Runes of Magic US / AU

dont forget to factor in how many levels higher you are now to then too, which in turn makes you crit more as well.

Assuming that you are lvl 87 and the bosses in Beth are lvl 83 I think would make you crit a significant amount more than being at level for the instance

i always use crit pots for anything i do tbh, i have that *cant have enough crit disease* lol

Rui, I was going to start a thread called "Mages and Crit: It's a Myth!" but you beat me to it. Now, my data shows a different result than yours does, Rui, and I am willing to chalk that up to Bethomia vs Grotto. At 87 in Beth vs 85/87 in Grotto, you're going to see a difference. And I think your data might show that crit hit rate has a more meaningful value once crit resist has been overcome by a certain amount.

However, while that's useful data for people who run instances at much higher level than current character level, it's less useful for people running current content, no offense at all here Rui. I say that because once you scale that data you have up- you would need something like 90% or higher crit to see that result in current content, which without +20 tier 9 everything, just isn't really doable. So, here's my data.

Please understand that the following ONLY APPLIES TO MAGES. I am not talking about any physical dps, so unless you're a mage, don't freak out please. I am aware that crit seems to play a huge part in phys dps, and since I haven't played warmage since Grotto, I am not prepared to make this a blanket statement about magical crit, JUST MAGE CRIT, ok?

Ok.

So, over the last few months in Grotto, we (meaning the mages of Heretic) have been doing some informal testing. By informal, I mean no one has a chart. However, the data has stretched over months, which means it paints a nice broad picture. This is what I've seen by comparing crit rates on scrut over the bosses in the entire instance, which have differing crit resists, comparing my crit heavy build against low crit builds like Borella and Yuhwa.

We all crit for the same amount.

Yes, I said we all crit the same number of times. It's completely random.

Now, some runs Bor would crit more than me, or Yuhwa, and some runs I would crit more than either of them, but that's the point I am making. ON AVERAGE we all crit the same number of times, regardless of what the critical hit percentage number on our character screen says.

I have 83% crit fully buffed in burn. Borella and Yuhwa both use Aoth and therefore have around 75% crit. Almost 10% less. Remember too, that the "magic number" bandied around has been 81%. I was able to get past that and have not seen any meaningful result. Using crit buffs, farming tp to increase my m/w crit skills, using p/r to increase crit, using +20 gems to increase my necklace's crit- none of that has actually increased my actual crit hit rate.

The one thing that did, that we could all see clearly on our scrutinizer, was Aristatic's d/r crit resist boss debuff. We all saw meaningfully increased numbers of critical hits. It wasn't ridiculous, but it was a clear dps boost across the board for the mages. I didn't get to see what it did to the physical dps party, not sure what it did for them, but mages definitely saw a boost.

I literally just switched from my crit set to Aoth, because the numbers have convinced me- critical hit percentage is just a number for a mage. It doesn't matter in practice whether that number is 75% or 85%- you will crit a random number of times if your crit is within that range. Therefore, it makes sense to switch to Aoth because the fire damage increase DOES make a very measurable difference.

Now look, I DID NOT WANT TO BELIEVE THIS EITHER.

It doesn't make any gorram sense at all. Rogues are cringing, looking at this, I know, because crit percentage makes such a huge difference to you guys. Alls I am saying is that for mages, sorry, but it just doesn't. Four months of observation in differing circumstances, enough that it shows the big picture, have made it clear as a bell to me. Going from level 85 to 87 in Grotto did indeed make a difference in our number of crits- but it made a difference across the board, whether crit build or Aoth.

The message RoM is sending to mages is clear: we don't care what that number says, it doesn't hook into reality anywhere. You crit what our random number generator says you're going to crit.

And that's that, as far as I am concerned. I am very open to criticism, and if someone has real neato data, or has seen differing results outside of the brackets I indicated (75%-83%) I would like to hear it. If we would see some kind of amazing difference at 86% crit, let me see the scrut, ok?

Quoted from "mnkmurphy885"

Novel is here.

Let me add on to this. I have basically 70% crit unbuffed. That's it. Just 70%. It might actually be something like 69.83% cause my gear is crap, but that's not the point. Yuhwa, having partly healer gear, has something around 75-76%. We both have the aoth set. That's 5-6% difference in our crit percentages, and we both have the same crit buffs during burn, and there seems to be zero rhyme or reason as to who crits more often. Fann, using a crit accessory set, has slightly more than Yuhwa, at around 77-78% unbuffed crit I believe, and there is still no difference in who crits more.

I mean I literally have nearly 10% less crit than Fann/Yuhwa in burns, and I still beat her sometimes. If crit really meant that much, I should NEVER be critting more often than her.


We get laughed at by our physical dps guildies who tell us that we're making stuff up, that crit is king, that mages are just whiny or don't want to believe that crit is always superior, but from what we've been able to tell, crit really doesn't matter for mages once you're over 70%. Is more good? Sure, but you shouldn't be sacrificing other, more important, things like 8% int and magic power. That is a quantifiable straight damage increase.

It makes no sense, and I wish it wasn't so, cause god knows I'd love to get out of a UD aoth set if the crit set really was superior, but I don't think, and neither do the other mages in Heretic, that it really is superior in any observable way.

