Critical Hit Teams and Critical Hit Chance - AKA WTF JUST HAPPENED!? And How do I keep it from happening again?

Fig. 1-1 Ishmael is a hero with Critical Hit Chance

So what exactly is Critical Hit Chance?  Critical Hit Chance is the probability that a hero with critical hit capability will land a hit that does double the amount of damage he/she normally does.  Simple enough right?

Before we go on, there are only certain heroes that have Critical Hit Chance, and they are:  Daredevil, Ishmael, Artemis, Jhu, Jet, and Fox. (disclaimer, I don't have a lot of these heroes, so there may be others I'm not aware of.)

In figure 1-1, you will see the number 9070 in orange.  That was a critical hit, and it dropped Peppy like a bad habit.  Also, if you look closely, you will see that Ishmael just wiped out a team of 5 by himself!  Let's explore this further, and try to figure out what is going on here.

There is really no simple way to explain this, so we'll jump straight into the deep end.  Critical Hit Chance is exactly what it sounds like.  It is a chance, defined by probability.  Luckily, there is a way to calculate this.

The possibility of landing a Critical Hit is calculated by:  Hero's Critical Hit Chance / (Opponent's Main Stat + Hero's Critical Hit Chance).  We then multiply the resulting number by 100.

Our result is the possibility of a hero landing a Critical Hit; expressed as a percentage.

Let's try it:

So, if we look at Ishmael's stats page, we find that he has a Crit Hit Chance of 653 that's our first number.

Let's look at the opponent:

Peppy's stats page tells us that her Main Stat is Intelligence, and it is at 79.  That's our second number.

Let's plug it in and see what we get.

653 + 79 = 732

653 / 732 = 0.89

0.89 * 100 = 89

So, against Peppy at this level Ishmael has an almost 90% chance of getting in a critical hit.  At 90%, he will get in Critical Hits more than he won't.  Peppy is screwed here.  When Ishmael delivers a Critical Hit, he will do double his physical damage.  His stats page shows that as 4539.  So he will hit Peppy with 9078 damage with a critical hit!  Peppy's health is 2605.  When he hits her, she's dead.

Let's give Ishmael a bigger challenge.

Dorian's main stat is also Intelligence.  We can see that he is at 2085.  Let's use our formula to see what will happen:

653 + 2085 = 2738

653 / 2738 = 0.24

0.24 * 100 = 24

So Ishmael's chances with Dorian have dropped to 24%.  This is still something we should worry about, but not as bad of a situation as Peppy faced.

So now that we have a good idea of what is going on here, we need to figure out a good defense plan. The single biggest factor here, is our hero's main stat.  For Dorian that is intelligence.  Luckily for us there is an easy way to influence the value of this stat.  To do this, we need to head to the forge and upgrade his main stat glyph.

Looking at the glyph screen, we see that Dorian is at level 15 on his intelligence glyph.  This glyph is the last one to unlock, and that does not happen until Violet +2.  If you are coming up against critical damage, you need to be at Violet +2, and you need to level up that main stat glyph. Period.

Other strategies for dealing with Critical Hit teams involve using Agility based teams that can dodge, attacking critical teams with a stronger critical team, adding huge amounts of armor to your heroes, and outright overpowering the opponent.

There is also a devastatingly effective solution.  This is where Helios comes in.  Helios specifically damages critical damage capable heroes.

Every time your opponent scores a critical hit it, Helios will activate his fourth skill.  Flaming retribution does a ridiculous amount of retaliation damage when a Critical Hit is scored.  He is the best way to deal with these types of teams.

This defense will be most effective with a hero like Orion on the team with Helios.  Orion does obscene amounts of damage rapidly on his own.  His artifact adds Magic Penetration; further augmenting the retaliation damage don by Helios.

Hopefully, you now have a few skills in your tool box that will help you deal with Critical Damage teams more effectively.

Next time, we will build a sample Critical Damage team so we can explore using Critical Damage offensively.