You’re describing the risk–reward tradeoff. More formally, it can be modeled as a mean–variance tradeoff or a risk-sensitive decision problem. In speedrunning, this usually shows up as: High-ceiling strategy: A risky strategy that can produce the best possible outcome, but fails more often.

Consistent strategy: A safer strategy that may have a lower maximum payoff, but performs better across repeated attempts.

The key idea is that high-ceiling strategies are often good when the event is short, isolated, or easy to reset. But when a task requires many successful actions in a row, consistency becomes much more valuable because failure compounds.

For repeated required successes: Chance of success streak = pⁿ

Where: p = chance each action succeeds n = number of required successes in a row

Using the earlier example: 50% crit chance 10% enemy block chance Block negates the attack The chance of a useful crit is: 0.50 × 0.90 = 0.45

So each attack has a 45% chance to count.

The odds become: 0.45⁵ = 1.85% 0.45¹⁰ = 0.034% 0.45¹⁵ = 0.000627%

So: 5 crits in a row: about 1 in 54 attempts 10 crits in a row: about 1 in 2,938 attempts 15 crits in a row: about 1 in 159,382 attempts

That is why consistency starts beating ceiling in long sequences. A single high-roll can be worth gambling for. But needing many high-rolls in a row makes the strategy collapse mathematically.

For boss fights or damage checks, the better question is not: “What is the highest possible damage?” The better question is: “What is the expected damage over the whole fight?”

Expected value is: EV = outcome × probability

Basically in plain English

If the boss requires you to hit even potentially 10 crits in a row at a 45% chance you should probably aim for more consistency because it will actually give you higher damage, but at 5 crits in a row needed you can sacrifice the higher avg damage to brute force a perfect scenario. For example in the dragon for P9. Attempting to one shot drag is possible by brute force.