How Do You Get 100% Crit?

[Red]

Every last build I've ever seen has advised this. Some more than others. And Atarlost recently told me he's consistently getting crit rates of 70%+ on Normal characters. I've never had any character even get close to 100% crit rate, and since a lot of procs are crit based, this makes all my builds a lot weaker.

How do you get such high crit rates?

[0player]

Gear!
For melee characters, one of the weapons has crit rate per accuracy bonus, I think it is axes (swords are crit power, maces are flat damage).
Also, certain talents and Cunning.

[overgoat]

You typically need high level unique items to get close to 100%. Some unique weapons have 30%+ bonus to crit chance. Get a couple of those or other other items with similar bonuses and its not hard.

[Red]

That might be it. I've gotten items like that, but only on test characters who I cheat in millions of gold to get infinite randarts. On legitimate characters, I've never gotten usable randarts with +crit like that.

Are there any ways to help guarantee better/more randarts?

[cctobias]

On normal and NM I wouldn't actually say you don't reliably get 100% crit, but on Insane and Madness since you get a whole lot more randarts (due to many more uniques and randbossess) you generally can and should get there and probably a good amount of crit mult too. Although I suppose this should be caveated in that you can usually get 100% crit on Normal if you make sacrifices in other areas and checks shops etc. Sometimes a purple item will give much better stats in one specific thing than a randart, even if the randart is overall better or even much better.

Even on Insane and Madness though its generally nice to have something like lethality or shaloren talent line to get that last 10% or so.

Basically it takes gear and investing in Cunning.

Also some builds have a much easier time at crit, for example I have gotten brawler gloves that give a total of about 40% to melee crit (merchant acquired). This was due to a 20% for gloves and then 20% from using as unarmed, and i believe its a gloves specific ego too. So in some cases some build guides may be making some assumptions that may not be obvious. So with cunning and and those gloves a brawler (or anyone with Flexible combat) can take care of 60% crit right then and there.

If you look at the profile my Madness adventurer guide you can see that character has some thing like 130% physical crit versus his 100% spell crit, mainly because of just this. A character wearing all the same stuff but not using brawling or flexible combat would lose 20% physical crit simply from prodigy choice and only be at about 110% crit. Given the fact that character is fully loaded with randarts (except a purple belt for the res pen/physical damage that was just better than any randart I got), you can extrapolate that by having a character with 50% less randarts the character might dip below 100% physical crit. Say somewher in the neighborhood or 80% without flexible (assuming still using same gloves). When Flexibile Combat is swapped back in this then bumps up +20% back to 100% crit.

Anyway that is not a full explanation but may help to show how these things are not always exactly obvious.

[Red]

That does help, cctobias. I've been ignoring shops unless I'm running a staff build, since I always snagged an early T3 staff from Angolwen. I've never checked a single shop upon hitting T2, but don't shops get new inventories after The Master and on returning from the East? I just never knew they were worthwhile.

[cctobias]

That might be it. I've gotten items like that, but only on test characters who I cheat in millions of gold to get infinite randarts. On legitimate characters, I've never gotten usable randarts with +crit like that.

Are there any ways to help guarantee better/more randarts?

The only way to really get tons of randarts is to play Insane+. That and the merchant. Or possible a farpotal etc. Which is why the reward choice in Trapped! is considered so one-sided. You can typically buy 2 randarts, and possibly more (again on Insane+ since you get more randarts to sell you can buy more possibly 4-5 or more).

Also keep in mind certain ego are slot specific so you may wish to buy certain slots to go for crit. This is also true for things like +physical damage. One of the reasons my madness adventurer won the game using Wrap of Stone is not because its so awesome (although its a nice artifact). Its because randarts for cloaks from the merchant favor +%darkness damage and not +%physical. Although physical is possible on a cloak its much more unlikely. Getting +%physical on a hat is far more likely due to ego like "of the mountain". Same is true for various other things, for example res pen, rather oddly, can be gotten on lights at a somewhat decent likely hood.

So for that +%physical build doing a randart cloak for merchant was not good, but for a Shadowstep based Shadbowblade you can definitely get a randart cloak with something like +60% darkness damage, making it an awesome slot to possibly get. Similarly high spell crit is much more likely on a staff than many other slots.

[cctobias]

That does help, cctobias. I've been ignoring shops unless I'm running a staff build, since I always snagged an early T3 staff from Angolwen. I've never checked a single shop upon hitting T2, but don't shops get new inventories after The Master and on returning from the East? I just never knew they were worthwhile.

Well they are "wothwhile" if you are heavily weighting a certain stat like crit. Check out the purple belt in thsi profile:

http://te4.org/characters/135593/tome/c ... 1dbb3339c1

That is a purple item and therefore can be found in a store (high level of course). But that belt has +20% res pen and +%25 physical. I have purposely scummed randart belts at merchant on other characters (to see what comes out not to actually use them, i.e. I never kept any). And after 2 hours of scumming I never got a randart with better values on those two things. I DID get some killer randarts dropping with some really nice long laundry lists of nice stuff. But I never saw a randart with anything better than about half those values that actually had both stats.

Now its theoretically possible to get a randart belt with those values and extra stuff. But my conclusion is that its exceedindly rare. Thus if you really want some stat, in my case it was +phys, sometimes a purple for a particular spot actually is not going to be beat.

