Critical Endorsements

Does anyone use them? In most games you are far better off accenting your strengths rather than trying to offset weaknesses. The exception for MNC is that you get a large bonus for staying alive so armor becomes mandatory for many players. The overwhelming majority of MNC players I have spoken to feel that critical endorsements are mostly worthless. Perhaps we might feel differently if we knew exactly what they did; without such information we can only examine how the critical endorsement works when we apply it.

About the only class where criticals really make sense is with the Assault. Combining passive critical upgrades with a critical endorsement really makes the assault rifle shine.
Only two other classes have naturally occuring critical hits (unless I am mistaken): the gunner and the assassin.

The gunner has to deploy to utilize his critical damage. When the developers were looking at this game on paper I'm sure they thought deploy was great. Sadly it fails miserably from a practical standpoint so the gunner's critical damage is therefore statistically irrelevant. However let's momentarily ignore this little fact (in case you fundamentally disagree). Let us try and piece together a working gunner build that involves critical endorsements. Considering that RoF silver is almost equivalent to RoF gold for most classes you're going to use RoF silver (this sentence alone requires its own post but let us ignore it for now). Since we want to get the most out of our criticals I assume we're going to allocate gold in this area. And here is where we reach our first problem. The "increased critical damage" is not even remotely on par with a gold armor endorsement in terms of effectiveness. You lose a lot of health for not using gold armor and you don't really get anything to show for replacing it with gold criticals. So then we must consider using silver criticals. And then you realize silver rate of fire does more damage than silver criticals.
Things become more complicated when you consider the third endorsement but it is unlikely to have an overriding effect when you consider how much better some endorsments are in the first or second position. I doubt for example that Gold armor/silver criticals/bronze RoF would defeat Armor/RoF/Criticals. It is however possible that some odd combination such as Critical/armor/RoF could defeat Armor/RoF/Criticals. I honestly don't notice when I am using bronze criticals. I am more keenly aware that I have 140 fewer bullets in my clip.

I don't like the way the assassin plays so I'll refrain from commenting on criticals with this class. Generally speaking the community doesn't generally consider using critical endorsements from what I have read. Also bear in mind that one of the developers said you can't get a critical grapple.

As for other classes if you allocate a critical endorsement then you will occasionally note a "purple bullet" effect. It doesn't do a significant amount of damage to an opponent. It might as well have just been a red fireball from Ken or Ryu.

If you have a primary build that incorporates the use of critical endorsements I'd like to hear what you have to say.

criticals is 50/50 for me. in testing i have always found RoF to be better than criticals, but in most applications that i use RoF, i have to use clip size to compensate. so if i NEED two other endorsements aside from damage, i will take criticals. if i NEED damage more than anything else, i will take RoF.
assault is a good example of this, i have several builds:
guerilla: speed, criticals, accuracy
anti-gunner: RoF, Accuracy, Clipsize
anti-tank*: RoF, criticals, clipsize
cqc: crit, armor, speed
*(i have found RoF/crit to be better than crit/RoF)

I also use crit on my "shotgun" gunner: RoF, crit, clipsize

I think the problem with the crit endorsement is the low %chance
It seems like gold gives you maybe 5%crit?

This would not be so bad but for the fact that crits don't seem to have a very high damage multiplier.

I Tried crits with the assault but the bonus you get from anything else outweighs the small damage increase

Also, regarding crits and the assassin.
The devs posted confirming that the assassin gets 100% crits on not only shurikens but also sword and dagger attacks out of cloak

I tested this in a private match but it did not seem to hold true
Either it is bugged/not working correctly/possibly left out or overlooked
Or
The crit damage modifier is so miniscule I could not see any difference in damage

crits on explosives are noteworthy, especially since i make my job to destroy turrets and maintain control of a lane at the same time as an assault (oddly enough, i dont use critical endorsements, i just figured if i did it would be paydirt as well)

crits on shurikens are noteworthy, especially since i make my job to destroy turrets and make an *** outta myself in their base, keeping them occupied instead of them taking control of the map. i also dont use criticals here, since my shuriken launcher has automatic criticals from a cloak, which i upgrade to 3 immediately lmao.

crits on a gunner can be great, i thought you can get crits without deploying. i see purple drank pouring outta my barrel anyway.

and with support, it makes your shotgun so strong that its hard not to play good ol' fashon MW2 spas-deathmatch with every ****ing annoyed enemy pro on the map. but i use it on my support so i can heal stuff so fast, next to rate of fire. i dont use my shotgun unless im being chased, i dont go running around like its my job to be the shotgun executioner of the wild ****ing west, thats just annoying. EVEN on mw2. you hear me infinity ward? go suck an egg.

tanks also have crits on railgun? snipers occasionally get crits?

but maybe a dev should comment on crit usefulness. ill just finish by copy-pasting from the wikia on the subject:

"Critical Shot Endorsements increase the chance each of your attacks will be a Critical Shot. Critical Shots can be identified by the purple bullet tracers that they leave behind (or purple beam in the case of the Support's Heal/Hurt Gun). The Sniper starts with a gold level Critical Shot Endorsement. Not having a Critical Shot Endorsement will not disable you from pulling off a Headshot."

"Gold: 5% increase critical chance
silver: 3% increase critical chance
bronze: 1% increase critical chance"

^ This has been my experience as well.

