critical hits:

• Autoattack critical hits deal approximately 1.25 times weapon max damage.
• Skill use critical hits deal approximately 1.5 times skill max damage.

Devastating Criticals

CR also affects your chance to land a devastating critical attack on your enemy. These do more damage than normal critical hits, but have less chance of occurring. Devastating critical hits still open critical response skills that many classes have.

Your devastating critical percentage is worked out in a similar way to critical percentage. To work out your percentage chance, use this formula:

• % = Critical Rating / (1330 * Enemy's Level + Critical Rating)

To work out the critical rating required to reach a certain devastating critical percentage, use this formula:

• CR = (1330 * Enemy's Level * %) / (1 - %)

In-game experimentation suggests the following magnitudes for Devastating critical hits:

• Autoattack devastating critical hits deal approximately 1.5 times weapon max damage.
• Skill use devastating critical hits deal approximately 2.0 times skill max damage.

Devastating critcal hits were introduced around the time of the The Mines of Moria expansion combat changes. They were discussed briefly in a Developer Diary from 22 Oct 2008.

Development History

Critical Ratings were introduced into LoTRO around the time of the Mines of Moria expansion. At the time, a Developer Diary dated 22 Oct 2008, elaborated on the changes. Tooltips were also improved to help players see the effects of this change. In the previous system, your character's ability to cause a critical hit was based on enemy mob level and percentages. In order to make the system more adaptable to future level expansion, a ratings system was introduced.

Update 9 - Dev Diary Update 9 - Combat Revisions - 13 December 2012

• Instead of reducing Critical Hit chance, Critical Defence will now reduce the magnitude of incoming critical damage.
• Once a hit has been determined to be a Critical or Devastating Critical Hit a multiplier is applied to the attack giving it the bonus damage. Critical Defence directly reduces this multiplier, causing a Critical or Devastating Hit to do less damage. The multiplier can never be reduced below 1, ensuring that a Critical or Devastating Hit will never do less than the base attack damage.
• It’s important to note that between the base critical multiplier value and additional critical damage mods acquired via advancement and itemization it is unlikely that a player who builds for Critical Hits will see their critical damage completely negated.

U9 Miss Chance Revision

1. These events are now called “Deflections”.
2. “Deflection” checks are only made when fighting a mob that is 4+ levels higher.

Dev Diary Update 10 - Critical Defence Revision - 28 February 2013

• Previously, we changed Critical Defence from a rating that reduced incoming Critical Chance to one that reduced incoming Critical Damage. In this update we are examining the other side of the coin and making alterations to Critical Rating and nature of skill crits.
• Critical Rating now increases your Critical Magnitude in addition to increasing your Critical Hit Chance. This provides a reason for Critical Attack builds to continue invest in Critical Rating after they reach the Critical Hit cap.
• The amount of Critical Damage reduction you gained per point of Critical Defence rating has been reduced. Previously you gained roughly 2% for every 100 points of Critical Defence, this has been reduced to roughly 1% for every 100 points. The reason for this reduction is a simple one -- we are now allowing all classes to itemize for Critical Defence.
• we’ve unified this system so that the skill makes a singular critical check; the result of which is then passed to all applied target effects that modify morale or power. A ‘target effect’ is any effect applied to your currently selected target.
• A skill’s critical result is only applied to the initial pulse of HoTs and DoTs. All subsequent pulses perform individual critical checks.
• Currently, Critical Rating is only applied to the skill and skill damage, not to associated effects. It’s something we are actively looking into, but we felt this could have a serious impact on heal potency and want more time for analysis.

U10 Impact on Monster Play

• Changes to the per-point value of Critical Defence will cause a significant reduction in Creep critical protection. Creeps will lose roughly 50% of their current Critical Damage reduction, which we feel is a good thing as the current values are so high that Creeps need never invest in Critical Defence Corruptions. That being said, we did feel this more negatively impacted the lower armour Creeps so we increased the amount of Critical Defence granted by the Rank 1 Armour Passive from 600 to 800.
• We’ve added a new set of Critical Rating Corruptions to Monster Play, to provide Creeps with an equal opportunity to make Crit builds. The premise we used when creating these was that if a Creep should fully invest in Critical Rating they should be able to push the Critical Cap similar to Freeps. Each Corruption grants 1717 Critical Rating, and all six can by acquired by Rank 4.