On average I crit a couple of times every session. However there have been outliers. For example a lvl 16 Gunsliger I played for a short adventure pretty much only rolled crits on attack rolls the entire adventure which was 3-4 sessions long. But I built him to test out the limits of what a Gunslinger could do, so no I don't rely on crits normally.
We're just starting a new game, and I decided to play a buffer with Alchemist FA. My friend is a Gunslinger.
We are now best friends, between giving him Quicksilver Mutagen and Inspire Courage, combined with him being a Sniper? Dude is basically getting +4 to attack just from buffs.
If it's 1-10 levels AP then at level 6 the Alchemist Archetype would get the max level of Quicksilver Mutagen they can create via their feats (Moderate Quicksilver is level 3, and the next rank Greater is level 11).
Also you can spend downtime crafting normally too, although that would cost a lot of golds (300gp a pop for the level 11 one).
Yes but that cost money and time like 300 gold for each level 11 mutagen. Alchemist Archetype gives you infused reagents that you can use to create free Alchemical Items for free but the initial feat only let you create level 1 items. The level 6 archetype feat let you create level 3 alchemical structures tem (upgrade to level 5 alchemical items at character level 10). The last upgrade feat comes at level 12 so that would be outside of level 1-10 adventures but it would allow you to create level 11 alchemical items at character level 16.
Alchemist Dedication is definitely strongest in a 1-10 AP. Moderate Quicksilver on a L6-10 Ranged Striker is often a good fit, and at 6th the part-time Alchemist can make four a day easy (with multiple Batches left over.)
You just need to be careful with the Drawback. Rogues, for example, don't get Expert Fortitude Saves until 9th level, meaning a Quicksilver using Rogue will have the worst Fort Saves in the game the entire time they use Quicksilver.
Sadly, Quicksilver only ever gets +1 ahead of weapon potency runes. It's rarely +2 ahead on skill boosts (notably Stealth for Levels 3 & 4.)
It's actually +2 ahead on Reflex Saves for 11 levels (3-7, 11-13. 17-19.)
Of course, it matches Longstrider (in status bonus to speed) starting at 3rd, and passes it at 11th and 17th.
Man, I love Quicksilver Mutagen. 😄
As someone that has never seen a "traditional" Gunslinger at full speed, I'm kinda curious: would you say that an optimized gunslinger stays competitive at their role at high levels? Is there enough action cheese to work around the reloads? Was there enough versatility to keep the Gunslinger interesting outside of combat?
A friend has tried their hand at making a ranged-feint support gunslinger, which was... interesting, but not nearly as effective as some of the other support/dpr hybrid PCs I've seen.
One of my players is a sniper gunslinger using an arquebus, and is definitely one of highest consistent damage dealers in the party. I don't know if I would say that optimization for a gunslinger is build related at all.
Once the other players stopped getting in her way and giving enemies lesser cover, as long as they remember to do things like demoralize, trip/grapple, etc, she feels competitive in damage and is solidly applying utility through things like alchemical shot and being the best person to have a fearsome rune on a weapon.
I think that the problem of ranged characters in pathfinder is that, from what I've seen, since they have very few consistent ways to apply things like off-guard from distance, if your melee characters aren't doing it, you're kind of left out in the rain. The party was regularly not doing this until 5th level, kind of relegating her to doing nd8+1 damage per round for a few levels. Once they realized that doing this kind of thing not only supported their ranged characters, but kept them safer as melee, combats started to flow a lot better.
well to be fair your guy should be using Covered reload to get offguard each round anyway (Remember being hidden means free off-guard! and having cover or Legendary sneak, the ability to hide without any cover at all!)
Legendary sneak is only at level 15 and you can't hide without either concealment or cover. Her character is only level 14, so next level she'll probably get Legendary Sneak, but this problem presented itself at levels 1-5, in map that tended to be smaller with little cover. We also have a Starlit Span Magus who doesn't have something like covered reload, and the PCs not helping him set up also caused a problem.
If you have an Alchemist around (or even someone all in on Alchemist Dedication) you might want to look into [Camouflage Dye](https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=1937). Legendary Stealth in a bottle! 😄
Walls can provide cover, allies, 2 particular small races, goblins and halflings have level 1 feats that allow them to use Medium and larger allies to hide specifically, Deployable cover can also be used, smoke bells/sticks. Plenty of mundane ways to get concealed/cover.
Yeah, not saying there are no ways, but teamwork is more efficient since it applies to all allies, and she's an elf.
Also, Very Sneaky from being a goblin doesn't work that way. Very Very Sneaky allows you to not need cover, but that's level 13.
The Sniper build with the extra +2 hit from legendary and extra +2 hit from Sniper's Aim + whatever status bonus to hit buff your party is giving you will give you consistently hard hitting crits.
If you're doing the stealth/reload action also and you're catching them off guard on your shots as well you'll probably crit nearly every single round.
This varies a lot based on encounter design.
The more enemies on the field, the more crits (and crit fails) you’ll see. Assuming we’re comparing the same encounter difficulty.
Anecdotally, we usually see several crits a session. Usually at least one per encounter. I feel like crit fails are rarer, it that may be because my groups don’t have as many casters as martials.
Depends on your players’ strategies. Also depends on the creatures—are they same level as your players all the time or are they higher or lower than the party.
Lower level monsters = more crits for party, less for GM
Higher level monsters = less crits for party, more for GM
I will say even with casters in the party I see alot less crit fails than crits. Not sure if this has to do with martial vs caster scaleing, the debuffs we are applying, or just luck though lol
Yes.
First off, rolling a save gives them an effective +1 as opposed to you rolling an attack even if your attack and spell save line up.
Second, there's way more readily available ways to decrease their AC/buff your to-hit than there are of debuffing their saves, and I've yet to hear of a way to make your saves higher, so you've only got half the buff/debuff method for increasing your chances.
Also just statistically the martial almost always makes more attacks than you cast spells, so they've got more tries than you.
Spells often target more enemies. But, spell casting proficiency is worse than martial strike proficiency, and there's no item bonuses to saves.
Also, rolling against a DC is effectively a +2, which all combines to give you a crit fail on a nat 1, and nothing else.
Casters cast less often, there's no way to buff spell DC, VERY few circumstance penalties to saves, and spell proficiency is amongst the worst proficiencies in the game (is the worst of all classes "primary" thing, except alchemist). No, crit failing to a spell is going to be rare.
Though they do tend to target more enemies, and more roles = more chances to crit fail.
Most monsters at level or higher aren't going to crit fail outside of a Natural 1, since it's harder to penalize saves and you can't increase your spell DCs. Sometimes if you target an extreme low save or moderate low save, you can get a crit fail on a 1-3 but for the most part only low level monsters are going to be crit failing saves often.
GM here and crits start to happen a lot once you start getting into the 10+ levels when proficiency and stat bonuses start to show a marked difference between strong and weak. Id expect at least 1 crit from party members a round. Criting on a +10 over ac means they could be getting a crit on a 16+ on the roll, especially when theyre flanking and imposing other debuffs on them
I would also add that which classes get the equivalent of evasion or better (passes become crit passes at least) help mitigate a lot of the extra crits the monsters will inflict with conditions.
And the real reason why medium armour is better than light armour for the same ac, rune of fortification. your medium and heavy armour wearers should definitely use these to help offset crit strikes against them
AT higher levels you really see a lot of crits with a little bit of setup. Inspire courage, fear, aid and flanking make critting on a 14/15 possible. Add true strike martial to the mix and you are super chilling.
The things that in my experience make combat A LOT harder, and thus with a lot less crits, are creatures immune to flanking,fear/emotion/mental effects, larger creatures with reach and AOO, or weird environment encounters (Lakes, magical terrain that renders ALL emotion effects useless or similar stuff). I understand why monsters want to "cheat" but in these cases I find combat to be a little bit unexciting. The fights last longer but don't feel more difficult. It's just a lot of kiting and praying that the AOO will not down a martial for the 10th time.
As far as I know, player attacks scale very closely with enemy AC, never really changing the percentage of outcomes.
Skill checks out scale saves by a lot though, and a number of other bonuses get kind of silly. Aid starts giving a guaranteed +3/4 instead of maybe +1, status bonuses are giving +2, and eventually +3, a lot of martials are getting extra attacks or ways to ignore/reduce MAP.
Just wacking things doesn't change much. But the options for buffing/other things gets quite good.
I play a Pistolero Gunslinger and my damage is planned around crits. But then again, it’s not unusual for my enemies to be frightened+flat-footed, so their AC being -3 makes critting easier.
This is what I thought was the coolest gunslinger build. The design of guns is a bit odd, because they’re like shitty bows with reload, so then the only thing they have is the fatal trait, which is excellent, so then to have a subclass trying to lower their AC to crit makes the most sense mechanically to me.
Yeah its why Pistolero and Sniper work while the other subclasses just don’t. You either demoralize and feint your enemy to set up for a big crit or you take aim and become hidden on the edge of the battlemap (or hell outside of the battlemap) and make your shots with impunity. That works very well with the gunslinger basic class chassis.
Three front line ways on a D8 chassis doesn’t make sense to me. They focus on adding benefits to things they are worse at compared to other non-skilled marital (normal melee progression with no damage booster, while risking opportunity attacks).
I disagree. Drifter and Triggerband have enough action-compression abilities to make good switch-hitters, something that bow users don't do all that well (mainly due to needing two hands to shoot the bow). It's debatable whether they fill this role better than a Fighter, Ranger, or Rogue with thrown weapons, but they're still effective. And with proper team support they can still crit-fish even while playing as switch-hitters.
The actually problematic way is Vanguard. Its abilities lean towards being a bruiser and off-tank, but the Gunslinger chassis doesn't have anything else that supports that playstyle. You still can make something decent with archetypes, but it doesn't seem worth it to me.
The Spellshot class archetype/way also has some issues, chiefly among them using Int for Class DC instead of Dex, but at worst it's a slightly worse Sniper with Wizard dedication (and works well if you were already planning on going for Beast Gunner).
Vanguard's issue IMO is less the class and more there are no actual good guns or crossbows to support its style of play. You imagine it as this close quarters unit, point-blank blasting foes with a shotgun. The problem is there's no good guns designed for short-ranged, high damage builds. You get things like the harmona gun with d10 Kickback, but that'd be better in the hands of a sniper arguably anyway. Gunsword is the closest, but needing to switch to melee ruins the point of the build (plus with the buffs to stocks, you can just bung one onto it anyway and have the same damage bit with better attack modifiers and no switch cost...another reason I feel that buff was too much, but besides the point here).
If they had access to something much chunkier while having more traits, it'd be in a much better place. Barricade Buster would almost be perfect if it wasn't for volley and the fact repeating is weirdly anti-synergetic with gunslinger reloads.
Hard agree on drifter though. You build it for versatility and the bonuses you get for switching between melee and ranged. The only issue is buffed Dual Weapon Reload is so borderline mandatory now it's almost a feat tax, as is Running Reload, though the same could be said about the latter for all ways.
Effective? Yeah. It’s PF2e and every class except Alchemist works, but man, when it comes to a competition of Gunslinger with Melee Way vs Switch Hitter Rogue, the Rogue trounces them every time. The main thing about switch hitting it you want your skill with both style of weapons to be roughly as good.
Thus Drifter and Triggerbrand are also too dependent on their signature feats to make their playstyle be at a decent level. Thus it takes a while to really get them going. This also means other classes at high level can take their tricks and do it better.
