Try as I might, I just can't find an excuse not to have this on my bar when I'm healing. Worse yet, I keep it on both bars so I don't have to recast it after swapping weapons. Too add insult to injury, half of the players hate the annoying orb that the spell has.
Inner light provides a 20% bonus to spell critical chance. The math on that comes out to a 10% increase in overall healing. That might not sound like much, but in practice, it makes for a lot more bursty healing. The 5% magicka reduction is barely worth mentioning. I don't even notice it.
Honestly, the whole crit system in this game is all out of whack. In PVP, stacking plenty of crit resistance is the way to go, which detracts from the whole "seamlessly switch from PVP to PVE" design philosophy of the game. Even players who stack nothing but crit resist can still have guaranteed critical hits against them by players who stack every available form of crit chance because critical strike chance can go over 100%.
Beyond that, critical strike chances are all over the place for different spells and builds. There's no innate critical strike chance and abilities / passives that add to it are usually extremely high values.
So that's the end of my observational portion of this thread. The rest is spitballing ideas on how I think the crit system could be improved. What follows should be taken with a grain of salt.
- Hard cap critical chances at 75%, save perhaps for abilities that have innate critical chances from passives, and also the 2h charge that always crits.
- Change Impenetrable from 10% max per piece of armor to 5% per piece of armor. This makes a maximum of 40% crit resistance, meaning a player loaded up on crit chance can max out at 35% for normal abilities against somebody who has geared up for complete crit resistance.
I feel like these two changes would make crit resistance not always be the go-to armor trait for PVP while simultaneously making it actually mean something against players who end up with 100%+ critical chance. Continuing...
- Add a crit chance armor trait. Replace one of the useless ones, like reduced durability damage, if you must. This forces players to make a meaningful choice to obtain the crit values that are already an obvious choice from other passive areas, like Magelight and armor.
White - 0.5%
Green - 0.75%
Blue - 1.00%
Purple - 1.50%
Yelllow - 2.00%
Total possible before weapons: 14% or 16% with shield. Adding an armor critical chance trait while reducing other passive means of gaining crit chance makes building yourself to have ludicrous crit chances in PVP a risk, rather than a given.
- Cut Prodigy light armor passive from 5/10% to 2.5/5%
We all know light armor is too appealing in the vast majority of situations. This is a small but meaningful step to change that.
- Cut Dexterity medium armor passive from 1/2/3% to 1/1.5/2%
Yes, I know medium armor / stamina / physical builds do not need to take a hit for PVE DPS, but there has to be room for the addition of armor critical chance modifiers, which would also let you make up for this loss.
For Magelight / Inner light, one of the following changes.
Option A, reducing the effectiveness of Magelight to make it a niche option, best in combination with other proposed changes to crit chance:
-Change Magelight (unmorphed) to max out at 5% spell critical. Make rank 1 3.5% and add .5% per level up.
- Change Inner Light to add 1% to this per rank, with rank 1 starting at 7%, maxing out at a 10% bonus.
or
Option B, making it a choice between high crit and PVP applications, does not fix PVE:
- Remove the orb visual effect from Inner Light. Keep it only at the glowing face.
- Remove the stealth detection from Inner Light. Keep it on Magelight and Radiant Magelight.
EP: Slania Isara : Harambe Was an Inside Job