I’ve been looking through skill trees trying to find builds that interest me and the frost one for sorcerer kind of gave me some questions.
I get that just “lucky hit” uses the skills lucky hit multiplier.
I get that something like “50% lucky hit” just means it has a second multiplier so using frost bolt it would be .5*.3= 15% chance
I get that “up to X” means you use the skill lucky hit multiplier on the max stated to get actual value
But then sorcerer has some stuff like… Elemental attunement. Where it is written out like "lucky hit: critical strike has a 20% chance to reset a defensive cooldown. So I’ll just say 25% crit and frost bolt for simplicities sake so does that actually read like 30% *25% * 20% = 1.5% chance?
That seems like an abysmal use of 3 skill points
And then sorcerer has a +15% lucky hit chance and another +15% as a cold legendary node.
But where the heck is that added in to the equation and additive or multiplicative?
If you just get to add it on at the end that turns 1.5% into 31.5% which is a gigantic power swing but imo kind of more in line with something that has a 10s internal cooldown
If it’s a multiplier at the end your literally just turning a 1.5% chance into a 1.95% chance which is kind of pathetic for 3 skill points + however much Paragon it takes to get to that node.
I understand it’s all lucky hits but no one is really going to have that many. From what I’ve seen cold sorcerer has the most but probably would only get 2 or 3
It’s such a rube goldberg machine of a mechanic… Just trying to understand it better so I can better figure out where it has value
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You probably have a firmer grasp of the lucky hit mechanic. But I agree that it’s a mechanic that confuses me very much. As of right now, I don’t know if it’s good value to invest into lucky hit. Looking for a guide on it.
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I think to make it as basic as I can it’s the D3 hidden proc chance, but now that it has a known value it has become harder to lock down the exact way they work.
But they do seam to be a much lower chance of X happening, and as
You look to have a better understanding then most, I think I watched a Youtube from Kripp about a month ago and he was going over how it works.
I just spotted this Youtube Video from Don the Crown.
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I would use the least factor argument until told otherwise by the devs. So, it would be 15% of 1.5%. And any adds would go from base. So, 16 adds of 15% would give you 3.6% added Lucky Hit for a total of 5.1% Obviously, Lucky hit is meant for some min/maxxer to spend tons of grind in order to get that 15 points of extra damage when they are already doing 10K damage.
I like the way he says it works in the video. Makes the +chance stuff a bit more significant than just a final multiplier.
The way he says “our current belief is it works this way” is slightly disheartening though.
It kind of seems manipulating lucky chance is a core part of cold sorcerer but it’s so cryptic about what it even actually does outside of “more is good”
Using the way he described it and sticking with 25% crit which may be super high or super low… No actual clue
The way that would work is (30%+15%+15%) * 0.25 * 0.2 = 3% chance which is way better than 1.95 but probably still a really bad skill investment considering how unreliable it would be.
I bet all those stats and numbers are just fluff to give players the sense of choice and meaningfulness but really are just cover up for some on/off flat values hidden under the hood. 
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The increased lucky hit chance passives won’t add or multiply at the end – I’m pretty sure they add to the original lucky hit chance for whatever skill you’re using.
So your new equation with the two +15% lucky hit chance would be (30% + 15% + 15%) x 25% x 20% = 3%.
I think a better way to think about the crit chance regarding lucky hit is: every critical hit has a 20% on lucky hit to reset the cooldown or whatever other effect it may be.
So we can think every critical hit has a 30% x 20% = 6% chance to reset the cooldown. Every crit has a 6% chance. That sounds better than every frostbolt is a 1.5% chance, I think.
And with the additive passives, the lucky hit chance for frostbolt goes up to 60%. So with those, every crit would have a 60% x 20% = 12% chance to reset a cooldown. Every crit now has a 12% chance to reset the cooldowns or whatever.
I think…
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Lucky hit is the most convoluted crap in Diablo 4 and it needs to be redesigned and so does Overpower.
A percent of a percent? or in some cases a percent of a percent of a percent? Gtfo
Then you have crap like Hydra. 70% lucky hit chance, but it’s over the course of the spell’s multiple attacks, so it’s actually 70% divided by number of attacks of the hydra.
If I could choose one system to be completely redesigned… it would be weapon swapping barbarians. Okay that’s not fair since I’m a barbarian nut.
But seriously, lucky hit needs a complete redesign. It’s such an unrewarding thing to attempt to build that you almost wonder if Blizzard was like “hehe yyou can’t plan for these they’re just rAnDoM HEHEHEHE”
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Overpower is fine. While it have a low base chance of its own, there is skills that have a autochance of causing overpowers. You can spec Blood Lance to overpower every 8 hits, or Blood Surge to overpower while you have 5 stacks of Overwhelming Blood.
And the blood of ratma’s chosen will cause your next skill to overpower if youve been healthy for 15s. And you can add enormous overpower damage mods. Necros also have a glyph that will increase damage taken by overpowered enemies by 12% for 5s while overpowered, and the glyph can be grown to add even more overpower damage.