Borella is correct, there is no reason to get off of Aoth set. I used to run Vahtos still for the extra dmg, and up till recently kept a 65% crit rate base. However, needing to get rid of Doom cycle for more dmg, I got the Aoth, and new accessories, now I am at like 71% and noticed dmg increase in most cases. Except for older instances, where I crit the same high amount and the extra magic power made the difference, but it is still minorly better than the Aoth set.. (that was before the new staff though)

CRITisKING™

to a point I would say you are right, I have seen the same thing others have noticed with magical crit... It is all over the place. My g/f started using her r/m and her crit is critical, some things we duo I see her averaging GoH easy 10-15% higher crit when she only has 5% more base than I.


I always thought it was just my bad luck til I started to see so many posting about it on the forums.

Hope you all are wrong cause I'm goin to regear at lvl 90 and get as high crit as I can, roughly 7.3k unbuffed or even more

I have always said Aoth > all when it came down to magical dps, and as an example, I sometimes jump on *that other server* which is @ a level cap of 90. As your characters level goes up, generally crit rate against lower bosses also goes up, yet even at level 90 in GoH i'll still get completely random crit rates. With 74% crit and 138k ma unbuffed, on average I would get around 30-50% crit rate, yet I would also at times get really low or really high, low being < 10% or high being > 70%.

In other words, I completely agree that mage crit is random, and I personally never found much of an increase going with crit accessories over the raw damage and int increase of Aoth.

Quoted from "Hipocrates"

Hope you all are wrong cause I'm goin to regear at lvl 90 and get as high crit as I can, roughly 7.3k unbuffed or even more

Good luck and god bless, honey. Let us know how it goes, I'm genuinely curious.

yeah I am somewhat curious also. But ill let everyone know the experiment I have done just for kicks


We have 3 close to max level mages

M/wd/w 87/86/85
M/w/p 87/87/72
M/s/p/w/r 85/86/70/87

The M/wd, I made a full set of quest gear for crit/m.attk and sits at like 74% crit, no aoth/vahtos
The M/p, is mine that I used to run Vahtos on only, now on aoth, still have to redo one right/earring but still at like 70% crit
The M/s still using Vahtos

Even when hunting and questing the m/wd is about 15% less dmg 17% on crits about than the M/S with Vahtos. They are pretty equally geared, so the dmg difference is easily seen. However, the crit rate... doesn't balance it out when doing burns. I tested M/s vs m/wd for straight burn, cause they are pretty equal. Can hit cap speed on both, and only tested the quick burns and daily hunting. Daily hunting in WF, or the new zone, the crit wasn't a deciding factor, the 15% magic power was. Even when burning GoH solo, the M/s did more dps. Even though with Vahtos that char has like 63% crit atm, opposed to the 74% on the M/wd. Base of course not buffed.

My m/p hits for about 3-4% less dmg taking individual hits into account then when I had Vahtos. So when Daily hunting I see the hits are for less, however the increase in my crit gave me about a 4-5% boost on overall DPS. When burns come in, like soloing GoH, as both W/m and M/w at 85 cap, I did 3 hour farms of first boss to get a good overall dps. Again I noticed about a 3-4% less damage on hits, but a 10-15% dps increase. Now I did a 3 hour farm with my vahtos, then a 3 hour farm with the Aoth. So from what I saw, crit rate is still important (and there is only so much you can do with Vahtos, and it now just isn't enough), but with Aoth + 2 good accessories like strike of despisal/quest ring and earring for ma.attk/crit on both. You still get great crit and the Magic power and int bonus are well more than worth it.

What I am not seeing in the discussion is that bosses have often have crit resistance. Hoson for example has 30% magic crit resistance. Assuming the crit cap is 75%, and not knowing the formula, my guess is 30% is subtracted from your crit rate or 75%, which ever is lower. Using 75% subtracting 30% puts you at 45%. If this is true, I could see wild swings in times crited from fight to fight.

This does factor in Amberwave and is a valid point. However there are a couple bosses in each of the newer instances that have 0% crit resist rate unless it was fixed. Those are the best bosses to test crit on vs bosses with crit resist.

Semi quoted from Wolf of Wall Street: "There is no nobility in aoth... I've had decent crit, and I've had great crit... And I choose great crit everytime!"

All this talk about mage crit being essentially random really makes me feel good about how I stat and gear my mage.


To hell with all of you (on Govinda specifically) who said my 70% unbuffed crit was too low.

This is is about mage crit, but i feel like this is probably true about all classes. The problems you describe in GOH and the general range of actual crit hit rate you all see is pretty similar to what the rogues get on runs. 30~70% depending on boss and luck.

Quoted from "Amberwave"

What I am not seeing in the discussion is that bosses have often have crit resistance. Hoson for example has 30% magic crit resistance. Assuming the crit cap is 75%, and not knowing the formula, my guess is 30% is subtracted from your crit rate or 75%, which ever is lower. Using 75% subtracting 30% puts you at 45%. If this is true, I could see wild swings in times crited from fight to fight.

You're absolutely right, Amber, which is why we collated our info from all 6 bosses in Grotto (6 bosses? 7? i dunno, whatevs, all the bosses). Grotto bosses range from having large crit resist numbers and zero, which means we were able to get data all across the board. While the results were always random, they were consistently random, which supports my point that mage crit, at least above 70%, is freaking random.