This will be a straight forward discussion much like my previous 'Bleeding Damage' topic.
BenC asked me a very good question a few days ago about how the 'Bladesman' perk works and so I set about messing around with critical damage, and this will reflect most of that testing. I had never really spent much time thinking about critical damage, even though I use swords for most of my 1H gameplay, so this was mostly new information to me. I couldn't find any definitive discussions about how these perks work so hopefully this will answer any questions you fine folks may have. There was one surprising revelation for me which I'll talk about at the end of this discussion.
This discussion will be broken down into a few subsections. First I'm going to list an example weapon and talk about how all of the perks afffect it (2H and 1H weapons all work the same as far as I can tell). The second section I'll be listing the BASE critical damage value of some common swords which will allow anyone to calculate the amount of crit damage you can expct with each perk (rather than me listing all of the values which would be far too long of a list). The final section will be a conclusion where I'll be briefly talking how critical damage is applied and how we can use that to our advantage.
NOTE #1: All Damage cited is base on ADEPT difficulty
How Critical Damage perks work
NOTE #2: If you want to know how Skyrim applies 'chance perks' please refer to my discussion on 'Reflect Blows'
For this example I'm going to be using a common 1H Steel sword. Whenever I cite the perks for 'Bladesman' you can consider 'Deep Wounds' to work the same for it's respective 2H sword.
STEEL SWORD:
- 8 Damage - Base Physical Damage Rating
- 4 Damage - Base Critical Damage Rating
SKILL MODIFIERS:
- +050% - 100 skill bonus
- +100% - Armsman perks 5/5
The Steel sword now does:
- 24 Damage - Standard attack
- 48 Damage - Power attack
How swords work in regards to critical damage (Greatswords work the same) is that without any perks their critical damage chance has a multiplier of 0.0, meaning you never do any critical damage whether using a standard or power attack. There are four critical damage multipliers we can add:
- Bladesman 1 - (10% chance to do [BASE] critical damage)
- Bladesman 2 - (15% chance to do [BASE + 25%] critical damage)
- Bladesman 3 - (20% chance to do [BASE + 50%] critical damage)
- Critical Charge - (100% chance to double ALL critical damage)
If you don't have any Bladesman perks then Critical Charge will use the BASE critical damage rating for it's calculation; unfortunately this means having only the first rank of Bladesman will give us zero benefit when using charge. Using the above Steel sword the critical damage calculations will be as follows:
- 04 Damage - Bladesman 1 (10% chance)
- 05 Damage - Bladesman 2 (15% chance)
- 06 Damage - Bladesman 3 (20% chance)
- 08 Damage - Charge Only (100% chance)
- 08 Damage - Charge + Bladesman 1 (100% chance)
- 10 Damage - Charge + Bladesman 2 (100% chance)
- 12 Damage - Charge + Bladesman 3 (100% chance)
Critical damage is completely independant of any smithing/enchanting/alchemy multipliers. I did my test with a basic sword and then the same sword smithed to legendary and using +40% enchantments and potions (marksman and onehanded) and the critical damage was always the same. From what I can tell the critical damage perks work in the same way for bows but since there is no equivalent to charge it's use is limited. To offset this Bethesda seems to have given bows a higher (ratio wise) amount of critical damage compared to it's base physical damage, we can't use charge with a bow but the critical damage perks for bows will be boosting a higher base damage so it ends up still being worthwhile. A Daedric Greatsword with all 3 perks and using Charge will proc for 36 'critical damage' and with the full effect of MFD that value can be boosted to over 230 damage...needless to say you're guaranteed to 1-shot most things.
I briefly tested Valdr's dagger and it just seems to have a 25% chance to do it's base critical damage (which is 5) and I couldn't get it to work with the perks so I think it overrides it. When you wield the dagger a hidden perk is being applied to your character so I believe it may be cancelling out any other perks. It has a higher crit. base than a regular steel dagger so it's still doing more damage than a standard one with all three perks.
