Struggling to understand crit damage... could use some help.

[☠Black Knight]

So, I never really paid attention to DMG before, only ever playing casually. Trying to get further into the game and eventually steel path tho, but I cannot for the life of me wrap my head around how damage is calculated in this game.

For example, if I am using Kullervo, and I use his 1 ability to get red crits (the highest tier) it might do 32k damage to one enemy, and then 2.5m damage to another of the exact same level and type.

It's all over the place, seemingly with no rhyme or reason at all. I tried reading the wiki and still can't make any sense of why some numbers are so much bigger than others.


Often times, I will even see a yellow crit hit higher than a red crit, which makes even LESS sense. How is that even possible, if the very nature of a red crit is 3x the damage of a normal one?

I'm so lost... lol

[GHSTKILA93]

you are overthinking it. the extra damage comes from ability strength. toggling his ability means you add ability strength to the damage numbers. you mod for ability strength you will get stupid numbers. the gun itself has no input on ability strength. ability strength is the only input being added when you toggle the ability. plain and simple.

[NocheLuz]

To put it in a very simple term... Weak point and Damage multiplier. Both of them affect the final damage the most.

If you look at the "Damage" page on the wiki you'll see a lot of Damage multiplier mentions on the page. And weak point (body part modifier) is one of the modifiers that give out a HUGE amount of damage increase. If you learn about each enemy's weak point and exploit them you can easily kill enemies that normally would take an entire magazine with just 3 to 5 or even one shot.

[FubarOne]

To start with, red crits aren't just triple the damage of a yellow crit, and in fact, there are even different red crits.

Crits are broken up into tiers, those being yellow, orange, red, red, red, red, red, etc, meaning the tiers keep getting higher but they stay red and just get more !s.

And the damage of a crit is based on the tier and the crit damage multiplier, more specifically every tier of crit adds your crit damage multiplier minus 1. This is basically the multiplier without the initial damage taken into consideration.

So a yellow crit with a basic x2.0 crit damage would actually be your initial damage, with a x1 multplier added onto it. If instead it was x3.8 crit damage, that would be your initial damage with x2.8 added onto it. And if it was an orange crit then it would be your initial damage plus 2.8 x 2, and a first tier red crit would be 2.8 x 3, and so on.

Now how could a yellow crit do more damage than a red crit? That's most likely due to armor, but damage type might also play into it.

Armor plays a huge factor in fighting grineer and some corpus units. And the armor type matters as well. There's ferrite armor and alloy armor, the former being weak to corrosive and the latter being weak to radiation. And when I say weak, I mean corrosive ignores 75% of ferrite armor and also does 75% bonus dmg vs it, while radiation does the same to alloy armor. Corrosive also has a status proc that reduces armor, which works on both types.

And just because armor really isn't a big deal for warframes because of other forms of damage mitigation and the fact we really can't stack all that much of it, when there are enemies with millions of armor, you're stuck dealing with their 99.999997% damage resistance. Hence why the most common solution is to bypass armor with bleed procs from slash status, or stripping armor completely with abilities.

[Nibbie]

To try to simplify and summarize the above information:

Crits deal extra damage based on the critical damage modifier.
Each level of crit (yellow-orange-red-etc.) adds the critical damage modifier again.
There are several levels of red crits, there is just no visual change at that point. 300% critical chance and 400% critical chance both produce red crits, but 400% adds the critical damage modifier an additional time compared to 300%.

As for why some of your numbers are larger than others, especially with Kullervo's ability, there are a few possible explanations.

One is red crit stacking; assuming your crit value is going over 300%, which is very easy to do with Kullervo's 1, some of your hits will be a higher crit tier than others, even though they all look red.

Another is body part modifiers; even melee weapons can get headshots (or headshot equivalents on some enemies), though they usually happen accidentally since you can't aim a melee like you can a gun. It still deals extra damage when it happens though, and that can give you a big modifier that feels (and largely is) random.

Another is current armor values. Heat and corrosive statuses, various warframe abilities, and other sources like pets can reduce enemy armor, causing significantly increased damage to them, especially as you get towards the higher levels. If one enemy had a heat proc that burned their armor away and another didn't, that could cause significantly different damage values.

[Kawalorn]

Do you use a weapon with armor reducing status? Removing armor can increase the damage by ridiculous amounts.