I hope that Blizzard will introduce some reasonable way to present lucky hit calculations. As much as I do not mind crunching some numbers - we should be able to decide quickly on wether we want some skill/item with proc or not. I do not want to waste 5 minutes to calculate that I found trash. There will be quite some decision making and there is absolutely no need to make simple choices hard.
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In case of Hydra this is even more complex. Here blizzard decided to state 70% but that means that ALL heads actually hit. So if Hydra shoots like 50 projectiles during duration and some miss, likely small percentage is removed with each miss.
And now we have rouge, I do not remember skill name but it makes it so that rogue copies shoot arrow with you (making it total of 5 shots). Each shot has 20% to lucky hit, so they decided not to write 100% as 5*20 but presented split chance per each shot.
This on its own makes sense but I think there should be 1 way to present lucky hit for all characters to make it clear. I am leaning more to rogue description. Hydra should have something like: 1,5% lucky hit per each hit, and not 70% grand total.
I actually kind of like needing to figure it out a little. Feels like maybe a small little space for some depth to nerd around in. Some skills have a greater chance than others to fire off a variable rate proc effect, that’s it – some skills will always fire off the proc if the proc triggers, and some skills will fire off the proc only half the time or less if the proc triggers. Kinda fun.
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DonTheCrown’s video on Lucky Hit … it was both very helpful … and … very depressing. Math is not my strong suit, but even I grasped how remote the chances were … 30% * 20% = 6% … (or, put another way … .3 * .2 = .06) … and … not only that … but you also have Crit Chance and Overpower. I miss the days of just having Crit Chance + Crit Damage. I hope the D4 Build Planners eventually take all these numbers into account and display them as you make your build. But, I guess with any build, if you don’t know what you are doing, you could really nerf your own character … and not even realize it.
My understanding is that you get a base 5% lucky hit chance.
Every attack calculates your lucky hit, and apparently EACH lucky hit takes turns at rolling, which sounds super bad.
So, if you have 20% to restore resource on crit, 20% to nova enemies on kill, and 5% on hit to reset cd of teleport for example.
Then it would do something like this:
10% to reset cd on teleport (cd based lucky hit comes first)
If no proc, and crit, 25% to restore resource
If no proc, and kill, 25% to nova
If this is correct (which i hope it isn’t) then it’s even worse.
Because it’s 90% * (75% * 75%) * 25% chance to trigger a nova on kill.
Lucky hit tp. * crit chance * lucky restore * lucky nova
(100% - 10%) * (100%-25% * 100%-25%) * 25%
Which is about 4.2% chance to proc nova lucky hit on kill, instead of the 25% stated.
This is basically what someone else posted. I have no idea if this is correct or not, but hopefully it’s not.if you have 10 lucky hit mechanics then they should all be able to trigger from the same attack simultaneously.
Overpower is fine as it is. It works great.
Should note that Overpower is a replacement for Crushing Blow from Diablo2. The devs had considered it, but decided it was too hard to balance. Something that scales off the max health of enemies is a balancing nightmare.
I like to see good alternatives to the old critical hit, that otherwise would outshine nearly anything else.
Overpower isn’t so bad because it’s just a super low chance of doing extra damage that doesn’t change anything.
Anything that matters with overpower will just force it and at that point it’s just a current hp calculation if you want to know the damage boost.
The hydra thing is weird but all the sorcerer conjurations seem to be consistent with their inconsistency. I guess they thought it would look better than writing 2% Lucky hit in the tooltip?
The funny thing with hydra doesn’t even matter for actual lucky hit.
People saw the firebolt enchant adding burn damage so put it on for hydra then realized it’s burning for 0 damage per tick and found out literally anything that has “up to X” in the wording uses the lucky hit of your skill even if it’s not lucky hit or chance based in any way
Me and the dev on d4builds.gg were talking about this and said two numbers would be the most useful.
So for hydra:
Lucky Hit Chance: 70% (10% per hit)
Yes I know the 10% is not correct, I don’t know what the actual number is.
Same for a channeled spell:
Disintegrate
Lucky Hit Chance: 40% (5% per tick)
He’s thinking of representing lucky hit chance this way on his/their character planner, which I think is a major improvement that should also be put into the game.
I agree & hope that Blizzard will make it more transparent down the road. We will see in 2 weeks if any improvements were added to the game but I somehow dont think there were any major changes.
In any case - I upvote representation thay you presented. We should never guess what is what in terms of game mechanics.
Pretty sure that LH is “unviable” only on low level/s, and pretty sure that as game progresses later on there would be a decent gear for LH-based builds, i.e. it’s not a “cosmetic” in other words
Just how much is it good compared to speccing into Crits, Vulnerabilities, mass CC + bonuses vs CC, or OP, that’s a different matter
I’m thinking at the moment it’s up in the air since no one knows but sticking with frost sorcerer for instance.
You get +15% from a skill
+15% from a legendary node
+10% from Paragon nodes
Can get aspect of fortune for +20%
And it can show up on gear
So the question becomes “can the base skill modifier go past 100%?”
Because that would be the thing that determines if lucky hit is just a niche thing outside of the couple paths that rely on it.
