Crits, Crits, Crits!

[AciD]

There is new post at Team Fortress 2 blog by Greg Cherlin, he talks about new critical hits system implemented on Tuesday.
[br]You can visit Team Fortress 2 blog here.

 

[Adabiviak]

Interesting to see the inner workings of the crit sytem, and I'm glad they're overhauling it. Question though: if you're a heavy or pyro, and you roll a crit but stop your weapon after the first round or two comes out, do you have two seconds of crit in the bank when you fire again?

Does damage made to equipment (namely engineer buildings, but also breakable items) count towards increasing your crit odds, or just damage to people? If it's just people, do you have to kill them, or as long as you're damaging people, is your crit-chance-o-meter increasing?

Also, good to know that the performance-half of the likelihood that you'll crit is based on the last 20 seconds.

a feat that occurs about as often as our backstab code works correctly.

lol - looking forward to that update.

 

[FoxFire]

Interesting read. At least now I know how crits work in TF2.

 

[Operational]

Yeah good read. I'm pretty happy with the latest update with regards to crits.

Question though: if you're a heavy or pyro, and you roll a crit but stop your weapon after the first round or two comes out, do you have two seconds of crit in the bank when you fire again?

No.

Does damage made to equipment (namely engineer buildings, but also breakable items) count towards increasing your crit odds, or just damage to people?

Not sure. On the flip side I believe damage added by Eng sentries add to the crit chance (which is why Spies are often on the receiving end of a crit-wrench). Crit chance for Medics is I believe increased by the damage done by their patient.

If it's just people, do you have to kill them?

No.

 

[Sloth]

Was something that always seemed very random, now we know its just a very low percent chance. Good thing to see how it works.

 

[hethoofd]

Erm... why do backstabs need critical hits? The whole point of the backstab is that it instantly kills, so a critical hit is not needed at all. The critical hit brings a problem: it uses an animation which kills the target at the end of that animation, resulting in failed backstabs. This is a know problem, but Valve doesn't fix that.

 

[-Psy-]

The purpose of critical hits for backstabs/sniping is to give players visual feedback on them hitting their target in the back or sniping the head.

 

[hethoofd]

Don't I already have that visual feedback when I stab someone in the back? I mean: I'm standing behind someone, I stab and that stab is in the back. Why would I need more feedback on that? The problem now is that when you try to get away quickly, the stab will fail because the animation hasn't finished yet. You will hear the backstab sound, but nothing happened and you'll probably end up getting killed.

 

[Operational]

I think it's more about balancing. If the Spy only "quick stabs" they can kill too fast.

For a while there the long animation would land at the start and kill at the end, but this lead to a lot more facestabs as people would turn around after the hit landed but before it killed them. So when the hit would land was moved to the end of the animation so it would land and kill together. As you say, this does make things more difficult for the Spy.
My favourite suggested solution so far is here.

 

[hethoofd]

I happen to have read that thread and I liked the solution too. I don't have any problem with Valve trying to prevent 5 stabs happening in a few seconds, but I do have a problem with how it's done at the moment.