I've always been a fan of magic missile spells, so most of my casters use it and the varients, which makes me familiar with chain missile.

Now i could be wrong, but as far as i remember, it used to be that despite what the spell said, chain missile would a) hit one target for middiling to bad damage (50?) then hit all nearby targets with 10 missiles (each missile dealing a pitiful 15-25 damage). The nice thing was that, if there was only one other target, the first would be hit for around 50-125, and the second would take around 300 (due to individual missiles critting, it averaged around 300).

Now, things seem to have changed in a number of ways.

The descriptions (edited): a missile fires out dealing 4-5 damage. Every 2 levels beyond the first gives you an additional missile that after striking the target, explodes outward hitting another nearby target.

First, i dont know where they are getting their damage from. At level 8 (4-5 missiles) i deal 63-70 damage with the first hit and no critical (with force IV, which is 35% damage bonus). And it no longer fires 10 secondary missiles, it fires the number you are supposed to get.

Second, once, when i threw one at a ghast, a bat just barely flew in the path of the spell. It seemed (obviously too fast for a screenshot) that two of the missiles fired impacted the bat while the other three hit the ghast. The two that hit the bat then secondary hit the ghast while the missiles that hit the ghast slamed into another monster behind it.

The secondary missiles are still doing 14-17 damage before crit, and crit secondary does 29-36 each, just less of them.

In conclusion, the missiles are now accurate to the level (didn't seem to be before) and critical secondaries do reasonable damage (each missile rolls it's own crit, much like firewall now has individual ticks crit while others dont. The primary strike does far more damage then it used to (as much at level 8 now as it used to do at level 14. My 15 sorc does 100-135 non crit with primary strike iirc), while the secondaries are as good or slightly worse due to less missiles. And in a chaotic environment, you may end up splitting the primary strike between enemies (or hitting someone you didn't aim at), much like a heat-seeking missile might hit a diffrent target then what it was aimed at.