Critical hit

A critical strike doubles the damage of a hit and adds forty percent to the knockback it applies. The base chance is four percent for melee, ranged and magic, and plenty of weapons ship with more than that already built in. Modifiers, armor bonuses, accessories and buffs add on from there.

You can spot one without reading the figure. Critical damage text is bolder, sits in a deeper color, floats a little higher, and stays on screen for two seconds instead of one.

The doubling is applied after the target's defense has been subtracted, not before. Take a Face Monster with ten defense, which removes five from anything you throw at it. A fifty damage hit lands for 45, and the critical version of that same hit lands for 90 rather than 95. The gap widens as the target's defense climbs, and it is the whole reason critical strike chance and flat damage are not interchangeable.

Against a target with no defense the two are equivalent. One percent more critical chance and one percent more damage produce the same average output, which is a genuinely useful shortcut when you are choosing between two accessories with different rolls.

Defense tilts it toward damage. The more the target subtracts, the more a flat damage bonus is worth relative to critical chance, because damage is added before the cut and the critical multiplier only doubles what survives it. The effect grows steadily with the target's defense value.

At the far extreme the ranking flips back. When a target's defense is high enough that every hit is floored to 1, damage bonuses do nothing whatsoever and critical chance is the only stat that still functions, since a critical strike turns each 1 into a 2. The Dungeon Guardian and its four figure defense is the case everyone tests this on.

For every fight in between, split the difference. The two categories multiply against each other in damage per second terms, so a balanced pair of bonuses beats going all in on either one.

Summon damage cannot critically strike on its own and gains nothing from critical chance on your gear. Two things override that. A full Monk or Shinobi Infiltrator set lets Lightning Aura sentries critically strike at a fixed rate, higher for the later set. And several whips tag whatever they hit for four seconds, during which every minion and sentry you own critically strikes that target at a fixed rate: the Morning Star and Kaleidoscope sit in the middle of the range, the Electric Eel at the bottom, Possession alongside the mid tier.

These rates do not add together. Each is rolled as its own independent event, so tagging with two whips does not produce one larger chance, and none of them respond to critical chance from your accessories.

A projectile does not remember the weapon that fired it. Its critical chance comes from whatever you are currently holding, as long as that item shares the projectile's damage type. Sentry style magic is the obvious exploit: set up a Nimbus Rod cloud, then hold a magic weapon whose own base rate is high, or one carrying a good modifier, and the raindrops inherit it.

Ammunition never carries critical chance. A ranged shot takes its chance entirely from the gun or the bow, so there is no reforging bullets and the ammo you pick only ever changes damage.

Players cannot critically strike other players. Melee hits against a player still show the critical visual at a flat one in ten, and melee projectiles show it at your real critical rate, but the damage is unchanged either way. It is cosmetic with one exception: if the player you hit is wearing Magic Cuffs or an upgrade, the fake critical doubles the mana they recover from the hit.