What does IC do?

[Elixxer]

I'm not sure where to post this and didn't look to hard, feeling lazy right now, But the feat 'Improved Critical' slash Perice ect ect. It says that it doubles critical threat range? Whats that mean, double chance to crit hit? and why is power crit not good? Overall can anyone show me to a thread that explains how the critical hits work?

[Agrivail]

What it means is it double the critical threat range so 19-20 is 2 numbers 19 and 20 so the feat would double it to 4 numbers 17,18,19,and 20 so 17-20, and so on and so forth.....

[Rawum]

Improved critical increases the threat range for a weapon. The way the d20 system works is that each weapon has a threat range and if you roll an attack roll in this range you score a threat meaning a chance at a critical. You then need to make a second attack roll to see if that threat scores critical damage. This attack roll must be equal to or greater than the targets AC.

If a weapon's crit chance is on a 20 IC will increase that to a 19 -20 effectively doubling the chance to score a threat.

The reason power critical is less important is because most people worried about scoring crits will already have an attack bonus high enough to make that confirmation roll.

[Kaervas]

I'm not sure where to post this and didn't look to hard, feeling lazy right now, But the feat 'Improved Critical' slash Perice ect ect. It says that it doubles critical threat range? Whats that mean, double chance to crit hit? and why is power crit not good? Overall can anyone show me to a thread that explains how the critical hits work?

Improved Critical doubles the base critical threat range of the weapon.

A weapon with a 20 threat range becomes 19-20, one with 19-20 becomes 17-20, and one with 18-20 becomes 15-20. It has no effect on the multiplier.

It doesn't stack with impact or keen (which do the same thing) which is why people with min2 weapons tend to drop IC for something else, since those are already keen.

[Elixxer]

Lots of answers really fast, thanks!

[Guildmaster_Kadish]

Every weapon has a critical threat range and a critical multiplier. On a longsword, for example, you see the numbers: 1d6 19-20/x2

This means it does 1d6 (one six-sided die) base damage per attack, with a critical threat range of 19-20, and a multiplier of 2.

Whenever you attack, you roll a 20-sided die, add that number to your attack bonus, and if the total is equal to or greater than the opponent's armor class, you hit. If you roll a number within the critical threat range (in this case, a 19 or a 20), you have the opportunity to score a critical hit. You then roll a second time to confirm the critical hit; if the confirmation roll would result in a hit, then the critical hit is confirmed and your base damage (including strength modifier and other bonuses) is multiplied by the critical multiplier (x2 in this case).

Example: Using a +1 Greataxe (1d12 20/x3) with an 18 strength on a level 2 fighter.
Attack bonus:
2 Base Attack Bonus (from 2 levels of fighter)
1 Enhancement (from the +1 on the Greataxe)
4 Strength (18 str = +4 modifier)
+7

Damage bonus:
1 Enhancement (from the +1 on the Greataxe)
4 Strength (18 str = +4 modifier)
+5

Attacking a monster with 15 AC.
You roll a 19. You hit for 1d12+5 damage.
You roll a 6. You miss.
You roll a 20. You roll a 5 on your confirmation roll. You hit for 1d12+5 damage.
You roll a 20. You roll a 10 on your confirmation roll. You hit for (1d12+5)*2 damage.

Make sense?


At high levels, characters gain a very significant amount of damage from getting critical hits. A quick example: A khopesh with IC has a crit range of 17-20/x3. This means that in 20 swings you get 1 miss (roll a 1), 15 normal hits (roll 2-16), and 4 criticals for 3x damage each (roll 17-20). That translates into 15*base damage + 4*3*base damage, for a total of 27*base damage. Compare that to the 19*base damage you'd get with no critical hits, and suddenly your criticals are adding 42% to your damage.

That's why IC is so powerful--in the example, it expands the crit range from 19-20/x3 to 17-20/x3, bringing you from 23*base damage to 27*base damage, a 17% increase. That's pretty darn nice for a feat.

Power Critical, on the other hand, merely gives a bonus to confirming your critical hits. This is generally useless because most melee characters at the endgame have attack bonuses so high that they only ever miss on a 1 and never fail to confirm criticals. The extra +4 to confirm is thus redundant and useless.


Hopefully that helped.

[Elixxer]

THAT explained everything!!!