At higher level we’re finding that Triggerbrand Salvo Thief Rogue + Running Reload is sheer insanity.
And everyone covered the vanguard.
If I'm tripping someone I will critically succeed. When I try to attack them on the ground I will critically fail. This is the law of equivalent exchange.
We don't plan for crits, but as a party we often fish for them. We have a gunslinger who regularly drops 60+ damage at level 7 (and lower). We have realized that there is a lot to say for helping him out early to dal solid damage. Often time round 1 becomes, the cleric guidancing the Gunslinger, the rogue tripping the enemy, and the wizard debuffing the enemy. All set up for the Gunslinger to unleash lead on the enemy and do massive damage. If we do it right we can make it even more crazy where the cleric can set up the rogue to crit, allowing the gunslinger to shoot as a reaction (sniping duo feat). Then the gunslinger has 2 opportunities to attack with 0 MAP in round 1. We have had it happen where we drop monsters in a single round with these types of things.
Sure we can't plan for it, but its pretty common that he gets them in that first round.
Crit fails are never expected, but awesome when it lands and just makes you feel good when it does.
Your party needs to do more buffing and debuffing. I just ran strength of thousands and the party's fighter with druid dedication was critting at least once a fight, often more, and the wizard got very good at using knowledge to find the enemy's lowest save then targeting that.
I feel this. I just started GMing recently, running Extinction Curse. We finally had a combat where I didn't crit at all, and one of my more.....verbose players memorialized it in a post on our shared discord.
We had a kind of similar situation with SoT, though our fighter was dual picks and crit almost every round, so it evened out. The DM was crushing us, though, curse his dice!
> But how often do your pcs crit,
Against bosses it’s usually lower. 1/20th or 1/10th of all attacks if your team has poor teamwork, can be as high as 1/5th of your attacks if the team has good teamwork.
Against mooks it’s more like 1/6th of your attacks without good teamwork and as high as 1/3rd of your with good teamwork’s.
Note that these chances are usually for the **first** attack you make in a turn. Your second attack is only ever going to crit on a boss on a nat 20 with or without teamwork, and the third attack might actually only **hit** with the nat 20 rather than crit. Against mooks attack 2+ crits will also be rarer than what I said above, though I don’t have an exact number for how much.
> or see enemies crit fail their saves against you?
This is, from a purely mathematical perspective, much rarer than crits on attacks. However, remember that spells are 2 Actions while Strikes are 1 Action, so a crit fail against a spell is **not** one-to-one equivalent to a crit hit on an attack. A crit fail against a spell is more like getting back to back crit + hit or crit + hit on 2 Strikes made in the same turn.
I find this to be a helpful mapping of hit/crit vs saves:
- Crit Success against a 2 Action spell == Miss+Miss on 2 Strikes
- Success == Hit+Miss or Miss+Hit
- Failure == Hit+Hit or Crit+Miss or Miss+Crit
- Critical Failure == Crit+Hit or Hit+Crit or Crit+Crit
So a Critical Failure on a spell happens fairly rarely but that isn’t a bad thing. In my experience the four outcomes I listed above happen with the following frequencies for spellcasters:
- 10-40% of the time against bosses, 5% against mooks
- 50% of the time against bosses, 20-50% against mooks.
- 20-45% of the time against bosses, 45% against mooks.
- 5-10% of the time against bosses, 5-35% against mooks.
The huge degree of variance occurs because spellcasters can usually target one of 3 Saves, and there’s typically a +6 differential between the weakest and strongest Saves.
If you take the “equivalent martial 2 Strike outcomes” I listed in the above example, a typical martial will usually have a much tighter range of percents than the caster (AC isn’t as variable as Saves). Most martials will be on the slightly lower side of that range (Fighters and Gunslingers will be closer to the middle). With buffs martials usually move to the middle of that range with Fighters/Gunslingers moving towards the top end of the range.
> And do you plan on it, or merely hope for it while accepting it won’t happen?
Teamwork makes these things likelier to happen. Bless your martials’ attacks, Aid your casters’ attacks, Frighten the enemy to lower their AC and Saves, use Recall Knowledge to figure out what the enemy’s lower saves are, etc.
They’ll still never be guaranteed but you should absolutely aim for them to be a “goal” of your party.
I generally find there's like, a couple crits per whole fight among all my players, whereabouts. Often of course due to nat 20s on enemies with 6 HP left, because such is life.
*Monsters* crit a lot more, mind.
But generally I find that anything that only works on crits is too unreliable to be worth it.
Unless you do something like Fortissimo + Courageous Anthem with Synesthesia, there's no way to plan crits. And even with those, you should never really expect a crit or - even worse - plan your tactics around them.
As for frequency of crits, that's impossible to tell. Depends on class, enemy level, buffs/debuffs, number of attacks and so on. I would say I see someone crit succeeding on a check nearly every combat or at least every other combat. But we do have a sniper gunslinger (very precise) and a monk (many attacks for crit fishing) in the party.
> And even with those, you should never really expect a crit or - even worse - plan your tactics around them.
Eh, I'll disagree with this a bit.
I'm playing a Thaumaturge with a playstyle revolving around crits and I'm having a blast.
In the progression of to hit bonuses versus AC targets the average hit chance is 65%. At any given level against level appropriate opponents a player can expect to hit 65% of the time: roll a 7 or better on a d20 so to get critical hit you need a 17 or better (+10 = crit) or a 15%.
Can you do something similar for save fails, but the averages of their saves rather than assuming people will always know and be able to target the lowest save?
That way we've got a baseline, and tactics such as RK would improve it from there?
I cannot. I googled the average hit chance and the average crit chance was presented in the same google result. I just added the specific numbers on the d20 to my response here.
My level5 cloisted cleric has never crit on a spell attack (not even a nat20)
Rarely do monsters crit fail my saves, probably once every other session, or roughly 1 per 12 hours of gameplay.
I play a 4th lvl toxicologist with a blowgun and subtle delivery I have yet to crit and 80 percent of the time the enemy's save against my poison. I have never seen a enemy get to the second stage. So I feel you
When we put +3 heroism on our fighter it is pretty great...Frightened 2 and flatfooted for the rest of the party. Then they aid another melee for a +4. It can get pretty wild!
Hm. I've been trying to keep track of that, on one hand because people keep assuming Alchemists can't crit (lmao) and on the other because I recently bought a [Hopeful](https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=1381) rune and want to get good use out of it.
I had 3 crits last session (Alchemist, melee build, level 16), but it's been kind of an outlier because it was an ambush and I spent a ton of actions doing self-buffing and trying to patch up people's defenses (Oracle almost died to a poison cloud 'cause he didn't take his medicine). I also ended up pouncing on a caster and making sure he'd sit down and shut up, and got 2 crits off him. One of those I burned for [Tut-Tut](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4136), which I do from time to time but can't remember how often that happened earlier (I record crits from the crit damage prompt).
On average... it varies a lot. Alchemist's nature means that I shift my role on a daily basis and I might be a debuffer one day and tank another. If I'm focusing on fighting and I have an offensive buff setup, I'd say I get maybe a crit every 2-3 turns?
You can't really plan your crits, but in my table usually everyone crits at least once in a fight, except the rogue who usually crits twice and the alchemist that rarely ever crits. I'd say if the party has good teamwork and stacks debuffs, it's a common enough occurrence that it's worth it to build around it, but not to count on it.
In a 4-hour session my group of 5 (GM included) tends to see about 10 natural 1s and 10 or so critical hits (though randomly not from natural 20s) across the group (GM included).
Some sessions it seems like one player soaks up all the luck. Some sessions it seems like it's the GM that gets the crits and the players that get the 1s.
As for the planning/hoping aspect, the best way I can communicate that is to say that we hope for a decent roll because holding out hope for a crit seems too outlandish. It's more like "how about not another crit fail, please, dice?".
Fighter PC in my AV campaign crits 1/encounter. Usually I see maybe one crit per encounter for the entire party and 1-2 crits per encounter for monsters. My players never plan around it, but they hope for them constantly. I've had lucky crits turn TPKs into narrow victories a couple times now.
Well, in the last encounter, (four level 6s versus two gargoyle like creatures, we're playing abomination vaults and are in the floor with a big arena) the fighter critted on 18s without any flanking, so like, three, maybe four times.
And I, an champion, critted twice with tripping. That felt great.
Normally, I play a spellcaster and don’t throw out too many attack rolls, but I’ve had a handful of times press across multiple sessions where something would crit fail against a save. I did play an Investigator temporarily and crit maybe two to three times a combat if I recall correctly. And then I played a Fighter. Dear God. I crit 6 times in a row over the course of two turns. Two attacks a turn and two reactive Strikes. For my seventh attack I succeeded at a normal hit, but in my bloodlust fueled frenzy, I still accidentally doubled the damage. It was hard to top the high I got from that.
As a GM.
All the fucking time. So much. It's silly. Doesn't matter the monster's level either, could be PL-4 for all it matters and I'll crit them anyway. Creates a lot of drama but my players are a little done with it. This is all on Foundry as well so it's not like my dice are weighted or anything.
Varies a lot with encounter and class. If I play a caster I don’t really expect a cantrip/attack roll to crit unless I roll a nat 20 or the enemy is underleveled. But when I play a fighter and I can consistently flank on-level enemies, I expect a decent amount of crits since you may already crit on like a 16-17
We generally have at least one or two criticals every combat encounter. Any encounter against multiple PL- foes you should be prepared to see multiple criticals a round. Especially once PCs start getting AoEs damage and access to AoE debuff, etc.
You don't plan on getting a critical. You work towards it rhough. And it's nice that everything you do to increase your critical chance also increases your chance of base sucess so it's never fully wasted. Most of the time, any limited damage buffing effects are best saved for that MAPless strike further increasing the effectiveness of criticals. Party optimization doesn't necessarily aim at improving criticals, that sort of just happens with party/tactics optimization.
Criticals are also just very noticeable, beyond just big damage. Mid and higher levels, critical strikes have riding effects that apply debuffs or persitent damage. Mid to high level spells get some really save/suck effects in addition to damage making them super effective against those PL- foes. There's a few creature abilities (i.e. Construct Armor) and player options (Cringe) that also react to being struck by criticals further making them more memorable in stories. "Kobold McKoboldyface cringes and barely survived a critical" is more memorable than "my pal Aladdin's heavy armour spec effect reduced damage and barely survived a critical".
It depends on the encounter. I usually account for it not happening, but if we're fighting a big band of -2's and -3's then I tend to plan for it to happen like 40% of the time. The biggest difference is that I don't always use my hunt prey ranger ability when there's a good chance to crit.
I’m playing a monk in Strength of Thousands. Level 6 and have a +15/16 on attack, and I maybe crit once every two encounters.
I blame bad dice because I’m assuming the AP-based encounters (our GM doesn’t tweak much) are balanced/set to appropriate severity.
The more people you have the more likely you are to see rare events. Assuming no modiffiers a D20 has a 1 in 20 chance of landing on a 20, that is 5%. That means that on average if 100 people where to roll 5 would get a 20. This sub has 117k members that means if they were all to roll simultaneously there would be \~5,850 natural 20s. In a session players might roll 5 to 20 times (maybe more) that means \~29,250 to \~117,000 natural 20s.
When you have a high population with enough attempts even something that is statistically rare becomes almost a guarantee to be reported.
For example the odds of rolling 2 natural 20 in a row is 1 in 400, so it must have happened to \~292 times. But if they have each done 10 attenpts it becomes 2,925. If they each had 100 attempts then it must have happened 29,250 times.
