Talk:Strun/@comment-109.102.234.182-20130718060657/@comment-13117751-20130723134515

Critical chance on shotguns is generally pretty low, the strun being the highest and clocking in at a rather "unimpressive" 7.5% (which in truth isn't really that bad).

If you use a maxed-out blunderbuss mod (90% critical chance), each pellet has a critical chance of 14.25%. Now, assuming that the strun isn't still bugged with the weird 6-pellet hit and you have all 10 pellets hit a target (which is also unilkely unless you've barrel-stuffed them at point-blank range), you can go ahead and roughly assume for simplicity that, well, 14.25% of your hits will score a critical for an extra 50% raw damage (which is subsequently applied to all your elements, etc.).

So for comparison purposes we're going to drag this out a bit. If you were to fire an INFINITE amount of pellets and none of them missed...with your 14.25% critical chance per pellet for 50% extra raw damage, you'd essentially in the end be doing 7.125% extra raw damage over the course of ALL your infinite shots (this is, of course, applied across all your further elemental damages if you have them to a negligible effect). To compare, maxed blunderbuss costs 9 mod points. Maxed Chilling grasp also costs 9 mod points, and grants 90% flat extra freeze damage. If you were to switch maxed blunderbuss out for maxed chilling grasp, you would see that 90% appear on every one of your infinite shots. Of course this is affected by modifiers like resistances and weaknesses.

^Note, the above comparison is really actually oversimplified since criticals affect other mods but it gets the point across that if you are giving up elementals to set up critical, you are losing flat damage. Critical builds are more for people who get a kick off of relying on luck to see a high number now and then, and it's more "sensible" to get consistently higher damage with elementals. Having said that so people don't rant and froth at the mouth at me, a critical build is still viable if you also have the elemental mods attached to go with it...and this is only possible if you've used a catalyst and forma'd your weapon once or twice.

tl;dr:

Critical build on strun loses to elemental build in the long-run when mod space is limited.