Introduction to Criticals and Killers

Critical hits are a powerful way to push a character’s damage further beyond their base output. When a critical hit activates, CRIT ATK is calculated with a base of doubling your damage. This can be modified with CRIT ATK buffs for your friends and CRIT DEF debuffs on your enemies. With every level of CRIT ATK UP  and CRIT DEF DOWN  increasing the 2x output by 0.3 times additively, this gives a maximum of 5x multiplier, compared to the starting 2x value. As CRIT ATK and CRIT DEF operate in the same way mechanically, we can call these 2 ‘CRIT buffs’, with the two adding up to a max of 10 ‘CRIT buffs’.

A friend’s chance of activating a Critical hit can be boosted with CRIT accuracy buffs to themselves or CRIT evasion debuffs on your enemies. Just like CRIT ATK UP and CRIT DEF DOWN, CRIT ACC UP  and CRIT EVA DOWN  are two sides of the same coin, thus the maximum number of ‘CRIT ACC buffs’ is 10. This boosts their base CRIT accuracy from their base percentage to 3x their normal CRIT accuracy. 

With all that said, is there a way to guarantee the 5x damage boost? Absolutely! Enter killers. Killers  are a way to guarantee a critical hit on an entire line of bullets a character can have by hitting a tag that their opponent has. As such, characters who can proc their killers in a stage can perform well. However, some characters may not have killers to consistently guarantee this boost, so how do some characters proc this potential 5x multiplier in spite of this? CRIT chance comes into play.

CRIT chance is something which is innate to all characters with most having a base of 5-10% CRIT chance on their first bullet line. This can be augmented by CRIT accuracy buffs for the party and CRIT evasion debuffs for the enemies as mentioned before. However, CRIT chance doesn’t come without its drawbacks. For one, instead of the entire line of bullets, it works on a bullet by bullet basis, instead of an entire bullet line like killers. This opens up significantly more variance in damage output. Another flaw that CRIT accuracy has in comparison is that most characters cannot guarantee themselves a 100% CRIT rate, with the only exception being those of DESTROY  class friends. DEST friends trade accuracy for a higher crit chance. Thanks to this, CRIT chance is generally not as favorable as someone having a spread of powerful killers.

Killers only activate if a friend hits a tag that the enemy has. Thus, killers that hit many enemies are highly valued. One notable example is the notorious Gensokyo-killer, which can hit 69% of the characters currently playable in the Global version of Lostword. Conversely, killers that hit few enemies are less useful. One example would be the Hakurei Shrine-killer, which only hits 6% of the characters currently playable.

To compare, we have L1 Toyohime and L1 Parsee as a great example of a wide hitting killer versus a more niche killer. As Toyohime would hit a wider range of enemies with a 69% of the cast, Parsee on the other hand will struggle a lot more to dish out as much damage as Toyohime consistently as she would only hit around 13% of named enemies. Superior killers that hit a wide range of enemies, such as Gensokyo-killer and Youkai-killer, are definitely desirable. However, having a large number of niche killers can still be useful.

In Divergent Spirits, killers can be a powerful way to deal damage to your enemies. While killers are NOT necessary to clear any Divergent Spirit stages, having killers will make dealing the required damage a lot easier.

Elemental EX, on the other hand, takes advantage of killers, as their overall HP and defense can reach much higher standards than Divergent Spirits (e.g. Star EX). By taking advantage of characters who can hit their killers on the stage, they can do enough compared to other characters, who would struggle significantly more without powerful CRITS.

With the introduction of Rank II buffs, it may be worth looking out for Friends who can benefit from an additional layer of CRIT boosting. A potential CRIT Accuracy II could boost CRIT chances to be much higher, while CRIT ATK II could elevate damage to unprecedented levels.