Tree, sometimes I really can't tell if you're trolling or not.

You've made several cases about "how things work" both here and on discord (before you were banned), and many are simply incorrect. Your claims about crits, dots, and damage scaling are mostly based on conjecture, not experiment. "I can't explain X, so you can't explain X" is not a compelling argument, especially when people have tried to explain X to you. For instance, a few days ago, you spent a good 30 minutes trying to convince a new player to re-work their gear to take advantage of Spontaneous Combustion on a physical weapon, before being told that's not how the skill operates. You had just assumed it worked the other way.

I respect your interest in trying to pull back the veil on game mechanics, but I would appreciate it if you took a bit more time to try to understand the material available to you before making claims.

The breakpoints were changed in the season patch (the patch notes have it as "Changed the Critical Strength value thresholds"). The rationale was that it was too easy to cap out crit strength without much investment.

I'm fairly sure about the crit damage %. First, the mechanism I'm describing lines up accurately with the crit model that Neocore uses internally to describe crit balance, and it was developed independently, so that's a strong indicator. (Also, in discussions, they believe it works this way.) Second, I'm pretty sure crit damage as a separate multiplicative factor is *not* the mechanism, for two reasons: (1) the damage component of crit damage on gear would be *incredibly* powerful, outpacing basically every other stat there is, and it isn't quite that good; and (2) crit damage would scale independently from crit strength, and testing shows they definitely interact. So 

I appreciate the post you linked (makes this discussion easier), but there's a couple of ambiguities in there that I think are causing the confusion. First, the phrase "critical damage" is ambiguous. This can describe "the overall damage done by a critical hit", or it can refer to the critical_damage_bonus stat on gear and skills, or it can refer to the initial multiplier computed after looking up the random number-modified critical strength value. This makes talking about criticals (whether asking *or* answering a question) easy to confuse. Second, there's some inaccuracies in that post that make me believe it was a bit hasty in being answered. For instance, critical hit strength is never applied to base damage---it's added to a random number and used as an index. The post is not devoid of meaning, though: the critical damage stat *does* end up directly multiplying the normal damage done, it's just that the critical damage value from gear is additive with the initial critical multiplier derived from the critical strength table; and critical strength calculations are indeed done before normal damage is multiplied to get your overall critical hit damage, it's just calculated slightly different. So I think what's going on here is ambiguity leading to miscommunication leading to assumed-correctness, all compounded by the demands of a community rep and the limited communication bandwidth of Internet forums.

Hope this helps shed a bit of light on things!