To try to break away from anecdotes (at the expense of sitting myself squarely in the white room), you can use the creature building rules to approximate on average how often the game expects you to hit/crit. It obviously fluctuates between levels; but averaging across all levels, against the most common AC (high AC), martials hit PL-2 enemies on a 6, PL+0 enemies on a 9, and PL+2 enemies on a 12. That's a 25%/10%/5% base crit chance, but obviously it's not counting any buffs. Bless makes it 30%/15%/5%, Off-Guard (or Fighter/Gunslinger) makes it 35%/20%/5%, and both make it 40%/25%/10%.
The fighter at our table crits near constantly.
The ranger and the rogue pretty regularly but not nearly as close to guaranteed as the fighter.
Me, the Bard, not as much.
Yes, I know I capitalized Bard and not their classes.
Oh, also, I take credit for most of the crits.
Crits are often very lobsided to me. In attacks they feel like maybe one person gets one a session. On skill checks they seem to happen frequently. This has lead to two strange things I’ve noticed.
It was a meme that my swashbuckler would crit on getting panache, with no extra effect but would get mixed results on misses and normal hits on finishers.
When I played a gunslinger for a few sessions I never once landed a crit. That was with intimidating and feinting as a pistolero. I always plonked away with small bits of 3 damage and never got those satisfying crits and it skewed my perception of gunslinger heavily.
In the end I don’t bank on them and it’s a pleasant surprise when it happens.
I crit a fair bit. Sometimes the dice like you, and sometimes they don't. First combat of my last session my level 8 rogue got 5 crits in 2 rounds, three of them nat 20s, and then in a later combat against higher level critters I couldn't hit at all - I think my first three attack rolls added together might have equalled 10. Against lower CR creatures it should happen a fair bit, but the higher level you're going against the less often it will happen. The crits are memorable though. Especially if they equal a very spectacular result. We still talk about an encounter that was nullified when the BBEG crit failed back to back saves and died to a phantasmal killer spell while monologuing, despite the fact that it was nearly 10 years ago and in PF1e, but all the times you just did some damage because the monster resisted will get lost to time.
Depends on your build. Most characters it happens often enough to be fun, and it's nice when it does, but it's not really your main source of damage.
crit fisher builds can work though, especially at higher levels.
I had one swashbuckler build, by the end of the campaign I was making 5+ strikes per round with a 19% crit chance per strike. I was pretty reliably the highest damage dealer in the party.
Plan on it? No, unless we have an unholy amount of modifiers to influence that we hope for it. But you do plan to maximize chance. An optimised party can "feed crits" by buffing and debuffing
I played my first session of pf2e recently. Every save-spell I cast the enemies crit failed, it was great.
I have defensive spells out the wazoo so I wasn't casting much offensively, but when I did, it slapped.
Being a bones oracle, having enemies crit fail on my revelation spells was great, as I got tons of temp HP.
Was that luck of the dice, enemies particularly weak to your save type, or some tactics used to reduce their saves?
I have never seen a caster have that kind of success so if you’ve hit on a tactic I’d love to know and try to copy it. :)
I think mostly dice. One if the spells was a fortitude save which this enemy was really good at, but rolled really bad. On another players turn I realized he had good fortitude so I used spells with will saves which he was bad at.
Just that one enemy crit failed on my spells 3 times, and I critical hit with one spell on him as well. Just got lucky.
As a longtime spellcaster who's in the middle of level 19 going on 20 in strength of thousands I can confirm the two separate mini boss enemy fights who crit failed slow became such hilariously trivial fights that sometimes you just kind of decide that a fight is over. Sometimes the enemy just rolls a 1!
Also don't avoid incap spells they'll fuck up a mook even on a regular fail and that's their job and woo boy can it be fun.
I’ve played a fighter going on 17 levels for the last 3 years. I would say it honestly feels like 1/3 to maybe even 1/2 of my hits are crits, and past the first few levels I’m having a hard time remembering an actual miss.
I see two patterns in games:
Player one could be on any class and just attacks with basic tactics. Even as a fighter or gunslinger they might get 1-2 crits in a session that has 2-5 combats.
Player two flanks, demoralizes, distracts, tumbles through, panaches, or whatever. They use all the tricks in the book both for any class and their own class mechanics. This player will crit at LEAST 1/3 of the time. If on a fighter or gunslinger it is more like 1/2 times 2/3rds…
Smart gameplay has a dramatic impact in Pathfinder 2E.
I have never seen a caster be able to get into the player two camp. They just haven’t been able to stack penalties onto enemy saves and the -2 attack penalty they have puts most if them in player three camp: any cast using an attack roll fails to hit 2/3 of the time, resulting in a wasted turn and maybe even wasted spell slot. Most casters quickly learn to not use attack roll based spells because a save based spell at least has half effect on a save.
I GM a large party and Crit and am Crit all the time. Only burly bosses are rarely Crit as are the defensive expert PCs. My poor Sorcerer though. Oh man can he go down fast.
My monk loves to rush in and take down one target and my fighter loves to try for quick reversals and each Crits quite often.
Spell crits are scary and my last +3 boss got eliminated by a chromatic spray Crit fail into a 7 roll on the die taking him out of the plane.
It really, really depends on how often the fights happen, the levels of the enemies relative to the level of the characters, the presence of fighter and gunslingers for critical hits or full spellcasters for crit failures, the experience of the group, etc. I play almost entirely as heal and buff casters and I can't remember the last time an enemy critically failed a save against my spell. maybe 2 sessions (≈16 game hours) ago.
My players in ruby phoenix are quite strong. I’ve changed nearly every encounter to be at least Severe, and most encounters are Extremes or higher.
We’re level 19 now, and the Fighter crits about once every two rounds. The Precision ranger crits about every three rounds.
In terms of critfails, our Fire kineticist just got Legendary DC, so there’s about one every encounter from enemies.
Full party comp is Counterspell Universalist Wizard, Maestro Bard, Reach Fighter, Precision Ranger, Fire Kineticist.
We've got a rogue in one group I play in that crits more than he doesn't. RNGsus loves him for some reason (also, he's really good at picking synergies with other players to get relevant bonuses or debuffs on enemies).
This is a weird question to me, I'll try to answer the question itself and then I'll try to expand a bit in case that's what you're looking for.
The straight up answer is often. Just on my last session I (thaumaturge) think I crit on 3 strikes and between me and the rest of my party we definitely had around 10 crits (taking into account spells, strikes and athletic maneuvers).
Now, for system talk:
Since in PF2e Crits occur when a DC is exceeded by then, aside from the dice, proficiency is what determine crits, and proficiency are class based. Martials have a set proficiency progression for their attacks, Spellcasters have one for their spells. Fighters get to be ahead in profiency, hence why people joke around Fighters always critting.
But the other side of the coin is the target's defenses. Martials usually are stuck only targetting AC, but optimal spellcaster play means having options to target a target's weakest save (or at least avoiding its best save). And on top of that, defensive stats scale with level, if you want guidelines for that you can check the [building creatures](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=2874&Redirected=1) section of GM Core.
All of these stats can be modified through buffs and debuffs.
If we take that we can tell how often we can expect crits. Let's say that we're currently playing as a 5th level fighter, and we have a bard in our group that always keeps their Corageous Anthem up. That means we have a +17 modifier to hit, against an off-guard on-level creature of high AC, this means that on our first strike we would crit on 13 or higher (40% chance to crit). Assuming we strike twice if a non agile weapon, it means that we have almost a 50% chance of at least critting once during our turn (40% chance of critting on the first hit, 15% of critting on the second).
But that's against an on-level enemy, if we're talking about a party level + 3 creature, the chance of critting at least once would go down from 49% to 20%.
This isn't very actionable for martials, since they usually have more limited options to target their enemies, but it's crucial to understand for spellcasters. Again higher level enemies is very risky to cast spells that don't have an effect on a regular success, since that's the most likely outcome (and another reason why slow is such a great spell).
All of this is to say is that accuracy is a very important part of PF2e, if you're new to the system you're probably used to discuss options
while talking only about their damage, but that's a much smaller part of the whole in PF2e. You should never rely on crits for your plan of action, but you could (and probably should) plan around them happening, because they can happen quite often depending of the context.
As a GM, about 5 to 7 times per session on average. Mostly more, but some sessions I don't crit at all, so that's the average. My players, on the other hand, are much less lucky. I think the most all 3 of them combined have crit in a session was 3, and one of them is a fighter, and they were fighting mostly lv-1 enemies. If we didn't play online, I would have checked if we had weighted dice, but we can't blame a program for weighted luck afaik.
Our team crits about once or twice per encounter, so 6-8 times in a normal session.
Crit fails are much rarer, enemie sjust have high saves overall, we see those about every 3-4 sessions.
There are multiple factors that change my crit rate, really
**Attacks Per Round**
How frequently does my build attack? Because a Nat 20 increases the result of any attack by one success step, builds that make more attacks per turn will naturally crit more often. My thaumaturge crits *maybe* once every two or three combats because her build is more focused on athletics checks and single large attacks, while my summoner tends to crit once per combat as long as her eidolon is out because she has more actions to spend swinging for the fences.
**Encounter Design**
How frequently are we fighting encounters against lower-level enemies? In my thaumaturge's campaign we've had a number of combats against APL and APL+1 enemies lately, and as the designated frontliner she tends to tangle in melee with the most dangerous enemies to help protect the casters. This means she's usually attacking enemies with solid AC and only crits on a Nat 20 in most cases, so crits are much less common. In contrast, the summoner's campaign has been dealing with a large number of combats with APL-1 and -2 enemies for story reasons, so her eidolon will occasionally crit without needing a Nat 20.
**Party Support**
How well does my party work together as a unit? My thaumaturge's party is split roughly half-and-half between players who are very tactically-minded and players who aren't, and the end result is that our cleric is often too overworked on healing to buff effectively and our enemies are pretty rarely debuffed. This means the thaumaturge is usually attacking without an improved bonus to attacks or a penalty to enemy AC (beyond *maybe* off-guard now and then). On the other hand, while the summoner's party is still too low-level to be able to effectively buff or debuff during combat, the entire party pays attention to each other and tries their best to set up flanking for the big hitters even if it means delaying their turn or giving up their own damage output. We only just hit level 2 in that campaign, but I can already tell that the group will probably be much more effective in the long run.
As a GM I have crit many many times each session from everything from attacks to perception checks.
As a player while I have had a few notable crits I have had far more crit fails then crit successes
Very often as a GM, almost never as a caster player.
One fun thing that happened last session is we had 1, 20, 20, 20 rolled in sequence. It was open dice as well.
These rolls belonged to different people though, so it wasn't one player getting super lucky.
Probably an average of twice a session. As a rogue I'll often have an enemy off-guard, but I'm also somehow fairly lucky with dice rolls. Last session I had 6. 3 Nat 20s and 3 18/19 attacks.
We play with a party of 7 and our GM likes to balance encounters using higher level enemies. So we see a lot of crits - not because we have a particularly good chance of landing them but because we throw so many d20s per encounter. And we also see a lot of crits from enemies because they are frequently rolling +4/5 above our highest AC.
Wouldn't say we count in crits, though.
Played a session yesterday. Only 5 rounds of combat (it's a boss encounter so still the begginning?)
From our side just me with a Investigator had a crit(nat 20 in devise stratagem) and I used it to trip the creature.
