Idea how to change crits and mates

The "aditional" helps making your post more clear.
I'm not going to answer the unnecessary second part of the post.


By the way, Sakiel BOX NOW!

 

*18.5% on a burst 4 weapon. And 14% on burst 3.

Im not sure what discussion you want to have about the use of abnormal? Would you prefer infrequent? Rare?

It happens a lot less often than most other actions in the game. This also completely disregards the chance that a non-crit roll has exactly the same result (won ftf and dealt a wound), making the game altering effects even less than those raw percentages.

I don't count burst because players have agency around burst, you can mitigate it. It reduces to 1 in aro. Special skills are not like that, very little I do will change my opponents 10% chance to crit with fatality L2.

 

Well, I guess linked HMGs as main troubleshooters are too common in my "meta", so I calculated it for B5. That may look like a sensationalist approach, fine, but even 18,5% is close enough.

That would work, but I wouldn't consider "potentially a couple of times per turn" to be that rare.

That's true, but if we fire up dice calculator, we'll see that a lot of "main canon" type of weapons have their range of "decent odds" at 70% or more under practical scenarios. When you consider that about quarter of your successes falls on supposedly outstanding events, well...

Of course, even if there wasn't such thing a crits, your top roll would still win you a FtF most of the time when you're on offensive and thus can pick your terms. But on the other hand, there is still all that ignoring of saves going on.

That brings interesting implications, of course, but my point being, crits are not that rare and impact the game a lot on average.

On a side note, I have brought my friend into Infinity and the first thing he said after our first match was "Wow, d20 are so damn random". But to him it was apparently a good thing, even though we're talking about someone ceaselessly mocking his 40k partner for relying too much on unreliable chaos spells and artifacts a bit too much...

 

Removing the ARM roll from the critted player is a big deal. It removes all player agency in the choice of a unit with a particular ARM value and the use of cover for the vital +3 ARM.

 

I guess it's fair to make equally opposite claims on a subjective matter.

But I still don't think youre taking into account how often when you see a critical, that even if we removed the auto wound, you would see the same result.

Even if you roll a critical twice in one player turn, how often are those actually game changing?

This is also why I don't consider burst like special skills. Increased burst door increase crit chance, but it also increases the chance that you would have got the same result (dead model). So it's internally balance, special skills are flat improvements at the moment, and that can be a a slippery slope for balance.

This has more to do with armour being maybe over valued or needing a larger division between the high and low values.

As above I think you'd find if you stopped to analyse, the amount of times a crit totally removed the value of your armour would be very small.

 

I don't think anyone would reasonably claim that CB doesn't take crits into account, but when it comes to ARM I think there is a wide spread opinion that they have not assigned the correct points weight to it.
Fusilier vs Fusilier (both in cover and +3): 37% vs 22%
Fusilier vs Mimetism Fusilier: 27% vs 31%
Fusilier vs ARM+3 Fusilier: 30% vs 22%

As you can see for a simple comparison, Mimetism (priced at around 1 to 4 points) is significantly better in terms of survival than +3 ARM (which would cost around 10 points), not to mention with regards to winning the FtF. While the two can't be compared directly due to DTWs, MSV, CC and AP (etc) ammo, taking costs into account it's very clear which ability is better and by a fairly huge margin.

But neither of these have anything to do with Crits, since Mimetism is seldom if ever sufficient to drag a model down to -12 MOD.

 

If that is true, you need to rethink your strategy. Crits have no effect on your strategy if you're well-prepared. You probably depend to much on a single specialist or something like that. Or your opponent is somehow cheating with their d20

 

Bad clustering does happen, statistically speaking it's necessary for a truly random result. You can only plan for statistically accurate data over a large pool of data. In other words, sometimes you just have to smile and make another offering to the dice gods, and maybe get some new dice, accepting that this was just not going to be a strong turn for you.

 

This is a truely exceptional outcome. And its not only crits but the tactics (youre opponent was doing something right to shoot 3 models with valour with their shock weapon on turn 1).

Next time you're playing, and there is a crit actually stop and analyse the result of the crit.

Would they have won the roll anyway. What were the odds you would have failed the armour roll.

Did your plan include what would happen if you get critted?

 

Think of this: a crit has a 5% chance to happen. That is, if you hit. Successful hits occur ~60% of the time, assuming BS12 and shooting a model with your native BS (assuming it has cover and you shooting within your +3 range band). And on top of that, you have to beat your opponent in FtF, which adds another variable multiplier. So, on average, crits have about 1% chance to occur.
Now, that doesn't mean that if you make 100 FtF rolls, one of those will be a guaranteed crit. There could be 17 crits within those 100 rolls, or there could be 0. 1% means that, assuming infinite number of rolls, crits will occur once every 100 rolls. The more rolls you make, the closer the ratio will be to 1%.
So, assuming the aforementioned, I think that 1% is a mathematically good estimation of a miracle within the given level of abstraction.

 

As someone who doesn't mind crits the way they are, I'm a little baffled by this statement. If you crit... you automatically hit. That's literally one of the things a crit does. Now, there is the chance that your opponent also crits... which does reduce the chances that your crit actually does something (anything).

Fun Side Note: I had a game a while ago where my opponent spent 4 orders attacking my TR bot with a spitfire (don't ask). We canceled crits on the first three orders and I got yet another crit on the 4th where he whiffed. Even throwing 4 dice each, the chances of that are pretty damn low (7.54 x 10^-4%)!

 

Sorry to rain on your parade... but you jumped one step ahead of yourself. Crits are usually a static 1/20 per die (unless FAT2, Stats exceeding 20, impossible to hit... etc) regardless of 20% or 80% probability to win a FTF. So with 100 dice you'll get an average of 5% = 5 Crits. Your opponent can cancel those with a Crit of his own or the Crit can be overkill (but so can normal hits)but lets leave that out for now).

Fact is that with a B5 Gun I am looking at a Crit every 4 Orders spent shooting with a little luck. So if you allow me to spend about 13 out of 18 Orders shooting you will very likely eat 3 crits - not because of luck, but because of statistical spread.
In Reality I might only crit once or never, but also five or seven times - the important thing is that weight of dice will heavily influence how often you should expect a crit.

There is also the matter of perception. I might spend 13 Order shooting, critting you 3 times in a row and simply winning 9 of the other FTF Rolls because the odds were heavily in my favour and losing 1 to a Critical ARO. This will feel like luck since results like this probably kill 8-10 models in a single turn, but it won't be luck. Just the average expected outcome.

Getting Critted by a Multi HMG or losing a FTF Roll resulting in 3 ARM saves against DAM16 AP/Shock isn't much different for the average trooper.
Finally getting the all deciding Crit on the last Order after a bunch of bad luck is also just the average spread doing it's work.

 

Even 100 Orders with Burst 5 isn't really quite statistically significant, but your point stands: Statistics and Confirmation Bias are not our friend when trying to intuitively understand probability. Often evidence does not match our perception.

 

Oops.. brainfart :B You're absolutely right, it's still 5%, unless your opponent also crits. I was too sleepy :D

 

And my whole point is that the same could easily happen without crits. Getting hit with a HRL, a lucky hit with HMG, basically, anything that generates 3+ hits can cause this outcome. Crits are not statistically significant enough to blame them for this outcome. Sometimes the dice gods will just want to troll you and you will be rolling 20s for skill checks and 1s for saves.

People are often misrepresenting probability. 5% is somehow a huge chance when it's a chance to crit, but at the same time missing a 85% hit is a "the RNG in this game is total bs" situation. I'm looking at you, XCOM players ;)