Terciel1976, on 02 October 2015 - 06:03 AM, said:
I'm not sure whether critical roll is by shot or by weapon, so I'm not sure about the math of critical hits. But your underlying assumption is flawed because by breaking up your shots, you spread your damage out over time and become way less likely to hit the same component with all your shots. Known damage sooner is way more valuable than maybe damage later. There really are extremely few circumstances where using less than all available firepower (as permitted by weapon load and current heat level) is a good decision. Also...never put yourself in the hands of RNGs if you don't have to!
Critical hits are determined per individual hit, meaning it rolls once per laser "tick" per laser. This is why lasers are so bad at taking out items, the sheer number of rolls ensures that critical hits will spread evenly across all crit slots basically every time, so you'll have to burn through a lot of item HP before any items get destroyed unless that item takes up a lot of slots relative to the total slots used in that component.
This means components with a lot of small items in them are nigh immune to item damage from lasers because you'll have to take out nearly all of the item's combined hit points before any are destroyed and the component itself will not last nearly as long.
Koniving, on 02 October 2015 - 01:21 PM, said:
When explained last year by PGI's Alexander or Karl, can't recall... (Think it was both.)
The critical rolls are done per individual weapon per 'use'. Even with pulse lasers which use "ticks" to determine damage, the "crit damage success" is evidently calculated when you pull the trigger, not when/if you hit. It is negated if you hit armor or miss. It is permitted if you manage to hit. Still the crit damage is turned into a percentage on beam weapons like medium pulse lasers so that if you earned a single crit on a single MPL, and 3 of 5 ticks makes it, you're doing 3/5ths of a single crit, too.
That said it wouldn't matter if you chain fired them or fired them at the same time far as crits.
....Having said that, I've come to notice that if your ping is high, or if you fire a lot of weapons very frequently, you'd be better off chain firing due to hit registration. This is also why I highly encourage stream-firing your LRMs and SRMs instead of clustering them up in a single blow. Fire too much and quite simply, "How many missiles was that again? Meh, I'll just say it was 20."
If that's true, ignore what I just said. Do you have a link for that?
Edited by Satan n stuff, 02 October 2015 - 03:26 PM.