Forum:NEW! A definitive study on critical damage, with graphs!


 * Actual graphs not included

Critical damage has always been an obscure field in Borderlands. I did some research, and here are my findings.

I'll start with the results, because that's what we all want:

Results
The formula for critical damage is defined as: CriticalDamage = BaseDamage * (1 + ZoneMultiplier + WeaponMultiplier)

Where:
 * BaseDamage: The base damage you'd do against an un armored opponent
 * ZoneMultiplier: A multiplier defined by the opponent.
 * WeaponMultiplier: The multiplier as defined by the weapon card.

What we have discovered: The existence of "ZoneMultiplier", which stacks additivelly with the weapon's multuplier.

Weapon Multiplier
This is what we all know and love:
 * Pistols, Shotguns, Rifles: +0% Critical Damage.
 * Revolvers: +100% Critical Damage.
 * SniperRifles: about +200%.

Zone Multiplier
This is the new field: There appears to be an upper bound on the amount of damage a skag can take
 * Bandit heads: +150% damage.
 * Skags: +300% damage.
 * Crab Worms: +2900% damage.
 * Spiderants: +200% damage.
 * Badasses: +100% ?

Other interesting tidbits (melee)
The critical weapon multiplier of the player's melee is the same as the weapon that player is carrying. This doesn't mean bladed weapons are useless, as the damage multiplier ALWAYS applies, but if you are going to melee an opponent, and you don't have a bladed weapon, at least carry a sniper.

Other interesting tidbits: "1"
There is a "1" in the above formula. Note that depending on your point of view, you can integrate that 1 into the two other fields, for example: It is really just a matter of point of view. I think from a strick mechanical point of view, it belongs inside "ZoneMultiplier", as shown by the Crab Worms, which take 29x damage. Why 29? Why not 30? However, from a human point a view, I think the "stand alone" 1 represents quite well the "BaseDamage" that a creature should normally take from your weapon, and is what makes the most sense.
 * WeaponMultiplier: You can consider that ALL weapons get a base +100% damage, and then the card's +X% stacks on top of that.
 * You can consider it as a part of ZoneMultiplier, and bandit heads really take +250%.

Heck, you can even "extract" 1 from the "ZoneMultiplier" and put it into "WeaponMultiplier". Doing both gives a good correlation with the current Critical hit page's data.

Conclusion

 * The above formula has been consistently accurate for me. It perfectly explains why some users report "+100% base", while others report "+150%". It also explains why some users report that the Bessie is actually "+650%" or "+750%". I don't think it is, but I'll have to test that individual weapon more in depth.
 * A note of interest is that the ZoneMultiplier is additive.
 * Firing a sniper at a lava crab worm is nothing short of retarded. You are better off with an automatic weapon (SMG/Machine Pistol), or a burst weapon (shotgun/Combat Rifle/Masher). Even if you are going for a damage competition, you are better off with point blank matador.
 * Regarding skags, I think the most important is to just unload with the weapon you have in hand.

Future research

 * Study the Bessie specifically, to find out if the multiplier is correct (which I suspect it is).
 * Study other opponents, such as Lance, and in particular, Crawmerax and Baddasses.

Future work
Re-write critical damage. The page is not top notch. As for the mechanics section, it is just plain wrong (bit I wrote it, so I'll take the blame for it)

Study
To create this study, I made the above assumption, and tested it using various weapons on various creatures, firing at both body and critical spot. The results were not too hard to interpret actually:

Lava Crab Worm
This was pretty straight forward: This chart shows quite perfectly that Crab worms take +29x damage, and each weapon's individual +0/+1/+2 critical multiplier.

Bandits
The second test was with low level bandits in front of Bonehead's. Note of interest, I tested all local bandit types (thug/raider/midget), which all took the same amount of damage.

Again, not much to say, the results speak for themselves. Bandits +150%

Skags
I tested with the alpha skags at the end of the "The Lost Cave". I chose them for their resilience, and because they are the only Skags I can get to reliably scream. Unfortunatly, it would appear there is an upper bound to the damage a Skag can take. However, the formula still holds for Pistols and SMG, and we can see that the Revolver's critical damage, while bounded, is higher than the SMG's 400%. Conclusion: Skags: +300%

Spiderants
Spiderants were harder to test on, because I could not get a direct feed on the "body damage". Nothin a bit of extrapolation can't fix though ;)

I tested on Workers, Queens, and a Baddass Corrupter which took a critical blast of all my weapons :o !

Here are the results for all 3:

We can see the "base" +200% damage for spiderants quite well, and a +100% for the Baddass. I'm really happy at how well my formula held up.

Talk
Thanks for reading! happypal (talk &bull; contribs) 15:04, July 19, 2012 (UTC)