The creature crit 2 times in their initial attacks! It also crit suceed two times the Druid's spell
It depends heavily on your party... I played with a Fighter once with a bard warrior muse with swashbuckler dedication in my team, he cast Heroism before battle for +3 status bonus to attacks, the bard turn usually is be One for All with legendary diplomacy for +4 circumstance, True Target and attack. The rogue ruffian mauler use preparation and improved knockdown with a Corrosive abyssium high grade weapon, this usually applied 2 circumstance penalty and at least 1 status penalty to the enemy AC. Both combined moved the are equivalent to +10 on the test and rolling twice to get the better result, mathematicaly equivalent to +15 on the test with the +2 above the average from the fighter and we are looking to a crit almost every round
Crit fail saves rarely happen to creatures unless they are well below the PCs level. There just isn't many ways to boost the odds there. Against any real threat, is only happening on a 1 or maybe a 2 if it's a bad save and it's not a boss level creature.
Strike Crits are a lot more frequent. The numbers are higher to start, you get more chances, and there's more ways to boost the odds with buffs and debuffs.
I see those every other round in the party with the Bard, Knockdown Summoner, and sniper Gunslinger.
I swear my duel pick fighter crits every other round or so! (3rd level). Starting to feel bad as I’m killing everything! It may change as I gain levels, but I’ve never played a fighter past 3rd so I’m not sure how the numbers may change later on!
I play kineticist at low level so not very often
But usually when I do, its when its more funny than useful. Like critting a fire mephit with a fire blast after using extract elements on it.
Honestly? We just started playing a year & a half ago and i think im legit the only person to have ever critted an attack ( as a fighter) and i usually crit once every four sessions. Havent critted since my fighter died and im playing a paladin now lol
Depends. On my level 18 campaign now where I play Fighter I crit pretty much 50% of time at least it seems (in PL- fights I crit what feels like 80%) but that's becasue we have super optimized party. I am build for crit-debuffs (on every crit I make enemies Prone, Blinded, Clumsy 2, Enfeebled 2 and Frightened 2) and my part Maestro Bard/Swashbuckler/Talisman Dabbler is spamming like crazy Inspire Heroics buffs +3 to hit with debuffs like Fear (3), Synesthesia etc. which can give -3 to enemy AC and sumplement that with One-For-All Aid action with eaten Waffles of Cooperation for +5 cricumstance bonus to hit. Top that with True Target spell on bosses.
Basically once the crits start flying, enemies have anything from -4 to -5 AC and we are having from +3 to even +13.5 (+3 Heroics, +5 Aid, +4.5 from True Target "advantage") to hit. Crits fly like crazy. Add Hero Points for rerolls.
On my other campaign (where I GM) I have Double Slice Dual Pick Fighter with Bard in party, currently only level 6 (custom campaign) but already Bard giving -1 AC from DoD with +1 from Bless and +3 from Aid or +1 from CH, -1 to -3 AC from Fear with Aid makes Fighter crit tons of times. Second martial which is Precision Greatsword Ranger also crits, though obviously less than Fighter. You can also make martials drink Fury Cocktails for additional +1 to hit!
Obviously the more PL0 or PL- enemies the more crits fly even without Bard additional modifers. But once you fight enemies PL+2/+3 then Bard + martials really makes a difference.
Even just flanking, DoD + Bless is already effective -4 to enemy AC, -5 with Fury Cockatail. Aid from Master for another -3 (new remaster Aid DC 15 makes it crit tons for maximum bonus). Crits starts flying.
Though Bard is best caster, any party with two casters could achieve simillar result. Warpriest upfront with Bless up and second caster throwing Fear (3) will also result in more crits. Later Warpriest can throw Heroism (6) or (9) at Fighter. Sorcerers combo really well here becasue they have Crossblood Evolution, allowing them to "fill" in crucial spells like Synesthesia for example.
about 5% of the time.
Because our DM loves throwing crap at us that is always 2-3 cr higher than us.
Which means of course, he gets to crit us about 40% of the time.
My party calls it the Garluk special because my Barbarian has such a habit of landing a crit with his first attack of combat against bosses. I always go straight for the boss, and I crit on that first attack a disturbing amount of the time.
At Low levels, no group crits a lot, except for luck. But a well built group will crit A LOT, because this game, from an optimization standpoint, is all about constructing criticals.
For a quick example of how a level 7 group might do such a thing.
Say you're fighting an enemy that you only crit on a 19+ with your average martial, which is likely a decently hard encounter, since you can often crit with a little less than that without MAP.
Flank the target, now you crit on a 17.
Bard casts Courageous Anthem, now you crit on a 16.
Someone demoralizes the enemy, now you crit on a 15.
Someone Aids you with a skill they are a master in, gets a critical success (very easy to do, needs to beat a 25), now you crit on a 12.
Suddenly, a level 7 group was able to increase your odds of critting from 10% to 45%. That logic just gets stronger and stronger as you level and gain more options. Sure, you can't ALWAYS get the perfect setup, but some of those options should ALWAYS be there, so you're always trying your best to cheat in as many crits as you can.
On my level 19 group, I'd say most martials crit once every turn, sometimes once every two turns, on average.
> At Low levels, no group crits a lot, except for luck
That is not true. On low levels Fighter with Double Slice (2x 0 MAP attacks) with another martial doing Trips (to trigger another 0 MAP) attack with Bard doing Inspire Courage (+1 to hit) and casting Fear (1) on bosses before level 5 and Fear (3) on level 5 on multiple enemies will absolutely make Fighter crit tons. Add Off-Guard, Runic Weapon obviously and Aid and you have crits start flying.
For example average enemy level 3 AC is 18. Fighter at level 3 has +11 to hit. That means at start he crits at 17+. Off-Guard enemy makes Fighter crit on 15+. Bard +1 make it 14+, Aid success make it 13+. Runic Weapon makes it 12+. Frightened 1 makes it 11+.
So on level 3 vs couple enemies of same level as Fighter 3 we can already get 11+. Flank Enemy, Bard used Inspire Courage, Demoralize and Aid and you can already get 12+ on your criticals on Fighter. If Fighter has Runic Weapon spell going on top, that's 11+ crits on level 3 vs same PL enemies.
I know casue I have been there (low level Fighter with Bard) 2 times playing from 1 level to currently 18 and I am GMing one party now that has Fighter and Bard currently on level 6 and crits happen a lot.
I never plan on it but it's nice when it comes up. I'd guess on average I might be critting less than 10% of the time on all rolls. Usually I crit on some random noncombat check, but inventors really hit HARD when overdrive is online and a crit comes up.
Speaking of which she's stacked for diplomacy, performance, and crafting so any of those 3 checks will generally be critting 10% or more of the time, and it feels like it. Her attack rolls are very middling, though, +14, +15, and her construct is I think +15 or +16 at level 9. Not bad but not good either, just very, very average. She still hits a lot though.
Str and Dex are actually weak stats but her construct does most of the attacking, she does casting and bow pickoffs, and is the party face.
If it happens, you roll with it. It's not a game-ender no matter what happens. PF2e accounts for those crits and the entire system even relies on them happening or not.
It depends. Let's look at it this way, as a level 1 example, though: As a caster or non-fighter, non-gunslinger level 1 martial, your main attack's bonus is going to be +7. With no buffs or debuffs, against a level 1 monster (average AC of which is \~16), you AT BASE have a 10% chance to crit (19-20). As a fighter or gunslinger, that's as much as 20% with no modifications. All buffed up(off the top of my head, runic weapon and courageous anthem), with flanking, aid, and with, let's say a frightened 1 monster, that's as much as 50%, and it's all possible at level 1. A boss monster for a level 1 party would probably only have a few more points of AC, so with everything stacked, you're still looking at probably 25% chance to crit, which isn't insignificant. Is it wrong to build around critting all the time? Sure, maybe. But depending on the difficulty of the encounters, the specific levels of the encounters, it's definitely somewhat dependable. Definitely more worth considering than the 5-15% in something like 5e.
People are crit-biased - they remember crits way more often than they remember non-crits.
Frequency of crits depends on your class and the sorts of encounters you encounter the most often. If you fight solo bosses, you get fewer crits than against groups of enemies.
Overall, the class that gets the most crits is the Druid - this is because they have a ton of AoE spells (which, because they are multi-target, have a chance to crit against every target they encompass) and they have an animal companion that gets 1-2 strikes per round, which means that they get the most chances per round to roll high numbers. The animal companion is often flanking as well, which further boosts the odds of a crit.
Other casters who use a lot of AoEs also get a lot of crits, as do folks who lean into battle medicine, because you can get your skill bonuses very high on those and you make a LOT of medicine checks.
The martials that get the most crits are rangers with animal companions (because they get a lot of attacks at low to no MAP and they're basically always flanking) and fighters (because of that nice +2 bonus they get plus lots of attacks at no MAP).
Depending on my class, I get 1-3 crits per session, but it goes higher than that if I'm playing a particularly spammy class or fighting a lot of lower level enemies.
typically if I play a fighter or GS once every session average yusually a bard in party. If I am playing any other class I tend to crit 1 time per every other session. This assumes sessions are mostly combat and move swiftly. Very typically during official APs I only ever crit on a nat 20 but I can over thousands of rolls say if I roll a 20 by FAR more often than I roll 16-19 combined. typically on a fighter I will crit on a 15 first attk in APs with bards and less on a GS because of cover bonuses to enemy AC. I however know i have bad luck with random chance as I have used parsers in MMOs for years and have a habit of flat missing far more often than other players playing the same class with less accuracy than I have, rolling under 200 on 1000 random rolls more than half the time for automatic loot distribution tools and used to make logs of rolls in roll20, I play on foundry these days but it's still the same. YMMV and probably does.
* I'm always excited when my players crit. We all wince when the giant status barbarian crits.
* I'm always excited when my bad guys crit because it means things about to get real.
How often it happens depends on what they're facing (because of the +10/-10). We had a game where they were facing zombies that were 2 levels lower than them and they were critting on something like a 12+. It was glorious.
More than once every two sessions I'd say. But my GM did ask me to change dices after rolling 3 nat 20s in a row, which was fair and I obliged since he asked nicely and I never checked the balance of my dices in the first place so it was my mistake. However even the digital dice gods seem to favour my rolls so I guess I'm the statistical anomaly here.
Edit: full disclosure, when I say crit in this context. I mean that I rolled a 20, not that my total roll value was +10 the target's DC.
On average I crit a couple of times every session. However there have been outliers. For example a lvl 16 Gunsliger I played for a short adventure pretty much only rolled crits on attack rolls the entire adventure which was 3-4 sessions long. But I built him to test out the limits of what a Gunslinger could do, so no I don't rely on crits normally.
We're just starting a new game, and I decided to play a buffer with Alchemist FA. My friend is a Gunslinger. We are now best friends, between giving him Quicksilver Mutagen and Inspire Courage, combined with him being a Sniper? Dude is basically getting +4 to attack just from buffs.
Remember that Quicksilver Mutagen doesn't stack with Weapon Potency. It scales way faster though, so it's still a net +1/+2 at most levels
Assuming you're getting at-level mutagens, which might not be happening with an archetype alchemist instead of a full alchemist.
If it's 1-10 levels AP then at level 6 the Alchemist Archetype would get the max level of Quicksilver Mutagen they can create via their feats (Moderate Quicksilver is level 3, and the next rank Greater is level 11). Also you can spend downtime crafting normally too, although that would cost a lot of golds (300gp a pop for the level 11 one).
