But you have minimal control over Burning Head beyond the initial target and, afaik, the entire shot crits. 4-5 crit stacks + max crit gear makes for a pretty reliable crit rate on it and it won’t do better/worse based on what it decides to hit. With power vs, if it veers off to hit something besides what you’re buffed against, it doesn’t help wanna will overall reduce your targets hit.
Pyro’s passive crit buffs stacked with gear buffs and innate crit rate feels pretty substantial to me. There’s also no combo that works universally and if I spec for the threats I most want bh to tackle, I have to either burn the while bh on them or accept that by aiming for max damage efficiency, for the larger threats there might not be as much juice left in the bh when it hits it.
I’ll doublecheck the nature of burning head Crit the next time I get a chance.
I think that breakpoints are vastly more important, specially for melee and for staggering. Through +power the player can achieve reliable +20% against either the majority of enemies or a select type.
It’s simply much more dangerous to face enemies if you can’t just stagger/shove them. It severely reduces melee options.
Crit provides small bursts of increased damage, but when fighting in melee the player simply doesn’t have the luxury of having luck. There’s hundreds of enemies and there must be a reliable way to dispatch them.
Relying on teammates to fill in damage never worked for me because it’s unreliable to focus fire and most likely will result in overkills while also presenting the danger of being separated and not having a clear pattern of attacks to eliminate the threat.
Attack Speed
Other options such as Attack Speed are, in my opinion, often overrated. This stat mostly benefits weapons used to clear hordes.
Attack speed isn’t so beneficial against elites or any important enemy since it’s unlikely that attack will be spammed. More likely they will be targeted by few strong attacks to the weakspot with dodges/blocks in-between.
Attack speed is also mostly irrelevant for classes which will clear mobs with ranged attacks.
Crit Power, as previouly stated, seems to provide little against most enemies because it’s just overkill.
When Crit is good.
Ranged careers because of the Scrounger talent and less relevant stagger
Careers that have significant bonuses to crit and/or abilities that trigger on crit such as WHC and Shade
There’s no significant breakpoints to go after or they require too much of an specialization. 20% against a common type isn’t hard, 30% is quite tough and higher is probably overspecialization.
My rule of thumb is: If my melee weapon doesn’t kill a SV with 2 headshots or less then I don’t even bother against armor. It’s a waste of time.
If I can’t clear hordes fast enough, I’ll increase attack speed a bit.
Ok, just tested it and I’m almost certain it does. If any Burning Head kill procs Heat Sink, every kill on that same Burning Head will also proc Heat Sink. I believe this is the case for all attacks, ie. the attack is what crits, so if you hit 30 enemies and the game decides that particular attack is a crit, all 30 enemies take crit damage. Except on flamethrowers, which do non-crit damage on crit afaik.
Body shotting a globadier or a storm sorc with the handgun is purely academic in nature? Of course not and I know you probably agree. This example shows that using +power to reach breakpoints can be more valuable than crit % for example (read: I would much rather have +10% infantry power on handgun than +5% crit). The flipside of course is that there is probably not much point in getting power to solely reduce the number of hits vs. CW to 5 from 6, for example.
I also disagree with the “dynamic environment” argument. Most of my kills come from being the sole contributor to damage. As such it I think it is very important to get frequently used strikes to single shot slave rats, clan rats & chaos fanatics if reasonably possible. This is not to say crit is bad or inferior, but I think both mechanics have their place.
I agree that handgun is on the far “power vs” side of the spectrum in that it definitely needs the right power vs loadout to get the absolute most out of it.
Bit of a necrobump but after playing around with this a bit more I definitely think the value of either is extremely class dependent and that any given class has a clear-cut superior approach, generally decided by its innate crit chance potential and crit power potential.
Eg. On WS, with max possible crit chance and max possible crit power boost, you’ll routinely 1-hit body shot everything except CW, and her non-crit headshots are pretty reliable to begin with. Obviously this doesn’t happen every single time but it balances out imo and the fact that it applies to every category of enemy makes stacking crit extremely valuable. Most importantly, you can ohko maulers. Her uncharged shots are also capable of ohko’ing most specials on crit. Since she should be landing headshots quickly/reliably anyways, it makes for an extremely potent build.
Eg. Pyro, due to its crit chance boost, lands crits reliably, lets you control how hard your burst hits anyways, and is generally reliable at headshotting, so crit power also seems like the superior choice here. I don’t have the greens to test much further on this right now.
Long story short, if a class boasts an above average crit rate, crit power is probably worth it. On classes where crits are more scarce, power vs can help you compensate against critical enemies. Huntsman can probably go either way given that he sports enhanced crit potential but in general I think he’s better with a power vs build.
Thanks for info, too bad can’t experiment cause 50 green dust.
Also imho bumping is better, than creating duplicate topics. Bumping is also spat-free, since everyone has already expressed their position on the topic.
Breakpoints are hardly worth it for most classes IMO, its always situational and it requires a huge stat dump to get chaos and Skaven to break point, I generally think Crit is more rewarding especially in 1.0.8 were damage caps have been removed. Furthermore crit works with scrounger and swift slaying really well, which most DPS centered classes tend to run.
as I dont run beam staff on pyro that much anymore, I’ve stacked power vs. to try to make hordes die faster with the conflag and fireball staff. If I had the greens it would be interesting to try crit power instead, as FB at least has a lot of opportunity to crit as the projectile flies through a horde.
The projectile most certainly crits and procs heatsink as it passes through enemies. I’m more uncertain of the explosion itself tho, because I don’t tend to see a lot of crits when spamming it into shields or bosses.
I’ve heard Drake Gun can’t either (or rather crits deal the same dmg as normal hits). I never use it though, that’s just what I’ve been told. Considering IB can’t crit worth a damn no matter what you do it’s not a big deal, just weird.