Guild Wars 2

So I’m a bit confused about what +X% Critical Damage actually does. I was mousing over my Critical Hit value in the Hero screen and noticed that Critical Damage displayed a value that didn’t seem to match what I had in my build. I started removing my gear (all of it, not just the pieces that had +crit dam on them) and ended up naked with +30% crit damage from traits. The number displayed in critical damage on the hero screen was now 21. What does this value mean and how does this crit damage actually work? I was under the impression that it just added a raw additive percentile to the base damage value of a crit.

A standard Critical Hit increases damage by +50%. In math term, you take your standard damage and multiply it by x1.50 (to represent that 50% increase). The gear and trait stat of +Crit Damage adds +.01% increase to the Critical Hit multiplier. In your example, having +30 Critical Damage means that your hits will do +80% more damage than usual. Therefore your math multplier will end up being x1.80 to your standard hit damage.

From the wiki:
Expected damage = Base damage * (1 + (0.50 + (Critical Damage / 100)) * Critical Chance)

(Note, that’s total expected damage, so critical chance is just in there to weigh it by how often a hit is critical)

Even with a critical damage stat of zero you get 150% damage for critical hits. Each point of critical damage adds another 1% onto that.

Ah thanks!
As for the weird value with 30% from traits: turns out I was reading a downscaled stat…
Sorry about that.