Critical strike

Critical strike (often abbreviated as "crit") is when an attack does extra damage. A critical effect is when any other effect (usually, but not limited to, a [Heal]) has an increased effect.

Criticals have a generally low chance of occurring, however, you can increase your crit chance in certain ways:

• Attributes
• Talents (some classes)
• Equipment
• Potions (temporary)
• Buffs (temporary)

Certain classes can also increase the amount of damage their critical strikes do with talents.

For physical attacks using weapons (melee and ranged), the chance to crit is based on the Agility attribute. Physical critical strikes deal 200% normal damage. To see your chance to melee crit, open your character pane and view your melee stats. The tooltip will show your percent chance to crit.

• It is worth mentioning that if an attack is blocked by a player, it can not crit as the attack table results are exclusive of each other. This does not, however, mean that increasing your block chance decreases your overall chance to be crit, that will only happen after all your chance to be normally hit has been pushed off the attack table.

For spells, the chance to crit is based on the Intellect attribute. Critical damage spells deal 150-200% normal damage. Critical heals will heal 150% their normal amount. To see your chance to crit with spells, open your character pane and view your spell stats.

 

See also: Combat and Combat rating system

Critical Strike Rating

The easiest method to increase the chance of a critical strike is to equip gear with the attribute "Improves critical strike rating by 'x'." There is also "Improves spell critical strike rating by 'x'." Note that these are different attributes; the former will increase chance to crit with a physical attack, and the latter will increase chance to crit with a spell.

For some classes, critical strike rating is of less value. For example, an affliction Warlock using DoTs will have almost no use of critical hits. That is because crits only affects direct damage.

The Choice

When choosing between equipment with higher crit or higher +damage , there are some things to consider:

• It is addictive to have high peak damage now and then.
• In parties and instances, crits makes it harder to control aggro.
• In general, critical strikes can quickly finish the fight for you.
• Some classes have abilities which proc off of crits.

At level 70, your gear choices are diverse in any class. As a caster, you get 1% chance to crit for every 22.1 crit rating.