BASE critical damage value for common weapons
One-Handed Swords
Iron: 3
Steel: 4
Orcish: 4
Dwarven: 5
Elven: 5
Glass: 6
Ebony: 6
Daedric: 7
Dragonbone: 7
Two-Handed Swords
Iron: 7
Steel: 8
Orcish: 9
Dwarven: 9
Elven: 10
Glass: 10
Ebony: 11
Daedric: 12
Dragonbone: 12
Leveled and Unique Swords: (Highest level version if applicable)
Bloodskal Blade: 8
Bound Sword (Standard): 4
Bound Sword (Mystic): 7
Chillrend: 7
Dawnbreaker: 6
Dragonbane: 7
Ebony Blade: 0 (I think this is 0, I'm not entirely sure though. Hopefully someone can help)
Nightingale Blade: 7
Pale Blade: 5
Conclusion
The most surprising aspect I learned about critical damage (and what made me feel this is more than worth discussing) is that critical damage is actually considered to be a physical attack; It had made sense that it would be applied as, and considered to be, a magical attack in much the same way bleeding is. Realizing critical damage is actually a physical attack opens up two important factors we must now consider:
- Critical Damage is mitigated by an NPC's armour rating and by blocking
- Critical Damage can be buffed by using the 'Marked for Death' shout
Anyone familiar with my previous discussions should already know the impact of this, with the full effect of 3 words of MFD we can boost critical damage by an additional 540%, or 9% per second! Critical charge seems to be the best way to take advantage of critical damage since it acts as a straight 2x multiplier and procs with every hit. Combining all three perks of Bladesman with charge and MFD we can actually make good use of the extra critical damage and while they probably aren't game changing they certainly have their use.
I won't be doing a discussion for maces/hammers and their armour ignoring since it seems to work exactly how everyone believes it to (a straight armour ignore). As mentioned this is just a straight forward discussion and there really isn't much amazing information but for the sake of completion I thought this would be worth posting. Hopefully everyone can now make an informed decision on whether or not the specific weapon perks are worth the investment.
P.S.
I tried figuring out how sneak attacks apply critical damage but had a difficult time nailing down the specifics. If I can work it out properly I'll be adding that information to this discussion but for now my results have been all over the place and I just don't understand it enough to include.
P.P.S.
I tried to do the 'Combine critical charge with silent roll' technique but I couldn't get it to work. I don't know if it's something that doesn't actually work or if I'm just a failure at doing it. Many people on this site swear by it so I'll assume for now that I just suck.
This will be a straight forward discussion much like my previous 'Bleeding Damage' topic.
BenC asked me a very good question a few days ago about how the 'Bladesman' perk works and so I set about messing around with critical damage, and this will reflect most of that testing. I had never really spent much time thinking about critical damage, even though I use swords for most of my 1H gameplay, so this was mostly new information to me. I couldn't find any definitive discussions about how these perks work so hopefully this will answer any questions you fine folks may have. There was one surprising revelation for me which I'll talk about at the end of this discussion.
This discussion will be broken down into a few subsections. First I'm going to list an example weapon and talk about how all of the perks afffect it (2H and 1H weapons all work the same as far as I can tell). The second section I'll be listing the BASE critical damage value of some common swords which will allow anyone to calculate the amount of crit damage you can expct with each perk (rather than me listing all of the values which would be far too long of a list). The final section will be a conclusion where I'll be briefly talking how critical damage is applied and how we can use that to our advantage.
NOTE #1: All Damage cited is base on ADEPT difficulty
How Critical Damage perks work
NOTE #2: If you want to know how Skyrim applies 'chance perks' please refer to my discussion on 'Reflect Blows'
For this example I'm going to be using a common 1H Steel sword. Whenever I cite the perks for 'Bladesman' you can consider 'Deep Wounds' to work the same for it's respective 2H sword.