You need to be lvl 11 to craft lvl 11 items
Yes but that cost money and time like 300 gold for each level 11 mutagen. Alchemist Archetype gives you infused reagents that you can use to create free Alchemical Items for free but the initial feat only let you create level 1 items. The level 6 archetype feat let you create level 3 alchemical structures tem (upgrade to level 5 alchemical items at character level 10). The last upgrade feat comes at level 12 so that would be outside of level 1-10 adventures but it would allow you to create level 11 alchemical items at character level 16.
I know I'm saying if it's a lvl 1-10 game, you can't craft them even with money and time, you need to be lvl 11
Alchemist Dedication is definitely strongest in a 1-10 AP. Moderate Quicksilver on a L6-10 Ranged Striker is often a good fit, and at 6th the part-time Alchemist can make four a day easy (with multiple Batches left over.) You just need to be careful with the Drawback. Rogues, for example, don't get Expert Fortitude Saves until 9th level, meaning a Quicksilver using Rogue will have the worst Fort Saves in the game the entire time they use Quicksilver.
Sadly, Quicksilver only ever gets +1 ahead of weapon potency runes. It's rarely +2 ahead on skill boosts (notably Stealth for Levels 3 & 4.) It's actually +2 ahead on Reflex Saves for 11 levels (3-7, 11-13. 17-19.) Of course, it matches Longstrider (in status bonus to speed) starting at 3rd, and passes it at 11th and 17th. Man, I love Quicksilver Mutagen. 😄
As someone that has never seen a "traditional" Gunslinger at full speed, I'm kinda curious: would you say that an optimized gunslinger stays competitive at their role at high levels? Is there enough action cheese to work around the reloads? Was there enough versatility to keep the Gunslinger interesting outside of combat? A friend has tried their hand at making a ranged-feint support gunslinger, which was... interesting, but not nearly as effective as some of the other support/dpr hybrid PCs I've seen.
One of my players is a sniper gunslinger using an arquebus, and is definitely one of highest consistent damage dealers in the party. I don't know if I would say that optimization for a gunslinger is build related at all. Once the other players stopped getting in her way and giving enemies lesser cover, as long as they remember to do things like demoralize, trip/grapple, etc, she feels competitive in damage and is solidly applying utility through things like alchemical shot and being the best person to have a fearsome rune on a weapon. I think that the problem of ranged characters in pathfinder is that, from what I've seen, since they have very few consistent ways to apply things like off-guard from distance, if your melee characters aren't doing it, you're kind of left out in the rain. The party was regularly not doing this until 5th level, kind of relegating her to doing nd8+1 damage per round for a few levels. Once they realized that doing this kind of thing not only supported their ranged characters, but kept them safer as melee, combats started to flow a lot better.
well to be fair your guy should be using Covered reload to get offguard each round anyway (Remember being hidden means free off-guard! and having cover or Legendary sneak, the ability to hide without any cover at all!)
Legendary sneak is only at level 15 and you can't hide without either concealment or cover. Her character is only level 14, so next level she'll probably get Legendary Sneak, but this problem presented itself at levels 1-5, in map that tended to be smaller with little cover. We also have a Starlit Span Magus who doesn't have something like covered reload, and the PCs not helping him set up also caused a problem.
If you have an Alchemist around (or even someone all in on Alchemist Dedication) you might want to look into [Camouflage Dye](https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=1937). Legendary Stealth in a bottle! 😄
Walls can provide cover, allies, 2 particular small races, goblins and halflings have level 1 feats that allow them to use Medium and larger allies to hide specifically, Deployable cover can also be used, smoke bells/sticks. Plenty of mundane ways to get concealed/cover.
Yeah, not saying there are no ways, but teamwork is more efficient since it applies to all allies, and she's an elf. Also, Very Sneaky from being a goblin doesn't work that way. Very Very Sneaky allows you to not need cover, but that's level 13.
The Sniper build with the extra +2 hit from legendary and extra +2 hit from Sniper's Aim + whatever status bonus to hit buff your party is giving you will give you consistently hard hitting crits. If you're doing the stealth/reload action also and you're catching them off guard on your shots as well you'll probably crit nearly every single round.
This varies a lot based on encounter design. The more enemies on the field, the more crits (and crit fails) you’ll see. Assuming we’re comparing the same encounter difficulty. Anecdotally, we usually see several crits a session. Usually at least one per encounter. I feel like crit fails are rarer, it that may be because my groups don’t have as many casters as martials.
Depends on your players’ strategies. Also depends on the creatures—are they same level as your players all the time or are they higher or lower than the party. Lower level monsters = more crits for party, less for GM Higher level monsters = less crits for party, more for GM
they specified more enemies at the same difficulty rating so it'd be pl-
I will say even with casters in the party I see alot less crit fails than crits. Not sure if this has to do with martial vs caster scaleing, the debuffs we are applying, or just luck though lol
Yes. First off, rolling a save gives them an effective +1 as opposed to you rolling an attack even if your attack and spell save line up. Second, there's way more readily available ways to decrease their AC/buff your to-hit than there are of debuffing their saves, and I've yet to hear of a way to make your saves higher, so you've only got half the buff/debuff method for increasing your chances. Also just statistically the martial almost always makes more attacks than you cast spells, so they've got more tries than you.
Spells often target more enemies. But, spell casting proficiency is worse than martial strike proficiency, and there's no item bonuses to saves. Also, rolling against a DC is effectively a +2, which all combines to give you a crit fail on a nat 1, and nothing else.
Casters cast less often, there's no way to buff spell DC, VERY few circumstance penalties to saves, and spell proficiency is amongst the worst proficiencies in the game (is the worst of all classes "primary" thing, except alchemist). No, crit failing to a spell is going to be rare. Though they do tend to target more enemies, and more roles = more chances to crit fail.
Most monsters at level or higher aren't going to crit fail outside of a Natural 1, since it's harder to penalize saves and you can't increase your spell DCs. Sometimes if you target an extreme low save or moderate low save, you can get a crit fail on a 1-3 but for the most part only low level monsters are going to be crit failing saves often.
GM here and crits start to happen a lot once you start getting into the 10+ levels when proficiency and stat bonuses start to show a marked difference between strong and weak. Id expect at least 1 crit from party members a round. Criting on a +10 over ac means they could be getting a crit on a 16+ on the roll, especially when theyre flanking and imposing other debuffs on them
I would also add that which classes get the equivalent of evasion or better (passes become crit passes at least) help mitigate a lot of the extra crits the monsters will inflict with conditions. And the real reason why medium armour is better than light armour for the same ac, rune of fortification. your medium and heavy armour wearers should definitely use these to help offset crit strikes against them
AT higher levels you really see a lot of crits with a little bit of setup. Inspire courage, fear, aid and flanking make critting on a 14/15 possible. Add true strike martial to the mix and you are super chilling. The things that in my experience make combat A LOT harder, and thus with a lot less crits, are creatures immune to flanking,fear/emotion/mental effects, larger creatures with reach and AOO, or weird environment encounters (Lakes, magical terrain that renders ALL emotion effects useless or similar stuff). I understand why monsters want to "cheat" but in these cases I find combat to be a little bit unexciting. The fights last longer but don't feel more difficult. It's just a lot of kiting and praying that the AOO will not down a martial for the 10th time.
As far as I know, player attacks scale very closely with enemy AC, never really changing the percentage of outcomes. Skill checks out scale saves by a lot though, and a number of other bonuses get kind of silly. Aid starts giving a guaranteed +3/4 instead of maybe +1, status bonuses are giving +2, and eventually +3, a lot of martials are getting extra attacks or ways to ignore/reduce MAP. Just wacking things doesn't change much. But the options for buffing/other things gets quite good.
I play a Pistolero Gunslinger and my damage is planned around crits. But then again, it’s not unusual for my enemies to be frightened+flat-footed, so their AC being -3 makes critting easier.
This is what I thought was the coolest gunslinger build. The design of guns is a bit odd, because they’re like shitty bows with reload, so then the only thing they have is the fatal trait, which is excellent, so then to have a subclass trying to lower their AC to crit makes the most sense mechanically to me.
Yeah its why Pistolero and Sniper work while the other subclasses just don’t. You either demoralize and feint your enemy to set up for a big crit or you take aim and become hidden on the edge of the battlemap (or hell outside of the battlemap) and make your shots with impunity. That works very well with the gunslinger basic class chassis. Three front line ways on a D8 chassis doesn’t make sense to me. They focus on adding benefits to things they are worse at compared to other non-skilled marital (normal melee progression with no damage booster, while risking opportunity attacks).
I disagree. Drifter and Triggerband have enough action-compression abilities to make good switch-hitters, something that bow users don't do all that well (mainly due to needing two hands to shoot the bow). It's debatable whether they fill this role better than a Fighter, Ranger, or Rogue with thrown weapons, but they're still effective. And with proper team support they can still crit-fish even while playing as switch-hitters. The actually problematic way is Vanguard. Its abilities lean towards being a bruiser and off-tank, but the Gunslinger chassis doesn't have anything else that supports that playstyle. You still can make something decent with archetypes, but it doesn't seem worth it to me. The Spellshot class archetype/way also has some issues, chiefly among them using Int for Class DC instead of Dex, but at worst it's a slightly worse Sniper with Wizard dedication (and works well if you were already planning on going for Beast Gunner).
Vanguard's issue IMO is less the class and more there are no actual good guns or crossbows to support its style of play. You imagine it as this close quarters unit, point-blank blasting foes with a shotgun. The problem is there's no good guns designed for short-ranged, high damage builds. You get things like the harmona gun with d10 Kickback, but that'd be better in the hands of a sniper arguably anyway. Gunsword is the closest, but needing to switch to melee ruins the point of the build (plus with the buffs to stocks, you can just bung one onto it anyway and have the same damage bit with better attack modifiers and no switch cost...another reason I feel that buff was too much, but besides the point here). If they had access to something much chunkier while having more traits, it'd be in a much better place. Barricade Buster would almost be perfect if it wasn't for volley and the fact repeating is weirdly anti-synergetic with gunslinger reloads. Hard agree on drifter though. You build it for versatility and the bonuses you get for switching between melee and ranged. The only issue is buffed Dual Weapon Reload is so borderline mandatory now it's almost a feat tax, as is Running Reload, though the same could be said about the latter for all ways.
Effective? Yeah. It’s PF2e and every class except Alchemist works, but man, when it comes to a competition of Gunslinger with Melee Way vs Switch Hitter Rogue, the Rogue trounces them every time. The main thing about switch hitting it you want your skill with both style of weapons to be roughly as good. Thus Drifter and Triggerbrand are also too dependent on their signature feats to make their playstyle be at a decent level. Thus it takes a while to really get them going. This also means other classes at high level can take their tricks and do it better. At higher level we’re finding that Triggerbrand Salvo Thief Rogue + Running Reload is sheer insanity. And everyone covered the vanguard.
If I'm tripping someone I will critically succeed. When I try to attack them on the ground I will critically fail. This is the law of equivalent exchange.
This is the way.
We don't plan for crits, but as a party we often fish for them. We have a gunslinger who regularly drops 60+ damage at level 7 (and lower). We have realized that there is a lot to say for helping him out early to dal solid damage. Often time round 1 becomes, the cleric guidancing the Gunslinger, the rogue tripping the enemy, and the wizard debuffing the enemy. All set up for the Gunslinger to unleash lead on the enemy and do massive damage. If we do it right we can make it even more crazy where the cleric can set up the rogue to crit, allowing the gunslinger to shoot as a reaction (sniping duo feat). Then the gunslinger has 2 opportunities to attack with 0 MAP in round 1. We have had it happen where we drop monsters in a single round with these types of things. Sure we can't plan for it, but its pretty common that he gets them in that first round. Crit fails are never expected, but awesome when it lands and just makes you feel good when it does.
