Jun Watarase, on 02 August 2017 - 11:40 AM, said:
What is the point of these? Last i checked, missles didnt even have any crit chance or damage bonuses, not that critting matters since most people take the survival tree anyway, and you can usually destroy a location with the next alpha anyway.
Missiles have crit chance. If they didn't, you wouldn't be able to destroy equipment with them. I believe they used to be able to crit off their own crit damage, which was removed.
Every time you hit structure, you have have a chance to both damage equipment. As far as I know, missiles are treated as normal weapons, and each missile has a chance to do strike for up to 3 critical hits. A 1x crit is somewhere around 40% probability, while a 3x crit is less than 10%.
A 3x crit gives three extra instances of damage, so your single SRM would be doing 2+2+2 damage to equipment, total. With both crit nodes, you'd be doing 2.3/4.6/6.9 to equipment with each SRM.
After you crit, 15% of the damage you've done to equipment is then done back to that structural component. So, if you land a 1x crit with every missile in an SRM6, you've done..
-12 damage to the component with your initial attack
- 6 instances of 2.3 damage to equipment in that component, totalling 13.8 equipment-destroying damage.
-an additional 2.07 damage rolled off of the crit damage, back onto the component.
So in total, your SRM6 would have done 14.07 damage rather than 13.8 without the crit skills. On a full 3x roll, you'd be doing a total of 6.12 bonus damage to the component, or 18.21 damage total vs. 17.4 without.
Comparing crit damage on a Splat dog, on a full 1x crit it's 84.42 vs, 82.8 dmg.
That's my understanding of how crit damage works, someone that has better insight can correct me if I'm wrong.
In any case, I think they're appropriately scaled. They aren't a massive investment, losing 1.5% cooldown for one node, and spending an extra two SP for the other. Comparatively, you're spending 4 extra SP to gain Missile Spread 2 (-2.5% spread) down from Missile Racks 1. It's not super crazy powerful, but it's also one of the only ways to increase your alpha, and you're not spending very much to get it.
Think of it this way- making them too good removes choice from the skill tree. Right now it's a total investment of 4 points. Alternatively, you can take Cooldown 1, 3, 13, and Heat Gen 8 instead. 15% crit damage vs. 2.25% cooldown and 0.75% heat gen? That's a valid decision that would be removed if you pumped crit chance up to two 15% nodes or something.