STEEL SWORD:
- 8 Damage - Base Physical Damage Rating
- 4 Damage - Base Critical Damage Rating
SKILL MODIFIERS:
- +050% - 100 skill bonus
- +100% - Armsman perks 5/5
The Steel sword now does:
- 24 Damage - Standard attack
- 48 Damage - Power attack
How swords work in regards to critical damage (Greatswords work the same) is that without any perks their critical damage chance has a multiplier of 0.0, meaning you never do any critical damage whether using a standard or power attack. There are four critical damage multipliers we can add:
- Bladesman 1 - (10% chance to do [BASE] critical damage)
- Bladesman 2 - (15% chance to do [BASE + 25%] critical damage)
- Bladesman 3 - (20% chance to do [BASE + 50%] critical damage)
- Critical Charge - (100% chance to double ALL critical damage)
If you don't have any Bladesman perks then Critical Charge will use the BASE critical damage rating for it's calculation; unfortunately this means having only the first rank of Bladesman will give us zero benefit when using charge. Using the above Steel sword the critical damage calculations will be as follows:
- 04 Damage - Bladesman 1 (10% chance)
- 05 Damage - Bladesman 2 (15% chance)
- 06 Damage - Bladesman 3 (20% chance)
- 08 Damage - Charge Only (100% chance)
- 08 Damage - Charge + Bladesman 1 (100% chance)
- 10 Damage - Charge + Bladesman 2 (100% chance)
- 12 Damage - Charge + Bladesman 3 (100% chance)
Critical damage is completely independant of any smithing/enchanting/alchemy multipliers. I did my test with a basic sword and then the same sword smithed to legendary and using +40% enchantments and potions (marksman and onehanded) and the critical damage was always the same. From what I can tell the critical damage perks work in the same way for bows but since there is no equivalent to charge it's use is limited. To offset this Bethesda seems to have given bows a higher (ratio wise) amount of critical damage compared to it's base physical damage, we can't use charge with a bow but the critical damage perks for bows will be boosting a higher base damage so it ends up still being worthwhile. A Daedric Greatsword with all 3 perks and using Charge will proc for 36 'critical damage' and with the full effect of MFD that value can be boosted to over 230 damage...needless to say you're guaranteed to 1-shot most things.
I briefly tested Valdr's dagger and it just seems to have a 25% chance to do it's base critical damage (which is 5) and I couldn't get it to work with the perks so I think it overrides it. When you wield the dagger a hidden perk is being applied to your character so I believe it may be cancelling out any other perks. It has a higher crit. base than a regular steel dagger so it's still doing more damage than a standard one with all three perks.
BASE critical damage value for common weapons
One-Handed Swords
Iron: 3
Steel: 4
Orcish: 4
Dwarven: 5
Elven: 5
Glass: 6
Ebony: 6
Daedric: 7
Dragonbone: 7
Two-Handed Swords
Iron: 7
Steel: 8
Orcish: 9
Dwarven: 9
Elven: 10
Glass: 10
Ebony: 11
Daedric: 12
Dragonbone: 12
Leveled and Unique Swords: (Highest level version if applicable)
Bloodskal Blade: 8
Bound Sword (Standard): 4
Bound Sword (Mystic): 7
Chillrend: 7
Dawnbreaker: 6
Dragonbane: 7
Ebony Blade: 0 (I think this is 0, I'm not entirely sure though. Hopefully someone can help)
Nightingale Blade: 7
Pale Blade: 5
Conclusion
The most surprising aspect I learned about critical damage (and what made me feel this is more than worth discussing) is that critical damage is actually considered to be a physical attack; It had made sense that it would be applied as, and considered to be, a magical attack in much the same way bleeding is. Realizing critical damage is actually a physical attack opens up two important factors we must now consider:
- Critical Damage is mitigated by an NPC's armour rating and by blocking
- Critical Damage can be buffed by using the 'Marked for Death' shout
Anyone familiar with my previous discussions should already know the impact of this, with the full effect of 3 words of MFD we can boost critical damage by an additional 540%, or 9% per second! Critical charge seems to be the best way to take advantage of critical damage since it acts as a straight 2x multiplier and procs with every hit. Combining all three perks of Bladesman with charge and MFD we can actually make good use of the extra critical damage and while they probably aren't game changing they certainly have their use.
I won't be doing a discussion for maces/hammers and their armour ignoring since it seems to work exactly how everyone believes it to (a straight armour ignore). As mentioned this is just a straight forward discussion and there really isn't much amazing information but for the sake of completion I thought this would be worth posting. Hopefully everyone can now make an informed decision on whether or not the specific weapon perks are worth the investment.
P.S.
I tried figuring out how sneak attacks apply critical damage but had a difficult time nailing down the specifics. If I can work it out properly I'll be adding that information to this discussion but for now my results have been all over the place and I just don't understand it enough to include.
P.P.S.
I tried to do the 'Combine critical charge with silent roll' technique but I couldn't get it to work. I don't know if it's something that doesn't actually work or if I'm just a failure at doing it. Many people on this site swear by it so I'll assume for now that I just suck.
