Difficulties understanding "Increased %" when creating a build.

I'm working on an elemental Lightning Arrow build, but I'm having a little trouble understanding how far I should spec as far as "Increased Critical Hit Chance" goes.

When placing points into passives such as "15% Increased Critical Strike Chance with Bows", how high should I increase these? If I spec into enough talents to give me 130%, or even higher, shouldn't 100% be giving me a critical hit every single shot? Or is there a base critical hit chance that I have, and then it increases by X% of that depending on my passives?

Nearly all percentages in this game are multiplicative and not additive (like they were in d3 for example).

The base crit for a bow is 5% (as shown on the tooltip for the bow itself). A 15% increased critical chance node would increase your crit by 15%.

So, 5 * 1.15 = 5.75% would be your new crit rate.

If you had 130% increased critical chance, 5 * 2.30 = 11.50% would be your new crit rate.

An exception to this is if your bow has the increased critical chance mod on the bow itself, that percentage is applied to the base crit chance of the bow, and all talented increase critical strike nodes would apply to that bow's new base crit chance.

So again let's assume you have 130% increased crit from talents, but your bow had a 30% increased crit mod. The bows new crit base would be 5 * 1.30 = 6.50%. Your new crit rate would be 6.5 * 2.3 = 14.95%.

If you need any more clarification feel free to ask.


-Edit for spelling-

Well, that's a very clear description of how it works. Thank you very much!

Is 5% the maximum critical hit chance before multipliers that a bow can have? And if so, can other items and equipment pieces raise your base critical hit chance before multipliers as well? It just seems that it's going to be quite hard to get any high amount of critical hit chance with such a low base weapon critical.

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Hetalar wrote:

Nearly all percentages in this game are multiplicative and not additive (like they were in d3 for example).

The math is correct, but the terminology is wrong. Increased % or Reduced % are "additive" whereas More or Less is "multiplicative".

Reason why increased/reduced is additive is how they work. If you have 15/15/60% crit chance from the Heartpierce cluster, the calculations work additively:

> x% on bow * [1 + (.15 + .15 + .60)]

More and Less applies after additive effects. So say you use Concentrated Area of Effect lvl 1 support gem with Rain of Arrows with 100 base damage. CAoE does 50% more area damage at lvl 1:

> 100 * (1 + the sum of all increased % damage passives) * (1.50 from CAoE)

I've only ever seen bows with base 5%, but there could be a unique or a bow base type that differs. I've not looked into it that much to be honest.

Sadly I believe that the bow having the increased critical modifier is the only way to increase the base crit. Any other piece of gear having the increased critical modifier will be additive with your talents. (If you had gloves that have 20% increased crit chance and you have 130% coming from talents, new crit chance would be 150%).

There are many increased crit nodes in the Shadow's tree as well as many bow specific nodes that increase crit chance. There is also the Increased Critical Strikes support gem you can run which gives you 72%-102% (depending on gem level) additive increased crit chance. While I agree that it is quite difficult to get any high amount of critical hit chance, I think that was their intention. :P

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DarthNorris wrote:

Is 5% the maximum critical hit chance before multipliers that a bow can have? And if so, can other items and equipment pieces raise your base critical hit chance before multipliers as well? It just seems that it's going to be quite hard to get any high amount of critical hit chance with such a low base weapon critical.

5% crit chance on bows is the base crit chance for ALL bows. Any crit chance mods increasing that 5% reflects on the bow itself before all passives, skills, supports apply. All other mods are additive in nature.

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Islidox wrote:

The math is correct, but the terminology is wrong. Increased % or Reduced % are "additive" whereas More or Less is "multiplicative".

Yes, I forgot about that, thanks for pointing it out!