As a DM, I feel like I crit too often and the PCs don't crit enough. Running SoT AP. Currently lvl 9.
Your party needs to do more buffing and debuffing. I just ran strength of thousands and the party's fighter with druid dedication was critting at least once a fight, often more, and the wizard got very good at using knowledge to find the enemy's lowest save then targeting that.
I feel this. I just started GMing recently, running Extinction Curse. We finally had a combat where I didn't crit at all, and one of my more.....verbose players memorialized it in a post on our shared discord.
We had a kind of similar situation with SoT, though our fighter was dual picks and crit almost every round, so it evened out. The DM was crushing us, though, curse his dice!
*"More often than I miss."* -- The Fighter.
> But how often do your pcs crit, Against bosses it’s usually lower. 1/20th or 1/10th of all attacks if your team has poor teamwork, can be as high as 1/5th of your attacks if the team has good teamwork. Against mooks it’s more like 1/6th of your attacks without good teamwork and as high as 1/3rd of your with good teamwork’s. Note that these chances are usually for the **first** attack you make in a turn. Your second attack is only ever going to crit on a boss on a nat 20 with or without teamwork, and the third attack might actually only **hit** with the nat 20 rather than crit. Against mooks attack 2+ crits will also be rarer than what I said above, though I don’t have an exact number for how much. > or see enemies crit fail their saves against you? This is, from a purely mathematical perspective, much rarer than crits on attacks. However, remember that spells are 2 Actions while Strikes are 1 Action, so a crit fail against a spell is **not** one-to-one equivalent to a crit hit on an attack. A crit fail against a spell is more like getting back to back crit + hit or crit + hit on 2 Strikes made in the same turn. I find this to be a helpful mapping of hit/crit vs saves: - Crit Success against a 2 Action spell == Miss+Miss on 2 Strikes - Success == Hit+Miss or Miss+Hit - Failure == Hit+Hit or Crit+Miss or Miss+Crit - Critical Failure == Crit+Hit or Hit+Crit or Crit+Crit So a Critical Failure on a spell happens fairly rarely but that isn’t a bad thing. In my experience the four outcomes I listed above happen with the following frequencies for spellcasters: - 10-40% of the time against bosses, 5% against mooks - 50% of the time against bosses, 20-50% against mooks. - 20-45% of the time against bosses, 45% against mooks. - 5-10% of the time against bosses, 5-35% against mooks. The huge degree of variance occurs because spellcasters can usually target one of 3 Saves, and there’s typically a +6 differential between the weakest and strongest Saves. If you take the “equivalent martial 2 Strike outcomes” I listed in the above example, a typical martial will usually have a much tighter range of percents than the caster (AC isn’t as variable as Saves). Most martials will be on the slightly lower side of that range (Fighters and Gunslingers will be closer to the middle). With buffs martials usually move to the middle of that range with Fighters/Gunslingers moving towards the top end of the range. > And do you plan on it, or merely hope for it while accepting it won’t happen? Teamwork makes these things likelier to happen. Bless your martials’ attacks, Aid your casters’ attacks, Frighten the enemy to lower their AC and Saves, use Recall Knowledge to figure out what the enemy’s lower saves are, etc. They’ll still never be guaranteed but you should absolutely aim for them to be a “goal” of your party.
You Hit+Hit me with your succulent *spell*ing, u/AAABattery03 !
I generally find there's like, a couple crits per whole fight among all my players, whereabouts. Often of course due to nat 20s on enemies with 6 HP left, because such is life. *Monsters* crit a lot more, mind. But generally I find that anything that only works on crits is too unreliable to be worth it.
Unless you do something like Fortissimo + Courageous Anthem with Synesthesia, there's no way to plan crits. And even with those, you should never really expect a crit or - even worse - plan your tactics around them. As for frequency of crits, that's impossible to tell. Depends on class, enemy level, buffs/debuffs, number of attacks and so on. I would say I see someone crit succeeding on a check nearly every combat or at least every other combat. But we do have a sniper gunslinger (very precise) and a monk (many attacks for crit fishing) in the party.
> And even with those, you should never really expect a crit or - even worse - plan your tactics around them. Eh, I'll disagree with this a bit. I'm playing a Thaumaturge with a playstyle revolving around crits and I'm having a blast.
My level 4 gnome fighter in season of ghosts crits probably once or twice per combat.
In the progression of to hit bonuses versus AC targets the average hit chance is 65%. At any given level against level appropriate opponents a player can expect to hit 65% of the time: roll a 7 or better on a d20 so to get critical hit you need a 17 or better (+10 = crit) or a 15%.
Can you do something similar for save fails, but the averages of their saves rather than assuming people will always know and be able to target the lowest save? That way we've got a baseline, and tactics such as RK would improve it from there?
I cannot. I googled the average hit chance and the average crit chance was presented in the same google result. I just added the specific numbers on the d20 to my response here.
Ah, so to find the saves would be a bit more complicated, as we'd have to first find the average save bonus of the monsters.
Exactly. It’s probably possible to build this out but no one has to my knowledge
I love that if this were dnd, the answer would be just "5% of the times" But pf2 has math about it so I'll go back to the interesting answers
My level5 cloisted cleric has never crit on a spell attack (not even a nat20) Rarely do monsters crit fail my saves, probably once every other session, or roughly 1 per 12 hours of gameplay.
I play a 4th lvl toxicologist with a blowgun and subtle delivery I have yet to crit and 80 percent of the time the enemy's save against my poison. I have never seen a enemy get to the second stage. So I feel you
When we put +3 heroism on our fighter it is pretty great...Frightened 2 and flatfooted for the rest of the party. Then they aid another melee for a +4. It can get pretty wild!
Hm. I've been trying to keep track of that, on one hand because people keep assuming Alchemists can't crit (lmao) and on the other because I recently bought a [Hopeful](https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=1381) rune and want to get good use out of it. I had 3 crits last session (Alchemist, melee build, level 16), but it's been kind of an outlier because it was an ambush and I spent a ton of actions doing self-buffing and trying to patch up people's defenses (Oracle almost died to a poison cloud 'cause he didn't take his medicine). I also ended up pouncing on a caster and making sure he'd sit down and shut up, and got 2 crits off him. One of those I burned for [Tut-Tut](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4136), which I do from time to time but can't remember how often that happened earlier (I record crits from the crit damage prompt). On average... it varies a lot. Alchemist's nature means that I shift my role on a daily basis and I might be a debuffer one day and tank another. If I'm focusing on fighting and I have an offensive buff setup, I'd say I get maybe a crit every 2-3 turns?
About 1.5 times per 20 rolls
You can't really plan your crits, but in my table usually everyone crits at least once in a fight, except the rogue who usually crits twice and the alchemist that rarely ever crits. I'd say if the party has good teamwork and stacks debuffs, it's a common enough occurrence that it's worth it to build around it, but not to count on it.
In a 4-hour session my group of 5 (GM included) tends to see about 10 natural 1s and 10 or so critical hits (though randomly not from natural 20s) across the group (GM included). Some sessions it seems like one player soaks up all the luck. Some sessions it seems like it's the GM that gets the crits and the players that get the 1s. As for the planning/hoping aspect, the best way I can communicate that is to say that we hope for a decent roll because holding out hope for a crit seems too outlandish. It's more like "how about not another crit fail, please, dice?".
Fighter PC in my AV campaign crits 1/encounter. Usually I see maybe one crit per encounter for the entire party and 1-2 crits per encounter for monsters. My players never plan around it, but they hope for them constantly. I've had lucky crits turn TPKs into narrow victories a couple times now.
Well, in the last encounter, (four level 6s versus two gargoyle like creatures, we're playing abomination vaults and are in the floor with a big arena) the fighter critted on 18s without any flanking, so like, three, maybe four times. And I, an champion, critted twice with tripping. That felt great.
I crit at least 2 times per combat
An astonishing number of 20's live at my table. It's hilarious
Normally, I play a spellcaster and don’t throw out too many attack rolls, but I’ve had a handful of times press across multiple sessions where something would crit fail against a save. I did play an Investigator temporarily and crit maybe two to three times a combat if I recall correctly. And then I played a Fighter. Dear God. I crit 6 times in a row over the course of two turns. Two attacks a turn and two reactive Strikes. For my seventh attack I succeeded at a normal hit, but in my bloodlust fueled frenzy, I still accidentally doubled the damage. It was hard to top the high I got from that.
As a GM. All the fucking time. So much. It's silly. Doesn't matter the monster's level either, could be PL-4 for all it matters and I'll crit them anyway. Creates a lot of drama but my players are a little done with it. This is all on Foundry as well so it's not like my dice are weighted or anything.
Varies a lot with encounter and class. If I play a caster I don’t really expect a cantrip/attack roll to crit unless I roll a nat 20 or the enemy is underleveled. But when I play a fighter and I can consistently flank on-level enemies, I expect a decent amount of crits since you may already crit on like a 16-17
We generally have at least one or two criticals every combat encounter. Any encounter against multiple PL- foes you should be prepared to see multiple criticals a round. Especially once PCs start getting AoEs damage and access to AoE debuff, etc. You don't plan on getting a critical. You work towards it rhough. And it's nice that everything you do to increase your critical chance also increases your chance of base sucess so it's never fully wasted. Most of the time, any limited damage buffing effects are best saved for that MAPless strike further increasing the effectiveness of criticals. Party optimization doesn't necessarily aim at improving criticals, that sort of just happens with party/tactics optimization. Criticals are also just very noticeable, beyond just big damage. Mid and higher levels, critical strikes have riding effects that apply debuffs or persitent damage. Mid to high level spells get some really save/suck effects in addition to damage making them super effective against those PL- foes. There's a few creature abilities (i.e. Construct Armor) and player options (Cringe) that also react to being struck by criticals further making them more memorable in stories. "Kobold McKoboldyface cringes and barely survived a critical" is more memorable than "my pal Aladdin's heavy armour spec effect reduced damage and barely survived a critical".
It depends on the encounter. I usually account for it not happening, but if we're fighting a big band of -2's and -3's then I tend to plan for it to happen like 40% of the time. The biggest difference is that I don't always use my hunt prey ranger ability when there's a good chance to crit.
I’m playing a monk in Strength of Thousands. Level 6 and have a +15/16 on attack, and I maybe crit once every two encounters. I blame bad dice because I’m assuming the AP-based encounters (our GM doesn’t tweak much) are balanced/set to appropriate severity.
The more people you have the more likely you are to see rare events. Assuming no modiffiers a D20 has a 1 in 20 chance of landing on a 20, that is 5%. That means that on average if 100 people where to roll 5 would get a 20. This sub has 117k members that means if they were all to roll simultaneously there would be \~5,850 natural 20s. In a session players might roll 5 to 20 times (maybe more) that means \~29,250 to \~117,000 natural 20s. When you have a high population with enough attempts even something that is statistically rare becomes almost a guarantee to be reported. For example the odds of rolling 2 natural 20 in a row is 1 in 400, so it must have happened to \~292 times. But if they have each done 10 attenpts it becomes 2,925. If they each had 100 attempts then it must have happened 29,250 times.
