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Mystic Scry Buff + Rending: why the best choice depends on what you already rolled

Mystic Scry Buff is the calculator's name for an attack-dice ability that, in the Roll Attack Dice step of a shoot, fight, or retaliation, lets you either retain one of your fails as a normal success, or retain one of your normal successes as a critical success. You pick one, each time you attack. In-game it's the "Mystic Scry" ability.

A single "or" hides a real decision. The two options do different things, and which one is better is not fixed — it depends on the weapon's damage and on the rest of the dice you rolled. This note walks through why, and how the calculator resolves it.

The basic choice: one more hit, or one better hit

Ignore other abilities for a moment. Relative to the dice you rolled:

• Fail → norm adds a brand-new hit, worth normDmg.
• Norm → crit upgrades a hit you already had, turning normDmg into critDmg + Devastating — a gain of critDmg + Devastating − normDmg.

So the crit upgrade beats the extra hit exactly when critDmg + Devastating > 2 × normDmg. Most KT2024 weapons sit just below that line, so adding a hit usually wins — until Devastating or a big crit-damage spike tips it over:

(On an exact tie the calculator takes the crit. A crit and an equal-value pile of norms are not really interchangeable: the crit's Devastating portion ignores saves, a crit triggers Piercing, and one big hit loses less to Feel No Pain than two small ones. More on that below.)

Rending changes the answer — in both directions

Rending lets you upgrade one rolled norm to a crit if you already have at least one crit. That conditional is what makes Mystic Scry Buff interesting: the option you pick changes what Rending can do afterward, so the right pick flips depending on whether you already rolled a crit. Both of the following use the same weapon (norm 3, crit 4, no Devastating), where the isolated rule from the table above says "add a hit."

Case A — no crit yet: seed one so Rending can fire

You rolled {0 crit, 2 norm} with Rending. There is no fail to convert, so the choice is "upgrade a norm" vs "do nothing":

Taking the crit looks weak in isolation (crit value 4 < 2 × 3), but it seeds the first crit, which then lets Rending promote the remaining norm for free. One buff becomes two upgrades: {2c, 0n} = 8, versus 6 for leaving the dice alone.

Case B — already have a crit: feed Rending a norm instead

You rolled {1 crit, 1 norm, 1 fail} with Rending. Now all three matter:

Here you should not take the crit. You already have one, so Rending will hand you a crit regardless — provided a norm survives for it to promote. Spending the buff to add a norm gives Rending something to work on, ending at {2c, 1n} = 11. Spending it on a crit consumes the very norm Rending wanted, stalling at {2c, 0n} = 8.

Same weapon, opposite decision — driven entirely by whether you had already rolled a crit. A fixed rule ("always take the crit" or "always add a hit") gets one of these two cases wrong.

How the calculator decides

Rather than a fixed rule, the calculator treats Mystic Scry Buff as the per-roll choice it actually is. For every possible dice result it:

1. builds the candidate outcomes — fail→norm, norm→crit, and declining;
2. runs each candidate through the rest of the Roll Attack Dice step — notably Rending, then a defender's Obscured if present;
3. on a shoot, scores each finished outcome by its expected damage against that defender's saves, cover, and Piercing, and keeps the highest. With no defender profile to score against (and in a fight, which resolves by strikes and parries), it falls back to pre-save damage (crits × (critDmg + Devastating) + norms × normDmg). Ties break toward the crit.

Because the score is taken after Rending resolves, the seed-vs-feed reasoning above falls out automatically — the calculator does not need to special-case it. The same mechanism handles Obscured: when the defender turns your crits into norms, a norm→crit upgrade gains nothing, so the comparison naturally prefers adding a hit.

Saves can flip the isolated table. Norm 3 / crit 4, one rolled normal and one fail: fail→norm is 6 raw and norm→crit is 4, so raw damage keeps two normals. Against one cover save and Piercing Crits 1, the cover blocks one of those normals (3 gets through). The crit line turns Piercing Crits on, the cover die is removed with the defence dice, and 4 gets through. The calculator takes the crit.

What the choice does not weigh

Feel No Pain is still left out. Concentrating damage into one crit loses less to FNP than spreading it across two norms. The calculator does not account for that, beyond breaking an exact pre-FNP tie toward the crit.

Devastating (mwx) is counted — it is folded into the crit's value, so a weapon with meaningful Devastating will favor the crit upgrade, as the first table shows.

Take-aways

1. On its own, the crit upgrade beats the extra hit only when critDmg + Devastating > 2 × normDmg; otherwise add a hit.
2. With Rending, that rule can invert. With no crit yet, seeding a crit can unlock a second upgrade from Rending. With a crit already in hand, Rending will promote a norm for you, so the buff is better spent keeping a norm alive for it.
3. The calculator resolves the choice by trying every option through the remaining steps and keeping the most damage, so Rending and Obscured interactions are handled without a fixed rule.
4. On a shoot, that damage is the expected total after the defender's saves, cover, and Piercing. Feel No Pain is not weighed, beyond breaking exact ties toward the crit.

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