What is Lucky Hit in Diablo 4 — and is it worth using?

Diablo 4 has added a lot of stats for us to consider on all our shiny pieces of new loot, and possibly one of the trickiest to really evaluate properly is Lucky Hit. Part of the confusion stems from the fact that there seem to be two different Lucky Hit numbers floating around — some of them on our active damage abilities, and some of them on passive abilities from talents, gear, class features, and Paragon nodes.

But what do these multiple numbers mean? Is it worth stacking Lucky Hit? For that you have to ask yourself: do I feel lucky?

Lucky Hit is just a roll of the dice, twice

The way Lucky Hit works is that it is, essentially, two random chances tied together every time you hit something with an attack:

1. The first roll is a chance to get a Lucky Hit at all — either yes or no.
2. If you got a Lucky Hit, the game then checks all your Lucky Hit abilities (passives, legendaries, and so on) to see which ones of them occur.

On your attacking skills, if you have Advanced Tooltips turned on in the options, you’ll see a line like in the screenshot above listing a Lucky Hit Chance. This chances applies to every hit you deal with the ability, so it’s most potent on area of effect attacks versus large crowds of enemies — so in the example of Pulverize, it’s a 25% chance on every enemy slammed by the Pulverize to get a Lucky Hit. At this point exactly what the Lucky Hit does is unknown; it’s just checking yes or no, did you get Lucky?

Assuming you got a Lucky Hit, the game will then move on to checking each of your Lucky Hit passives, legendary effects, and so on to see which one — if any — takes effect. Here’s an example:

Earthen Might has anywhere from a 5% to 25% chance to take effect on Lucky Hits, depending on if the hit was a critical hit and/or if the target was crowd controlled. This is a separate chance from your basic Lucky Hit Chance, and as far as I can tell, there is no way to augment these with gear. What this does mean once you put it all together is that even a Lucky Hit that sounds like it should happen fairly often can still, in practice, be fairly rare.

Using the Druid examples we’ve shown here, every Pulverize hit has a 25% chance to land a Lucky Hit; if you did land a Lucky Hit, you then have a 5%-25% to trigger, specifically, Earthen Might. The upside is that this means that multiple Lucky Hit effects can trigger on a single Lucky Hit! The downside is that this means it’s very possible to get a Lucky Hit that doesn’t actually do anything.

Should you stack Lucky Hit?

Honestly, it’s hard to say. There’s no doubt that Lucky Hit effects tend to be very powerful to compensate for the fact that they can be rare — a chance of a chance on a hit, but when it does fire, it can really pay off. Some of this is going to depend on your build; Druids, for example, who take the Earthen Might key passive with the Lucky Hit based Spirit Boons might tend to value Lucky Hit more than other builds even within the same class. Some of it is also going to depend on gear; Lucky Hit Chance can only appear on a few pieces of gear — notably jewelry, gloves, and as the primary stat on wands. If your class can’t use wands, that’s not even an option for you. Remember that this only increases the chance to get a Lucky Hit at all, not to trigger any of the effects — in the Druid examples shown above, the Lucky Hit Chance on that ring would increase the chance for Pulverize to trigger a Lucky Hit, not for a Lucky Hit to trigger Earthen Might.

The other side of whether you should stack Lucky Hit is going to depend on how much you can put up with RNG (or random number generation — used as a stand-in for “luck” in video games). A lot of getting the most out of Lucky Hit abilities, even if you’ve stacked Lucky Hit Chance to the sky and you’re doing all the things needed to maximize your chance of an effect, if the randomly-generated numbers don’t go your way that day, it’s possible that these are just going to be dead weight in your build.

Many people prefer a ‘sure thing’ over a chance, even if it’s a chance where you can stack a lot of the deck in your favor. So to answer the question of whether you should stack Lucky Hit, I ask you again: do you feel lucky?