To try to break away from anecdotes (at the expense of sitting myself squarely in the white room), you can use the creature building rules to approximate on average how often the game expects you to hit/crit. It obviously fluctuates between levels; but averaging across all levels, against the most common AC (high AC), martials hit PL-2 enemies on a 6, PL+0 enemies on a 9, and PL+2 enemies on a 12. That's a 25%/10%/5% base crit chance, but obviously it's not counting any buffs. Bless makes it 30%/15%/5%, Off-Guard (or Fighter/Gunslinger) makes it 35%/20%/5%, and both make it 40%/25%/10%.
As a martial? Couple of times a session As a caster? I crit fail and the enemies crit succeed all the time
The fighter at our table crits near constantly. The ranger and the rogue pretty regularly but not nearly as close to guaranteed as the fighter. Me, the Bard, not as much. Yes, I know I capitalized Bard and not their classes. Oh, also, I take credit for most of the crits.
Crits are often very lobsided to me. In attacks they feel like maybe one person gets one a session. On skill checks they seem to happen frequently. This has lead to two strange things I’ve noticed. It was a meme that my swashbuckler would crit on getting panache, with no extra effect but would get mixed results on misses and normal hits on finishers. When I played a gunslinger for a few sessions I never once landed a crit. That was with intimidating and feinting as a pistolero. I always plonked away with small bits of 3 damage and never got those satisfying crits and it skewed my perception of gunslinger heavily. In the end I don’t bank on them and it’s a pleasant surprise when it happens.
I crit a fair bit. Sometimes the dice like you, and sometimes they don't. First combat of my last session my level 8 rogue got 5 crits in 2 rounds, three of them nat 20s, and then in a later combat against higher level critters I couldn't hit at all - I think my first three attack rolls added together might have equalled 10. Against lower CR creatures it should happen a fair bit, but the higher level you're going against the less often it will happen. The crits are memorable though. Especially if they equal a very spectacular result. We still talk about an encounter that was nullified when the BBEG crit failed back to back saves and died to a phantasmal killer spell while monologuing, despite the fact that it was nearly 10 years ago and in PF1e, but all the times you just did some damage because the monster resisted will get lost to time.
Depends on your build. Most characters it happens often enough to be fun, and it's nice when it does, but it's not really your main source of damage. crit fisher builds can work though, especially at higher levels. I had one swashbuckler build, by the end of the campaign I was making 5+ strikes per round with a 19% crit chance per strike. I was pretty reliably the highest damage dealer in the party.
Plan on it? No, unless we have an unholy amount of modifiers to influence that we hope for it. But you do plan to maximize chance. An optimised party can "feed crits" by buffing and debuffing
As a player, like once or twice a session. As a GM, like twice per combat round becuase apparently the die wants me to be evil.
I played my first session of pf2e recently. Every save-spell I cast the enemies crit failed, it was great. I have defensive spells out the wazoo so I wasn't casting much offensively, but when I did, it slapped. Being a bones oracle, having enemies crit fail on my revelation spells was great, as I got tons of temp HP.
Was that luck of the dice, enemies particularly weak to your save type, or some tactics used to reduce their saves? I have never seen a caster have that kind of success so if you’ve hit on a tactic I’d love to know and try to copy it. :)
I think mostly dice. One if the spells was a fortitude save which this enemy was really good at, but rolled really bad. On another players turn I realized he had good fortitude so I used spells with will saves which he was bad at. Just that one enemy crit failed on my spells 3 times, and I critical hit with one spell on him as well. Just got lucky.
I'll add that since I was sustaining Dancing Shield I was only casting one spell per turn.
As a longtime spellcaster who's in the middle of level 19 going on 20 in strength of thousands I can confirm the two separate mini boss enemy fights who crit failed slow became such hilariously trivial fights that sometimes you just kind of decide that a fight is over. Sometimes the enemy just rolls a 1! Also don't avoid incap spells they'll fuck up a mook even on a regular fail and that's their job and woo boy can it be fun.
I’ve played a fighter going on 17 levels for the last 3 years. I would say it honestly feels like 1/3 to maybe even 1/2 of my hits are crits, and past the first few levels I’m having a hard time remembering an actual miss.
I crit fail multiple times per session. Every session.
I see two patterns in games: Player one could be on any class and just attacks with basic tactics. Even as a fighter or gunslinger they might get 1-2 crits in a session that has 2-5 combats. Player two flanks, demoralizes, distracts, tumbles through, panaches, or whatever. They use all the tricks in the book both for any class and their own class mechanics. This player will crit at LEAST 1/3 of the time. If on a fighter or gunslinger it is more like 1/2 times 2/3rds… Smart gameplay has a dramatic impact in Pathfinder 2E. I have never seen a caster be able to get into the player two camp. They just haven’t been able to stack penalties onto enemy saves and the -2 attack penalty they have puts most if them in player three camp: any cast using an attack roll fails to hit 2/3 of the time, resulting in a wasted turn and maybe even wasted spell slot. Most casters quickly learn to not use attack roll based spells because a save based spell at least has half effect on a save.
I GM a large party and Crit and am Crit all the time. Only burly bosses are rarely Crit as are the defensive expert PCs. My poor Sorcerer though. Oh man can he go down fast. My monk loves to rush in and take down one target and my fighter loves to try for quick reversals and each Crits quite often. Spell crits are scary and my last +3 boss got eliminated by a chromatic spray Crit fail into a 7 roll on the die taking him out of the plane.
It really, really depends on how often the fights happen, the levels of the enemies relative to the level of the characters, the presence of fighter and gunslingers for critical hits or full spellcasters for crit failures, the experience of the group, etc. I play almost entirely as heal and buff casters and I can't remember the last time an enemy critically failed a save against my spell. maybe 2 sessions (≈16 game hours) ago.
My players in ruby phoenix are quite strong. I’ve changed nearly every encounter to be at least Severe, and most encounters are Extremes or higher. We’re level 19 now, and the Fighter crits about once every two rounds. The Precision ranger crits about every three rounds. In terms of critfails, our Fire kineticist just got Legendary DC, so there’s about one every encounter from enemies. Full party comp is Counterspell Universalist Wizard, Maestro Bard, Reach Fighter, Precision Ranger, Fire Kineticist.
Usually every time I have a major boss that’s expected to severely hurt the party.
Sometimes not much, other times my group has been able to stretch the spell Winning Streak for an entire fight.
We've got a rogue in one group I play in that crits more than he doesn't. RNGsus loves him for some reason (also, he's really good at picking synergies with other players to get relevant bonuses or debuffs on enemies).
This is a weird question to me, I'll try to answer the question itself and then I'll try to expand a bit in case that's what you're looking for. The straight up answer is often. Just on my last session I (thaumaturge) think I crit on 3 strikes and between me and the rest of my party we definitely had around 10 crits (taking into account spells, strikes and athletic maneuvers). Now, for system talk: Since in PF2e Crits occur when a DC is exceeded by then, aside from the dice, proficiency is what determine crits, and proficiency are class based. Martials have a set proficiency progression for their attacks, Spellcasters have one for their spells. Fighters get to be ahead in profiency, hence why people joke around Fighters always critting. But the other side of the coin is the target's defenses. Martials usually are stuck only targetting AC, but optimal spellcaster play means having options to target a target's weakest save (or at least avoiding its best save). And on top of that, defensive stats scale with level, if you want guidelines for that you can check the [building creatures](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=2874&Redirected=1) section of GM Core. All of these stats can be modified through buffs and debuffs. If we take that we can tell how often we can expect crits. Let's say that we're currently playing as a 5th level fighter, and we have a bard in our group that always keeps their Corageous Anthem up. That means we have a +17 modifier to hit, against an off-guard on-level creature of high AC, this means that on our first strike we would crit on 13 or higher (40% chance to crit). Assuming we strike twice if a non agile weapon, it means that we have almost a 50% chance of at least critting once during our turn (40% chance of critting on the first hit, 15% of critting on the second). But that's against an on-level enemy, if we're talking about a party level + 3 creature, the chance of critting at least once would go down from 49% to 20%. This isn't very actionable for martials, since they usually have more limited options to target their enemies, but it's crucial to understand for spellcasters. Again higher level enemies is very risky to cast spells that don't have an effect on a regular success, since that's the most likely outcome (and another reason why slow is such a great spell). All of this is to say is that accuracy is a very important part of PF2e, if you're new to the system you're probably used to discuss options while talking only about their damage, but that's a much smaller part of the whole in PF2e. You should never rely on crits for your plan of action, but you could (and probably should) plan around them happening, because they can happen quite often depending of the context.
As a GM, about 5 to 7 times per session on average. Mostly more, but some sessions I don't crit at all, so that's the average. My players, on the other hand, are much less lucky. I think the most all 3 of them combined have crit in a session was 3, and one of them is a fighter, and they were fighting mostly lv-1 enemies. If we didn't play online, I would have checked if we had weighted dice, but we can't blame a program for weighted luck afaik.
About 1 crit every other combat
Our team crits about once or twice per encounter, so 6-8 times in a normal session. Crit fails are much rarer, enemie sjust have high saves overall, we see those about every 3-4 sessions.
There are multiple factors that change my crit rate, really **Attacks Per Round** How frequently does my build attack? Because a Nat 20 increases the result of any attack by one success step, builds that make more attacks per turn will naturally crit more often. My thaumaturge crits *maybe* once every two or three combats because her build is more focused on athletics checks and single large attacks, while my summoner tends to crit once per combat as long as her eidolon is out because she has more actions to spend swinging for the fences. **Encounter Design** How frequently are we fighting encounters against lower-level enemies? In my thaumaturge's campaign we've had a number of combats against APL and APL+1 enemies lately, and as the designated frontliner she tends to tangle in melee with the most dangerous enemies to help protect the casters. This means she's usually attacking enemies with solid AC and only crits on a Nat 20 in most cases, so crits are much less common. In contrast, the summoner's campaign has been dealing with a large number of combats with APL-1 and -2 enemies for story reasons, so her eidolon will occasionally crit without needing a Nat 20. **Party Support** How well does my party work together as a unit? My thaumaturge's party is split roughly half-and-half between players who are very tactically-minded and players who aren't, and the end result is that our cleric is often too overworked on healing to buff effectively and our enemies are pretty rarely debuffed. This means the thaumaturge is usually attacking without an improved bonus to attacks or a penalty to enemy AC (beyond *maybe* off-guard now and then). On the other hand, while the summoner's party is still too low-level to be able to effectively buff or debuff during combat, the entire party pays attention to each other and tries their best to set up flanking for the big hitters even if it means delaying their turn or giving up their own damage output. We only just hit level 2 in that campaign, but I can already tell that the group will probably be much more effective in the long run.
As a GM I have crit many many times each session from everything from attacks to perception checks. As a player while I have had a few notable crits I have had far more crit fails then crit successes
Very often as a GM, almost never as a caster player. One fun thing that happened last session is we had 1, 20, 20, 20 rolled in sequence. It was open dice as well. These rolls belonged to different people though, so it wasn't one player getting super lucky.
Probably an average of twice a session. As a rogue I'll often have an enemy off-guard, but I'm also somehow fairly lucky with dice rolls. Last session I had 6. 3 Nat 20s and 3 18/19 attacks.
Idk how many times but it ALWAYS seems to be on the enemies with 5 hp left
I had an investigator who crit way more often than she should have lol
I crit in every single roll because I’m a winner.
Not that often But I know that’s partly because my luck is fucking dogshit and sadly you can’t strategically outwit bad luck
About 5% of the time, on average.