It may vary from class to class though. It feels more effective on Assault and Gunner, while on others it doesn't seem to do anything. I'd be very curious to know what the Crit damage multiplier actually is and if the weapon or target factors in at all.

It would be one thing if you hit someone with that mystic purple effect and said wow look at how much damage I just did. I don't think you're ever going to say that with the way they work right now.

I don't think the critical effect is quite as high as 5% but let's consider some numbers (based on this data: viewtopic.php?f=18&t=1157&hilit=endorsement+research). If you're not deployed as a gunner then you're going to get 20 bullets out of a 400 round clip that will be criticals. Gold rate of fire increases your damage output by 24.5%; that is to say a gunner with gold rate of fire has a damage rate of 498 and a gunner without rate of fire has a damage rate of 400. In order for gold criticals to compete with those numbers you need 20 bullets to equal that extra 98 damage (let's just call it 100 to keep everything simple). So that means a critical bullet would need to be 5x damage in order to be equal to rate of fire.

I hate to say it but I don't think criticals do that much damage. The easiest way to test this would be to use gold criticals with the tank's rail gun. Hudson has a nice set of numbers we could look at, but I don't think we need to bother. Can you kill a gunner in 2 hits with the railgun? I don't think so.

Ignoring realism for a minute lets pretend that gold criticals occur as often as 5% of the time and they do 5x damage. Gold Rate of fire is still going to be better because critical attacks occur in streaks (very important when you consider circumstances like trying to kill a turret while a support heals it). Gold rate of fire is going to give you a better chance to hit the enemy than criticals.

since criticals do come in streaks, they would do higher damage sometimes, and less damage other times. it works in bursts.

it all depends if you like to roll the dice on wether or not you outdamage your enemy. at least, thats how i always saw it for sniping and the assault rifle and gunner spray.

I stand by this statement... if you're spraying a lot more bullets in a shorter amount of time you're more likely to get extra hits if the enemy is evasive.

I would agree with you except that you forgot we were talking about pretend land. Criticals in MNC do not do 5x damage. So what you actually means is:

Since criticals do come in streaks, they might do higher damage sometimes, and less damage most of the time.

If the MNC Wiki is to be believed, even the best Critical endorsement is only 5%. That's a 1/20th chance that you will shoot crits. 3% if silver 1/33 or bronze 1%, 1/100 shots. I'd rather have a tangible endorsement change that is always active as opposed to one that might happen. I.E. RoF, Armor, speed, etc.

I tested rail gun crits and you get 3 crit bullets in a row once every 5 clips or so. With the gold endorsement.

Doesn't having a higher critical endorsement boost the damage of criticals as well? Every time I've gotten a crit stream as a Gunner, I've totally #&$%ed &$%# up much faster than normal. The Gunner build I use is gold Crit/silver RoF/bronze Armor. When a crit stream starts, it's as nasty as if I were juiced.

I found Crit. endorsements to be more effect with weapons that do a constant amount of damage. IE Jetgun, Dagger/Sword, H/H Gun and sometimes the Minigun. The more you put out the higher change of getting Crits. If you stop shooting/attacking "it" gets reset.

I used to use a Support with Gold crits prior to the patch, as there was no way to boost the H/H gun's damage, since Rate of Fire had no effect on it yet. However, post-patch, I stripped that class entirely, as I had no use for it anymore.

I could see crits maybe helping out the Assault (with both passives) and Gunners (with Deploy), but those are ENTIRELY situational. A better endorsement that's always there (RoF and Armor, for example) are better warranted for most classes than "pure luck", IMO.

I use gold because shooting pink bullets is fun. Not joking. :lol: :evil:

I think I'll try it with RoF Healing, good idea BroTranq. I look past the obvious things too much.

To the LazerBlazers!

Oh wow. I tried out Gunner with the Deploy+passive abilities fully upgraded and Achille's as the gold endorsement...While deployed, an overwhelming majority of my dual minigun bullets were criticals. I tried juice on top of that. Holy #&$% that does a lot of damage! I mean, wow. It took about three seconds of fire to drop a Jackbot from 100% health at a medium distance, I can't imagine what it could do from point blank!


EDIT: Hahaha, yeah. "Afar" and "point blank" are pretty different from each other lol.

Too bad Jackbots can't turn around then. Poor poor Jack.

If you have never noticed, the majority of your bullets are already criticals if you purchase the level 2 upgrade. You don't really get much more for your extremely precious gold endorsement than you are already getting for $150. Previously the level 3 deploy took away the criticals that level two gave you. I think you are experiencing a placebo effect.

Here's my question: who are you playing against that lets you deploy to get all that fantastic damage? You can't reasonably expect to sit around deployed because It doesn't work. The deploy skill doesn't do enough to keep you alive against intelligent or skilled opponents. It doesn't even work if you have a support standing there with his heal beam on you (with gold RoF).

You can kill a jackbot from medium range undeployed with rate of fire gold in about the same amount of time (while juiced).

Seems some people in here do not realize that juice gives you 100% crit chance.

The more you know

Possibly because there isn't something in the game they says that and you have to test it or search the internets. I don't have time to test thing nor really the drive to care. Also I don't usually remember to search here or the wiki page for things like that. And if most players are more like me, just playing for fun for an hour here or there, that might explain why they don't know exactly everything juice does.

I'm still looking for someone who has done any kind of testing that shows criticals can even remotely compete with rate of fire. Bear in mind we're realistically talking about the assault and assassin classes.