Confused about thrown melee damage(random every time)

[pvwatermelon]

Is there some factor that can mess with your thrown melee damage such as distance from enemy when you detonate it? I'm using the wolf sledge with a riven + heavy atk build and in ESO will get around a 30k crit detonating it mid throw and sometimes there is a 300k crit and a few times i get a 1.3 million crit... ?????? I'm just confused if maybe you can get headshots or something because I'm pretty sure you can do less damage hitting enemies in certain spots. No one's really stripping their armor and I almost always get a viral proc on them.

[majorchord96]

It sounds to me like the effects of a combo counter. The multiplier displayed applies only to heavy attacks (such as thrown melee) and can build up to 12x. Add to that the possibility of critical chance upgrades (such as those from the gladiator set or from the blood rush mod) and you may be getting triple crits or even higher (at level 3, crits may increase without changing color.) It sounds like you've got a good build. If you were to post a picture of said build, it may be easier to see what's going on.

Other things that may influence critical properties include arcanes, kavats, and warframe abilities (particularly harrow or volt, though there may be other crit-adjusting frames.)

[Disasterchild]

It's an explosion. The further a target is from the center of the explosion, the more the damage tapers off. It's not the same damage within the entire radius, as I have understood it.