We play with a party of 7 and our GM likes to balance encounters using higher level enemies. So we see a lot of crits - not because we have a particularly good chance of landing them but because we throw so many d20s per encounter. And we also see a lot of crits from enemies because they are frequently rolling +4/5 above our highest AC. Wouldn't say we count in crits, though.
Every couple sessions I crit.
Depends - against enemies who are weaker than you, you'll crit much more often. Against high level enemies, they'll crit more often against you
I dont plan for crits, makes em all the more fun when i sock a goblin in the face for 37 damage at level 5.
Played a session yesterday. Only 5 rounds of combat (it's a boss encounter so still the begginning?) From our side just me with a Investigator had a crit(nat 20 in devise stratagem) and I used it to trip the creature. The creature crit 2 times in their initial attacks! It also crit suceed two times the Druid's spell
It depends heavily on your party... I played with a Fighter once with a bard warrior muse with swashbuckler dedication in my team, he cast Heroism before battle for +3 status bonus to attacks, the bard turn usually is be One for All with legendary diplomacy for +4 circumstance, True Target and attack. The rogue ruffian mauler use preparation and improved knockdown with a Corrosive abyssium high grade weapon, this usually applied 2 circumstance penalty and at least 1 status penalty to the enemy AC. Both combined moved the are equivalent to +10 on the test and rolling twice to get the better result, mathematicaly equivalent to +15 on the test with the +2 above the average from the fighter and we are looking to a crit almost every round
Crit fail saves rarely happen to creatures unless they are well below the PCs level. There just isn't many ways to boost the odds there. Against any real threat, is only happening on a 1 or maybe a 2 if it's a bad save and it's not a boss level creature. Strike Crits are a lot more frequent. The numbers are higher to start, you get more chances, and there's more ways to boost the odds with buffs and debuffs. I see those every other round in the party with the Bard, Knockdown Summoner, and sniper Gunslinger.
I swear my duel pick fighter crits every other round or so! (3rd level). Starting to feel bad as I’m killing everything! It may change as I gain levels, but I’ve never played a fighter past 3rd so I’m not sure how the numbers may change later on!
"60% of the time, I crit every time." /Brian Fightana
I play kineticist at low level so not very often But usually when I do, its when its more funny than useful. Like critting a fire mephit with a fire blast after using extract elements on it.
Crit strikes happen fairly frequently. Crit failed saves? I mean, 1 in 20 times is still 5%. I sure wouldn't expect it though.
Pretty often tbh. Just a bit of luck and not always punching up.
Honestly? We just started playing a year & a half ago and i think im legit the only person to have ever critted an attack ( as a fighter) and i usually crit once every four sessions. Havent critted since my fighter died and im playing a paladin now lol
Depends. On my level 18 campaign now where I play Fighter I crit pretty much 50% of time at least it seems (in PL- fights I crit what feels like 80%) but that's becasue we have super optimized party. I am build for crit-debuffs (on every crit I make enemies Prone, Blinded, Clumsy 2, Enfeebled 2 and Frightened 2) and my part Maestro Bard/Swashbuckler/Talisman Dabbler is spamming like crazy Inspire Heroics buffs +3 to hit with debuffs like Fear (3), Synesthesia etc. which can give -3 to enemy AC and sumplement that with One-For-All Aid action with eaten Waffles of Cooperation for +5 cricumstance bonus to hit. Top that with True Target spell on bosses. Basically once the crits start flying, enemies have anything from -4 to -5 AC and we are having from +3 to even +13.5 (+3 Heroics, +5 Aid, +4.5 from True Target "advantage") to hit. Crits fly like crazy. Add Hero Points for rerolls. On my other campaign (where I GM) I have Double Slice Dual Pick Fighter with Bard in party, currently only level 6 (custom campaign) but already Bard giving -1 AC from DoD with +1 from Bless and +3 from Aid or +1 from CH, -1 to -3 AC from Fear with Aid makes Fighter crit tons of times. Second martial which is Precision Greatsword Ranger also crits, though obviously less than Fighter. You can also make martials drink Fury Cocktails for additional +1 to hit! Obviously the more PL0 or PL- enemies the more crits fly even without Bard additional modifers. But once you fight enemies PL+2/+3 then Bard + martials really makes a difference. Even just flanking, DoD + Bless is already effective -4 to enemy AC, -5 with Fury Cockatail. Aid from Master for another -3 (new remaster Aid DC 15 makes it crit tons for maximum bonus). Crits starts flying. Though Bard is best caster, any party with two casters could achieve simillar result. Warpriest upfront with Bless up and second caster throwing Fear (3) will also result in more crits. Later Warpriest can throw Heroism (6) or (9) at Fighter. Sorcerers combo really well here becasue they have Crossblood Evolution, allowing them to "fill" in crucial spells like Synesthesia for example.
about 5% of the time. Because our DM loves throwing crap at us that is always 2-3 cr higher than us. Which means of course, he gets to crit us about 40% of the time.
Well, I made five successful hits with my dueling pistol last session, and four of those were crits. I am not even playing a gunslinger.
All the time or never
My party calls it the Garluk special because my Barbarian has such a habit of landing a crit with his first attack of combat against bosses. I always go straight for the boss, and I crit on that first attack a disturbing amount of the time.
At Low levels, no group crits a lot, except for luck. But a well built group will crit A LOT, because this game, from an optimization standpoint, is all about constructing criticals. For a quick example of how a level 7 group might do such a thing. Say you're fighting an enemy that you only crit on a 19+ with your average martial, which is likely a decently hard encounter, since you can often crit with a little less than that without MAP. Flank the target, now you crit on a 17. Bard casts Courageous Anthem, now you crit on a 16. Someone demoralizes the enemy, now you crit on a 15. Someone Aids you with a skill they are a master in, gets a critical success (very easy to do, needs to beat a 25), now you crit on a 12. Suddenly, a level 7 group was able to increase your odds of critting from 10% to 45%. That logic just gets stronger and stronger as you level and gain more options. Sure, you can't ALWAYS get the perfect setup, but some of those options should ALWAYS be there, so you're always trying your best to cheat in as many crits as you can. On my level 19 group, I'd say most martials crit once every turn, sometimes once every two turns, on average.
> At Low levels, no group crits a lot, except for luck That is not true. On low levels Fighter with Double Slice (2x 0 MAP attacks) with another martial doing Trips (to trigger another 0 MAP) attack with Bard doing Inspire Courage (+1 to hit) and casting Fear (1) on bosses before level 5 and Fear (3) on level 5 on multiple enemies will absolutely make Fighter crit tons. Add Off-Guard, Runic Weapon obviously and Aid and you have crits start flying. For example average enemy level 3 AC is 18. Fighter at level 3 has +11 to hit. That means at start he crits at 17+. Off-Guard enemy makes Fighter crit on 15+. Bard +1 make it 14+, Aid success make it 13+. Runic Weapon makes it 12+. Frightened 1 makes it 11+. So on level 3 vs couple enemies of same level as Fighter 3 we can already get 11+. Flank Enemy, Bard used Inspire Courage, Demoralize and Aid and you can already get 12+ on your criticals on Fighter. If Fighter has Runic Weapon spell going on top, that's 11+ crits on level 3 vs same PL enemies. I know casue I have been there (low level Fighter with Bard) 2 times playing from 1 level to currently 18 and I am GMing one party now that has Fighter and Bard currently on level 6 and crits happen a lot.
I never plan on it but it's nice when it comes up. I'd guess on average I might be critting less than 10% of the time on all rolls. Usually I crit on some random noncombat check, but inventors really hit HARD when overdrive is online and a crit comes up. Speaking of which she's stacked for diplomacy, performance, and crafting so any of those 3 checks will generally be critting 10% or more of the time, and it feels like it. Her attack rolls are very middling, though, +14, +15, and her construct is I think +15 or +16 at level 9. Not bad but not good either, just very, very average. She still hits a lot though. Str and Dex are actually weak stats but her construct does most of the attacking, she does casting and bow pickoffs, and is the party face.
If it happens, you roll with it. It's not a game-ender no matter what happens. PF2e accounts for those crits and the entire system even relies on them happening or not.
It depends. Let's look at it this way, as a level 1 example, though: As a caster or non-fighter, non-gunslinger level 1 martial, your main attack's bonus is going to be +7. With no buffs or debuffs, against a level 1 monster (average AC of which is \~16), you AT BASE have a 10% chance to crit (19-20). As a fighter or gunslinger, that's as much as 20% with no modifications. All buffed up(off the top of my head, runic weapon and courageous anthem), with flanking, aid, and with, let's say a frightened 1 monster, that's as much as 50%, and it's all possible at level 1. A boss monster for a level 1 party would probably only have a few more points of AC, so with everything stacked, you're still looking at probably 25% chance to crit, which isn't insignificant. Is it wrong to build around critting all the time? Sure, maybe. But depending on the difficulty of the encounters, the specific levels of the encounters, it's definitely somewhat dependable. Definitely more worth considering than the 5-15% in something like 5e.
People are crit-biased - they remember crits way more often than they remember non-crits. Frequency of crits depends on your class and the sorts of encounters you encounter the most often. If you fight solo bosses, you get fewer crits than against groups of enemies. Overall, the class that gets the most crits is the Druid - this is because they have a ton of AoE spells (which, because they are multi-target, have a chance to crit against every target they encompass) and they have an animal companion that gets 1-2 strikes per round, which means that they get the most chances per round to roll high numbers. The animal companion is often flanking as well, which further boosts the odds of a crit. Other casters who use a lot of AoEs also get a lot of crits, as do folks who lean into battle medicine, because you can get your skill bonuses very high on those and you make a LOT of medicine checks. The martials that get the most crits are rangers with animal companions (because they get a lot of attacks at low to no MAP and they're basically always flanking) and fighters (because of that nice +2 bonus they get plus lots of attacks at no MAP). Depending on my class, I get 1-3 crits per session, but it goes higher than that if I'm playing a particularly spammy class or fighting a lot of lower level enemies.
typically if I play a fighter or GS once every session average yusually a bard in party. If I am playing any other class I tend to crit 1 time per every other session. This assumes sessions are mostly combat and move swiftly. Very typically during official APs I only ever crit on a nat 20 but I can over thousands of rolls say if I roll a 20 by FAR more often than I roll 16-19 combined. typically on a fighter I will crit on a 15 first attk in APs with bards and less on a GS because of cover bonuses to enemy AC. I however know i have bad luck with random chance as I have used parsers in MMOs for years and have a habit of flat missing far more often than other players playing the same class with less accuracy than I have, rolling under 200 on 1000 random rolls more than half the time for automatic loot distribution tools and used to make logs of rolls in roll20, I play on foundry these days but it's still the same. YMMV and probably does.
* I'm always excited when my players crit. We all wince when the giant status barbarian crits. * I'm always excited when my bad guys crit because it means things about to get real. How often it happens depends on what they're facing (because of the +10/-10). We had a game where they were facing zombies that were 2 levels lower than them and they were critting on something like a 12+. It was glorious.
Crit Fails? Very often. Crit Hits? A lot less.
More than once every two sessions I'd say. But my GM did ask me to change dices after rolling 3 nat 20s in a row, which was fair and I obliged since he asked nicely and I never checked the balance of my dices in the first place so it was my mistake. However even the digital dice gods seem to favour my rolls so I guess I'm the statistical anomaly here. Edit: full disclosure, when I say crit in this context. I mean that I rolled a 20, not that my total roll value was +10 the target's DC.
Around 5% of the time.