Critical hits

Critical Hits often shortened to crits or full crits are a damage mechanic that do extra damage on certain conditions, such as the Kritzkrieg's Übercharge or randomly in certain Melee weapons. When a critical hit is landed on a player, a special sound effect accompanies the hit as well as the text CRITICAL HIT!!! in green or Mini Crit! in yellow for critical hits and mini crits respectively is displayed above their head. Buildings are immune to both types.

Critical hits are easy to distinguish from their normal counterparts. Melee weapons get a different animation for crits, projectiles have a team-colored glow and sparkle effect, fire gains team-colored particles effects while bullets gain a team-colored trail. Alongside these visual effects there is an electrical crackling sound that accompanies these.

Critical hits increase a weapon's base damage by 3. For example, a normal pipe does 100 damage on direct hit. A critical pipe by contrast deals 300 damage on direct hit. Furthermore, critical hits ignore damage ramp-up and fall-off. A Soldier rocket deals diminshed damage at range. At maximum fall-off, it only deals 48 damage. However a critical rocket ignores this while tripling it's damage, dealing a whopping 270 damage at any range.

Mini Crits

Mini crits can be thought of as less extreme critical hits. Instead of tripling a weapon's damage, they only increase it by 35%. They too like critical hits ignore damage fall-off, but unlike critical hits they factor damage ramp-up. Full critical hits override mini-crits. For instance if an enemy is Marked for Death but you manage to hit a critical hit, the mini-crit will be ignore and will instead factor the normal critical hit. It is because of this critical hits are soemtimes referred to as full crits to distinguish them from mini-crits.

Random Critical Hits

Random critical hits often shortened to random crits is a mechanic present in Team Fortress 2 live where any weapon has a random chance to hit. This mechanic has been removed from Team Fortress 2 Classic, on all except melee weapons.

A weapon's random crit chance depends on how much damage has already been done previously by the player.