How Does Critical Chance Work On Beam Weapons?

[Ajreil]

Status chance is handled as status per second, and the mechanics of that are pretty well documented. I can't find any information on crit chance though.

 

Is it crit per second like status is, or does it each pulse of damage have a seperate chance to crit? As far as I can tell beam weapon damage isn't even handled in pulses, it just displays it that way when damage numbers appear. Anyone have an idea?

[shut]

As far as I can tell beam weapon damage isn't even handled in pulses, it just displays it that way when damage numbers appear.

 

Beam damage is most certainly handled in pulses. When you attack an enemy with a beam weapon, it'll deal damage about 3 times per second (and even if you ignore the damage number, you can still see the enemy's health losing a chunk three times per second). Because of this mechanic, attacking a level 1 enemy with a super-powerful beam weapon will still take a third of a second to kill it (although you can shorten this time by canceling the attack earlier for a lower-damage tick, rather than holding M1 for an entire third of a second).

 

Fun fact:

If you use the Atomos and you shoot a level 1 butcher surrounded by level 10 lancers, you'd expect that the butcher would die first and the chain-damage beam will be canceled. The reason that this doesn't happen is because of the "three ticks per second" mechanic. Despite the butcher having way lower HP than the level 10 lancers, the damage that accumulates after 0.3 seconds for the first tick is already sufficient to kill the lancers as well. This is why the Atomos is so reliable at clearing crowds of enemies at the same time despite differences in enemy HP.

 

 

OT:

I haven't tested out critical hit mechanics, but I'm assuming they function the exact same way (i.e. they function "per tick" rather than "per second"). So if you have a beam weapon with a 50% crit chance, then:

- when continuously firing against an enemy, there will be three ticks of damage per second. Each tick will have a 50% chance of being a crit.

- when tap-firing (or canceling the beam in another way) against an enemy, each tick of damage that appears will have a 50% chance of being a crit.

That's just my guess, anyway. It would be fantastic if someone could test this out.

 

Now that you mention it, though, I'm curious as to how Status works with beam weapons as well. Do they really work based on status per second, or is it actually status per tick (meaning that the number in the UI is effectively tripled for continuous fire, and effectively multiplied by your framerate if you happen to use a tap-firing macro)?

Edited December 22, 2015 by SortaRandom

[Darzk]

^ is pretty much correct, except the first tick after the beam contacts an enemy occurs after 1/10th of a second, and subsequent ticks are every 1/3rd. Thus there is some benefit (reducing overkill) to tap-firing with a macro at 100ms, but it's very minor and not worth the hassle.

 

I too have not tested critical mechanics, whether it's per tick or per ammo spent, but I can confirm that the status% is per second, with each tick having 1/3rd of that chance to proc per tick (1/10th for the first tick).

[shut]

the first tick after the beam contacts an enemy occurs after 1/10th of a second, and subsequent ticks are every 1/3rd. Thus there is some benefit (reducing overkill) to tap-firing with a macro at 100ms, but it's very minor and not worth the hassle.

 

TIL. Thanks a lot!

[OniGanon]

So... for continuous weapons, the Status Per Second stat shows is basically like having 300% multishot on a normal weapon?

 

On the subject of multishot, why does it no longer show an improvement in Status on continuous weapons?

[[DE]Momaw]

First off beam weapons are 4 ticks per per second, after the initial one. Not 3.

 

Crit chance is indeed rolled "per pulse chunk" as far as I can tell.  Experimented with a synoid gammacor and cranked its crit chance as hard as possible (33.5%). From observation about 1/3 of the numbers coming off my target were yellow.

 

Now, beam weapon crits do make really high numbers because of the damage aggregation: Rather than critting with the shown base damage, it crits on damage*FireRate/4. But non-beam weapons can potentially score a lot more, smaller, crits because they don't aggregate and can make more than 4 hits per second.

[shut]

 

First off beam weapons are 4 ticks per per second, after the initial one. Not 3.

 

I actually tested this a while back. The tick rate was around the ballpark of 3 per second. Definitely not 4.

 

 

EDIT:

Also, regarding the damage*FireRate/4 thing, the fire rate actually affects the damage per tick of the weapon without crits as well. I don't remember if it shows up in the UI, but the way beam weapons handle fire rate is that they'll straight-up boost the damage per tick (while of course increasing ammo chewed up per second).

So if you've got a beam weapon that deals 100 damage per tick, 3 ticks per second: adding Speed Trigger will change this to 160 damage per tick, 3 ticks per second.

 

A bit off-topic, but I vaguely recall multishot working the same way (i.e. Split Chamber will straight-up multiply the final damage by 1.9, rather than having a "split beam" or even "90% chance for each tick do double damage"). This was a couple months back, though, so my memory might be hazy. It may very well be the "90% chance for each tick do double damage" thing; all I know for sure is that there's no split beam.

Edited December 22, 2015 by SortaRandom