When are crits calculated?

Question

This is a pretty specific question so I don't expect a large number of responses, but if someone out there has the time to confirm this it would be greatly appreciated.

I was firing my Elemental Arrow (Nether Tentacle) at a champion with several attributes, one of which being missile dampening (for those who don't know, it slows the projectiles significantly, although I don't believe it affects the projectile's damage). I also had my Sharpshooter perk active. Normally I do a large amount of damage, 25k dps give or take 5k, however this was in Inferno so I know the pack wouldn't go down easily. To my surprise they dropped like flies. My question for you is:

• Does my Sharpshooter crit chance affect projectiles already mid-air, and does hitting the missile dampening semi-sphere reset the Sharphsoot crit chance bonus?

Either I was extremely lucky and landed ~15 natural crits in a row, or Sharpshooter left all my dampened shots 100% crits and they dealt damage as such. The numbers on my screen showed ~30k, which is typical crit damage for me (because of Nether Tentacles this is x2).

Answer 1

Crits are calculated on hit, using the player's crit-rating at the time of impact. Crit-rating is not attached to the shot itself when it is launched.

However, the Sharpshooter buff lasts for one second after a crit (it says this in the tooltip) so if multiple shots hit within that one-second period after the first crit, they will all benefit from the buffed crit-rate. Missile-dampening makes it much more likely that this will happen.

The dampening sphere itself is just a visual cue, so missiles 'hitting' the sphere only causes them to slow down, nothing more.

Answer 2

As already said, Sharpshooter doesn't drop until something is hit, this may also be a door or other object. The Missile Dampening field isn't a object or monster, so it doesn't reset the Sharpshooter buff.

But when you shoot several Nether Tentacles or Ball Lightnings into the Missle Dampening, they are going to be slowed, so that they actually hit a single enemy somewhere around 4-8 times with one projectile. As the Sharpshooter Buff remains active 1 sec after critical Hit, it can occur that in this one second an enemy is getting hit by many hits caused by Missile Dampening and this makes them go down very fast even if you don't crit for sure on subsequent hits. After this initial second the damage output from those slow arrows in combination with the missle dampening gives an immense damage output on all enemies in the way.

PS. if they have the reflect damage prefix, you're gonna have a bad time, cause you'll kill yourself if you don't pay attention and go invisible at the right time.

Remark: Nethertentacle won't hit multiple times since there is patch 1.0.3 out. Ball Lightening still has the same effect

Answer 3

It's worth noting that Sharpshooter doesn't drop until you actually hit something. (ie: if you stand in town firing into air, you stay at 100% crit).

Due to missile dampening, more hits would have hit the mob in a shorter space of time (due to the dampening meaning you end up with 3-5 shots inside the dampening field) in addition to these shots hitting multiple times each due to slower travel speed*.

^{* This has been subsequently fixed in a patch, and abilities like Nether Tentacles will now only hit each enemy once}

Answer 4

It is understood that your critical chance is held for about 1 second after your initial critical strike and it resets after that. Missile Dampening does not lower damage but for spells like Nether Tentacles and Ball Lightning it significantly increases damage because of the fact that it slows down the movement of the missile meaning that Nether Tentacles and Ball Lightning hit the monster more times per ball. The combination of Sharpshooter and Missile Dampening makes those sorts of packs drop so quick.