Critical Mastery

Figure 1: Sho smacks down Faust Orbatos?

This Innate Ability is a nice and simple one to explain to anyone who has not played the game; Critical Mastery effectively doubles the chance of achieving a Critical Hit (which Empire can improve further with the Combat Mastery Organizational Advantage).

A model scoring a Critical Hit hits even if the target Dodges successfully, and inflicts a minimum of 1 Life Point of Damage regardless of Armor. So for a unit like Ignis, Fire Demon for example, this particularly offsets the Summon's low Attack value.

Now comes a quick lesson! Anima Tactics allows a little degree of manipulation of probabilities through buffs to Attributes such as Attack, but more importantly through use of Gnosis. Players have a small pool of Gnosis to use each Turn. A Gnosis die adds an extra die to a roll, choosing the best result. Alongside Critical Mastery and using a Gnosis die means a 36% chance of a Critical Hit. For Empire Parties using Combat Mastery, that probability rises to 51%. So even the most well-defended (through high Defense and/or Armor plus Dodging) target can be hit with a strong degree of confidence in those circumstances!

Figure 1: Sho is Attacking Faust Orbatos, and Sho's Party is benefiting from Combat Mastery; Faust has not yet Activated, and so has enough AP to Dodge. Sho knows Faust may Dodge, and that his target has very good Armor, so he decides to use Gnosis (Attacker declares first before the target declares use of Dodge and any Gnosis).
If Faust does not Dodge, Sho has a 64% chance of hitting, a 51% chance of causing a Critical Hit, and a 19% chance of causing his maximum Damage in this situation which would be 6 Life Points. Perhaps more importantly, it pressures Faust to either Dodge (using a precious AP) or risk a good chance of taking some Damage.