Critical Damage & Critical Chance, a Beginners Guide

As a beginning pirate in Seafight, even an experienced one, the choice of weather to invest in crit chance or crit damage can seem tricky, do you want to crit more often or crit higher? Well I'm here to answer that question.


The basics/Short answer

Crit damage like other damage buffs is calculated from your base cannonball damage, this means your crit bonus is not affected by other damage bonuses. So if you have 100 cannons using explosive and 50% crit damage your crit bonus is (75*100)*50%=3750. You have 20% crit damage by default.

Crit chance is the chance per shot you fire that you actually score a critical hit, pretty simple. You have 0% crit chance by default

The easiest way to think of the average damage you gain from crits is to multiply crit chance by crit damage, this gives you an average damage increase per shot equivalent to a straight damage %.

Given this we can use simple maths to create this rule:

Always upgrade the lowest of either crit chance or damage.

Now for the long answer

Most cannons have 20%/20%, you have 20% crit damage by default and many people use black powder for a further 10% crit damage, this gives us 20%/50%.

Now imagine you have the choice between a 10% crit chance and a 10% crit damage gem:

20%*60%= 12% damage increase

30%*50%= 15% damage increase

Here we see upgrading the lower value gives us bigger average gain, this is because we are choosing between getting 10% more hits that score 50% more damage or 20% of hits that score 10% more damage. Do this calculation when choosing gems as often gems with lower values can still net you more damage.

Exploiting this for maximum gain

Compared to ther other cannons Devastator cannons have very high crit damage and improved crit chance. With black powders and at least Lv2 Devs these will naturally deal above 100% crit damage, this creates a strange scenario where each point of crit chance is actually more valuable than each point of normal damage increase.

 

thanx for the info.