I’m a bit confused about this:
How does Cunning or OA effect damage from crits?
Cunning
higher cunning = higher OA = more crits & higher crit multiplier = more dmg
as for physical dmg/pierce/bleed it also increases their base dmg that you then get on top
You can also check the Crit Calculator to see how OA affects your average damage, see this:
And %damage from Cunning you gotta count individually as it’s a separate multiplier.
Hmm yeah but cunning doesn’t directly increase your crit multiplier I believe, from what I can tell…
In the end you do more damage but it seems obvious that you would do more from critting more often, and having more base damage. Is it just worded badly? The way it reads to me it seems like it means it DIRECTLY increases damage from crits (like the other increases it lists), which it doesn’t seem to?
Oh that is a really cool calculator. I will definitely mess around with that.
it does by increasing your oa…
As @Gnomish_Inquisition says although it doesn’t seem to be that impactful because those higher crits tiers have low probability. Best is the combination of high OA (Cunning) and stat +Crit damage to boost your damage because +Crit adds to all Crit Tiers.
Just like in Diablo 3 although it’s of course much harder to do in Grim Dawn.
Is there some hidden mechanic then? My critical damage doesn’t move.
My point is that if you have 100% chance to crit, but 0% critical damage… how would raising cunning make your hits from critical strikes do MORE damage (which is exactly how it is worded)?
yep, you aren’t taking cunning “just to increase your crit mp”
you are either cunning dumping as physical dmg types, bleed/pierce etc, to get bonus dmg on top of the bonus OA
and as magic dmg build you only cunning dump if you are desperate for OA, minor crit increase then being a bonus
crit dmg in sheet 2 is a separate thing, unrelated to cunning or OA, it’s a flat bonus addition to your existing base crits from OA
+note that you need a significant amount of OA (ie loads of cunning dump) to reach the various next levels of crit multiplier/OA vs DA thresholds in PTH
Yes it’s a hidden mechanics. See the calculator with 0% Crit damage
You can see chances of different Crit tiers increases if you increase OA (which is increases by cunning):
These are these Crit tiers and you reach more tiers / chance for them improves while you raise your OA
There are two types of crit multipliers in Grim Dawn, OA bases crit multi (which you see e.g. here https://grimdawn.fandom.com/wiki/Game_Mechanics#Critical_Strikes) and +x% crit multi (which is the stat you see ingame on 2nd char sheet).
Ah, seems strange.
So base damage and critical damage can remain the exact same, but as OA goes up at threshholds the criticals WILL actually hit for more damage. That is super confusing, to me, anyway.
That link helped, which will make the calculator make more sense to me now I suppose.
Thanks. I’m gonna go read that link a couple more times, lol.
And their damage texts have even different colors then (yellow, dark yellow, orange…)
OH THATS WHY THE COLORS ARE DIFFERENT.
HA! I could not figure out why that was! lol.
Btw an interesting thing I’ve noticed is often new players, i.e. coming from D3, think that in Grim Dawn bigger crits is also more or less equivalent to boosting damage / the be-all and end-all so they chase that %Crit damage on gear. Which actually may not be optimal because perhaps if they went for different means of boosting average damage, it would benefit them more actually although highest crits could be lower. Main reasons are
%Crit chance in GD are not that high in general
the tier thing, i.e. you can have 0.1% chance for the highest Tier crit as in the screenshot above
Yeah I can see that. I kind of did that, but was dropping crit damage for other things and I am doing better now.
This threads purpose really was just trying to understand why it said critical strikes do more damage if crit multiplier doesn’t change. It seems slightly strange to me the way that works but at least I do know about it now.
Yeah it’s kinda complicated that’s why this calculator exists in the first place since it’s practically impossible to calculate your average damage manually.
Well there are times when going for %Crit can be good (Cunning builds, skills with innate +Crit damage you boost OA for anyway, Upheaval abuse, needing to proc devos on crit etc), but it should be though out and justified whereas in D3 everyone has very high crit chance and Crit damage is basically an insane damage multiplier along with crit chance in a simple form of
(1 + crit_chance * crit_damage)
in Grim Dawn reality it it worked like that it could be
1 + 0.25 * 100 = 1.25
and it may be even generous for many builds vs some bosses
but in Diablo 3 it’s more like
1 + 0.5 * 350 = 2.75
and you always hit enemies as far as I remember?
and the difference is staggering and every further boost of crit chance / damage is huge and using crit as a proxy of measuring your dps seems more justified as they are more correlated with your average damage.
Not that hidden if it’s in the game’s official guide available from main menu: Landing Hits and Critical Hits
Yeah that definitely helps and now that I know all that info is there I will definitely take the time to read through it.
Having said that… I would still consider it a hidden mechanic if it doesn’t make sense and you have to go to the websites game guide to read about it. I mean, it says it increases critical hits damage and it does, it just didn’t make any sense trying to figure out how it works from in-game.
And I’m not trying to be argumentative so there’s no reason to be defensive about it. I love learning games mechanics over time, I just haven’t been playing GD very long but I’ve felt obsessed this past week since I finally have a character I really like and starting to get to a bit more challenging content where learning this stuff starts to matter.
Anyway, I appreciate the help even if this stuff does seem obvious to most people since ghe games been out a long time now. I just wish I found the game earlier!
Welcome to GD, would your party like to be seated with conversions and Cadence? 
