Crit chance & multiplier for elemental skills

Hi everyone!

Would like to know what's the pros on pumping more crit chance and multiplier when using elemental skill? Cold, fire, lightning etc.

I'm guessing that crit chance made the mobs easier to get ailment? Eg, freeze for cold for example.

Anything else?
Does it boost your damage just like physical skills?
If so which would be better: pumping more raw damage (eg, increased cold damage, spell damage, etc) or pumping crit chance and multiplier?

Thanks.

any skill (attack or spell) works the same way with crit.

if the skill does elemental damage, a crit will apply the appropriate ailments (chill/freeze, ignite, shock)

the damage dealt will be increased by your crit multiplier.


note - only damaging HITS can crit.



most 'endgame' builds are crit, because they scale farther than non crit builds. however, non crit builds exist. crit or not depends on what you're building (and your budget, crit builds can be expensive)

Crits innately have a 100% chance to apply an elemental ailment. Non-crits have whatever your "% chance to apply" is. All hits with non-damaging ailments must met the minimum threshold to apply.

Obviously various mods can change any part of the process.

Crit effects direct damage with hits the same between elemental, physical, and chaos. Elemental ailments (not poison or bleed) always happen on crits, though it is worth noting that damaging ailments (ignite, bleed, and poison) don't benefit from increases to critical multiplier unless you have a special ability.

Most high end builds use crits if applicable (keeping in mind crits don't apply to DoT, and might not be worth it with skills or weapons that have extremely low base crit rates). This is because increasing damage, then increasing damage some more is additive scaling, while crits are multiplicative scaling of damage when combined with increased damage. ("More" damage is always multiplicative, but there are much more limited sources of it than "increased" damage which is additive.)