Critical hit means randomly occurring increased damage. But what's the term for randomly occurring reduced damage?
My friends said it's a missed hit, but it's not really what I'm looking for.
What’s the opposite of the ‘critical hit’
terminology
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Best Answer
You're looking for something that kind of doesn't exist. In terms of a direct opposite to the idea of a 'critical hit', the closest analog would just be to not hit at all, or, y'know, 'miss'. That said, some games include the concept of the 'critical miss' as seen in many tabletop RPGs, or in the earlier Fallout games (for example), which don't just not hit the target, but cause some calamity to the individual making the attack. For instance, you don't just not hit your target, but you shoot yourself in the foot, or your weapon breaks, or whatever.
That said, you've asked about something that isn't really a direct analog, which is when an attack does a reduced amount of damage to a target, even though it hits. This happens in lots of games for lots of reasons and gets called lots of different things. Some games include a concept of 'resistance', wherein damage is reduced by a set amount, or sometimes, a percentage of the time, by some amount (sometimes fixed, sometimes variable). Others allow for attacks to be blocked, mitigating some of the damage. World of Warcraft has the concept of a 'Glancing Blow', which affects only melee autoattacks, and which causes them to do reduced damage sometimes (and more importantly, a percentage of attacks to be incapable of being critical hits), when attacking opponents of a higher level than yourself.
The point is, there isn't any single term you can throw out there to mean this universally. Some games have mechanics like this. Some don't. They all call them whatever the developer of the given game decides to call them.