Largest critical strikes

Season 5 is underway. While there are still many interesting changes being made to League of Legends, and those changes make for interesting articles, I wanted to take some time to write an article about something that has been a bit more 'consistent' (see what I did there?) over time. So today I am going to write an article about crits.

Riot's delectable data API gives data per-match about each player's largest critical strike. I did some basic analysis on this data, and wanted to share some quantitative insights. The dataset includes over forty-thousand matches played by Diamond, Master, and Challenger elo (MMR) players in NA ranked solo queue on patches 5.1 and 5.2. Who has RNGesus smiled upon in season 5? The data can tell us.

Here are the biggest critical strikers so far in season 5:

Those numbers are big. Caitlyn is in a league of her own here; the way her Headshot passive interacts with critical strikes makes it possible for her to do more in a single crit than any other champion.

I just had to track down the game where that crit happened The player who fired the biggest crit in the dataset was R Veramist. Unsurprisingly, he or she had a full damage build with Infinity Edge, Bloodthirster, Phantom Dancer, Mercurial Scimitar, Last Whisper, and Berserker Greaves. Though, interestingly, that was it. The team did not have any attack damage steroid skills, and the composition does not look especially suited to huge crits. They did have five dragons, though.

Here is a slightly different slice of the same data.

This table shows the average largest critical strike, per-champion, after filtering out games in which that champion had no crits at all. So, after building critical chance items, these are the champions that tend to hit hard with critical strikes.

Nasus is on top now, but just by a bit; and I'm glad to see Gangplank (Critplank) on this list. However, the most mathematically interesting part of this table is how the largest critical strikes vary for each champion. Nasus has the highest average largest critical strike, but his data also has the largest standard deviation.

To clarify this, check out these histograms.

These plots likely reflect typical itemization choices for these champions. There are a wider array of possible critical strike item choices for Caitlyn and Nasus than there are for Master Yi. This results in more variance in the plots for Cait and Nasus than that of Yi.

So, Yi crits a bit more 'reliably' (haha, see I did it again), in some sense.

Comically, in the entire forty-thousand game dataset there were two champions that didn't have a single critical strike. Zero critical strike damage done between these two over the entire dataset.

Want to break the meta-game? Full crit rune page Singed and Ziggs, here we come!

I appreciate you taking the time to read this article. This data was all taken from relatively serious high-level ranked solo-queue games. There are YouTube videos of some ginormous crits, but I think it is neat to see that someone made it over 3k in an at-least-semi-serious game.

Writing this article definitely got me thinking about which champions to build critical strike change on, I hope you got something out of it too. Let me know what you think.

Then head back to the home page and mash F5, there will soon be more league and more math here at LeagueMath.com.

No RNG was harmed in the making of this article.

Peace.