What is “Lucky Hit Chance” in Diablo IV?
Lucky Hit Chance Explained
In basic terms, a lucky hit is a chance for your skills to proc other effects in Diablo 4. This article will help you understand how lucky chance works, what it works with, how to stack it, and if it’s a good stat to keep.
If “lucky hit chance” is “critical chance”, then why have both stats? Well, it doesn’t quite work the same.
With Critical Chance, you have a set percentage to proc a critical hit, resulting in a guarantee of more damage when you do (based on your critical damage stat). That number is yellow (or orange for an overpower crit) and it’s very easy to see as you increase critical chance. That’s very straightforward.
Lucky hit chance, on the other hand, is not guaranteed to do anything, even as you increase it. I’ll explain that more in a bit, but let’s first look at where to find lucky hit stats in Diablo 4. To see the base lucky hit chance for each skill in Diablo, you need to enable Advanced Tooltips in the settings. In the skill tree, each skill has its own lucky hit chance that can be increased with gear, like most stats. However, like I said before, just because a skill has a 15% lucky hit chance, even if you increase it to 20%, that won’t make it do anything when it lucky hits.
In order to have something happen on a lucky hit you have to have an item with a lucky hit effect. Where do you find these effects? Well, some skill passives and gear items in Diablo 4 come with an additional effect that triggers when you score a LUCKY HIT. For example, one of sorcerer’s skill passives is “Frigid Breeze” which reads:
You may also find gear pieces with lucky hit affixes. For example this staff —
These lucky hit effects will also have a percent chance associated with them. Multiplying that % chance by your skill’s % lucky hit chance will give you the PROC CHANCE for this effect to happen. This can help give you an idea of how often you’re likely to PROC that effect every time you hit with your skill. Keep in mind that there may be other contingencies to this effect. Like for Frigid Breeze, the enemy must be Vulnerable and you must be doing cold damage. Let’s say those contingencies are met and we’re using Ice Shards. You have a 20% EFFECT chance, multiplied by your skill’s base lucky hit chance of 71%. 0.20 * 0.71 = 14% PROC CHANCE. You should notice the effect 14% of the time when you hit with ice shards.
Once you have a lucky hit effect equipped from your gear or skills, you may want to increase your lucky hit chance. To do this you can first check the base chance of our skills and make sure you’re using skills with a high lucky hit chance. To increase this chance, you need to find gear, attributes, and skill points to boost it. Lucky hit chance modifiers can roll on amulets, helms, rings, gloves, off-hands, and wands. In addition to gear, you can find some passives on the skill tree and paragon boards that will also boost your lucky hit chance, like Precision Magic on Sorcerer that will increase your lucky hit chance by 5% per point.
These lucky hit chance modifiers will increase your base lucky hit chance up to a possible 100%. However, keep in mind that this number still gets multiplied by your effect chance, so there may not be a way to achieve 100% lucky hit proc chance. Any lucky hit chance bonus from your items will increase your overall chance. You will see the updated value in your skill’s tooltip and it is calculated by adding your total bonus to 1 and then multiplying by the skill’s base lucky hit chance.
LUCKY HIT = [effect LH % * skill LH % * (1 + sum of increased LH % from items)]
So what class can stack the highest lucky hit chance? Right now it’s looking like Sorcerer with 15% from the precision magic passive with no contingencies plus percentage bonuses from the paragon board. Followed closely by Rogue who has a lot of lucky hit chance but also a lot of contingencies.
That’s the basics for Lucky Hit Chance and how to calculate your proc chance for a lucky hit effect.