Therefore if you do want something in particular check shops for purples etc. Anyway there are a few people with much more knowledge about the various egos than me. But the important thing to understand is that knowing what ego give what and go where is actually extremely useful for this stuff. If you want to get some stat high you may only need good items is 3-4 slots, but the other slots on the char screen may be almost useless or at least extremely unlikely to help at all.

[Red]

I'm already aware of ego comboes with my Infinite Timeless tests (because -spell CD only appears on boots and pickaxes. Freaking pickaxes) but I hadn't actually considered applying that to everything else.

In your opinion, as one of the better players of ToME, would it be more worth it in general to go for maxing out one particulr stat, like crit, or to simply get a randart for a vital piece of gear, like your weapon? Assuming the best randart for crit is not also your weapon and you haven't already gotten an artifact worth keeping to the endgame in that slot.

[cctobias]

I'm already aware of ego comboes with my Infinite Timeless tests (because -spell CD only appears on boots and pickaxes. Freaking pickaxes) but I hadn't actually considered applying that to everything else.

In your opinion, as one of the better players of ToME, would it be more worth it in general to go for maxing out one particulr stat, like crit, or to simply get a randart for a vital piece of gear, like your weapon? Assuming the best randart for crit is not also your weapon and you haven't already gotten an artifact worth keeping to the endgame in that slot.

Mmmmm that is really completely build dependent. I mean an anorithil build might go for crit to the exclusion of almost everything. Other builds you DPS is really a mix of things; %dam, crit rate, crit mult, etc. Yet other builds might care nothing about %dam and simply want crit rate/crit mult for shields or something. Similarly a really good weapon can be much more important for a marauder vs a really good staff for an AM. Although staves can have some really nice stuff so that is debatable, but still in general the DPS of a marauder is pretty much all on the weapon and the DPS of an AM is only partially on the staff and a marauder gameplay is much more dependent on the fast kill.

Also all of this is heavily dependent on just how much you want to use the Vault. I mean I can shuffle around those 40% crit gloves all over the place. On Madness I have no problem doing so, because Madness is completely out of whack and doing any trick to win is fine. But I really wouldn't transfer that over on normal or Nightmare. But maybe I might do something like that if I really really wanted to do a Corona based Anorithil.


But still in a pure game without using the Vault at all on Normal or NM difficulty I really don't think you can reliably always get 100% unless you are something like a shaloren shadowblade or whatever.

So you are going to pretty much be playing the percentages and/or making sacrifices to max out one stat. In general I don't really consider it really worth it except in certain gimick builds. This is one reason Stealth actually becomes kind of worse and worse as difficulty rises. On Normal its not that likely that you can pull off the guaranteed crits AND the ~90% bonus to crit mult. But on Insanity you can get all that and still have many other bonuses. So even when we ignore the fact that you lose stealth more often, just replicating the actual benefits go from maybe possible with sacrifices on Normal, to doable on Insane and thus making a 20 point skill investment an OK tradeoff to a rather large waste of points.

I mean I would say you can reliably get to 60% or even 80% crit on Normal. And if you get lucky you can get to 100%. By checking shops and maybe buying specific slots at the arti merhcnat you can slant those odds to some degree. Maybe something like getting to 80% reliably and 100% like every other playthrough? Then race and class will have some effect possibly enough to get you to 100% fairly often.

I generally don't bother with that though. Because when we talk about pure damage getting a nice 20% damage bonus is effectively the same as some amount of crit%. There are generally enough contributing factors to damage that mixing a matching give you better odds of maximizing your damage with what you have.

In some cases this is not the way I have done it. For example on the Light tree/staff shadowblade build I have posted in the Rogue forum that build benefits a lot from crit mult specifically and on playthroughs of that I have done some atypical things to get more crit mult as I was giving it a higher priority. This was mainly due to the fact that it would give me better and and better shields simultaneously, and stealth gave auto-crits.

Similarly some Sun Paladin build might really want crit rate if they are trying to be a Sun Ray caster.

And when you run it all together getting to 100% can be as simple as simply passing around one good crit item to your characters through the vault if you are usually playing classes that boost crit some (like about 10-15%).

Basically, I would say but others may have different experience, that there is a roughly 20% gray area on Normal, that in some cases can be fairly hard to bridge and in other cases rather easy. You can bridge this gap in various ways; pick a specific race, have your class help, get lucky, or use your vault. Some of these things are maybe part of your build considerations, others are about how you want to play the game in general. Perhaps you purposely decide to play skeleton and roll the dice. Perhaps you don't feel great about bridging that crit gap and really want Sun Ray procs so you go shaloren. Perhaps 100% is not that big a deal so you do whatever you feel like. For a berserker using berserk rage you can potentially get enough +crit to bridge that gap alone and maybe don't need to go shaloren.

But the way I would think about the problem is to imagine that for a Cornac player with average luck using a class with no crit help and assuming you invest in cunning, you should have somewherre around a 20-30 % shortfall. Then if you are interested in maxing crit you should come up with some thing you are comfortable with to either add a flat increase or slant your playthrough to better luck.

[Red]

I actually made a Shaloren Anorithil in between my last post and yours in an attempt at a Corona run. Died in the SLazish Fens, so never even got close to applying any advice seen here, but still.

Have you considered writing a general guide on how to do ToME better? That right there is some excellent advice on character building in general, and while it's likely a bit much for newer players to use properly, it would be an excellent resource to simply have on hand for anyone who's trying to get better.

[Zenavathar]

I'd definitely read a guide like that .