Nerfing Crit Chance was wrong. Alternative suggestion.

MindOfTheSwarm

Nerfing Crit chance even further was a bad move in my opinion. It will just make stacking Crit Chance even more important as a result and have the reverse intended role of pushing players to play non Crit builds. In my opinion, if ZoS wants to nerf Crit builds then it is not chance that needs nerfing but damage. I propose the following:

Nerf Crit Damage by 25% baseline.
Buff Shadow Mundus by 7%.
Buff Crit Chance to what it was.
Buff Base Damage modifiers.

Why?

By nerfing it to 25% then non-crit builds would not be losing out too much especially if they equipped Malacath. However, focused Crit builds would benefit and would not be the go to build unless heavily invested in. In essence a Crit build would only be losing a total of 18% or even less if going Divines. This would pull them down closer to non-crit builds.

In summary a Crit build would get consistent Crits but not deal as much damage as they did before.

The problem with nerfing Crit Chance is that many builds cannot benefit from sets that boost their base damage as now basically you need to go full Crit Chance sets to get results. This in turn makes a lot of non-crit sets redundant. This is an issue as due to the fact that the Crit Damage is too good to pass up, everyone will now go for as much Crit Chance as possible. Making non-crit sets essentially useless for PVE.

By nerfing Damage instead of Chance you allow for other sets to be used, letting players settle for slightly less Crit Damage for more uptime and consistent results. While those looking for maximum Crit Damage can still do so.

The reason Crit is meta is due to 50% baseline damage. Not Crit Chance.

Thoughts?

MindOfTheSwarm

P.S. Alternatively give PVE enemies different levels of Crit Resistance. Allowing Crit builds to be effective against certain enemies but savagely uneffective vs others.

axi

Those ideas would bring some serious imbalances into PvE. The problem is that if You want to lower base source of crit dmg and increase overall crit chance then everything that gives crit dmg is being buffed. Especially that You also want to buff shadow mundus to 27% crit dmg with divines. What other mundus could even come close to that ? And what race could beat khajit on mag or stam DPS considering the fact that even right now differences are really small ?

So You want developers to do something that will first require rebalancing game once again just to implement that.

Yes crit chance is meta partially because right now we can build really high crit dmg but also because it's easy to build pretty high crit chance plus with additional 1k weapon and spell dmg we recived and nerf to percdentage value buffs in CP , base stats got slightly nerfed.

Dagoth_Rac

The mistake was giving everybody the stats to "raise the floor", such as base spell/weapon damage, base max resources, and base penetration, but leaving out base critical chance. It is now pretty easy to get the damage, resources, and pen for a viable DPS build. But without a decent amount of crit, you still cannot do very good real Trial/Dungeon DPS. So now everyone is obsessed with getting crit because it is the missing piece. If ZOS had raised the floor of crit chance like they did with other stats, it actually would have reduced the appeal of crit builds. Then there would have been lots of paths to go from good DPS to great DPS. Now there is only one path to great DPS and it goes through crit chance.

Vermintide

It really doesn't matter that much honestly. You can beat the hardest content using basically any set you like as long as you don't do something really dumb like using tanking sets on a DPS, or stam sets on a mag char, etc.

It's all basically entirely arbitrary just to keep the meta fresh. Balance is only a superficial concern. Let go of your emotional investment, and be happy. If you like to chase the meta, you are happiest not when you have the best gear, but in the process of theorycrafting, testing and acquiring it.

Oreyn_Bearclaw

I am not saying you are wrong in your analysis, but considering that meta DPS sets are essentially unchanged, and all we really had to do was swap a mundus stone for a 5-7% DPS, loss, I am just not too fussed about it.

They wanted to nerf damage at the higher end of things, they accomplished it. Target Dummy DPS on magcro and and mag sorc for me went from like 101k to 96k, and I bet I can close that gap (havent parsed much this patch).

While I certainly havent run all PVE content since the patch, I frankly feel stronger than I did last patch even if my damage is slightly lower. More health and more regen are really nice. In PVP, I never built for crit anyway.

Everest_Lionheart

Oreyn_Bearclaw wrote: »

I am not saying you are wrong in your analysis, but considering that meta DPS sets are essentially unchanged, and all we really had to do was swap a mundus stone for a 5-7% DPS, loss, I am just not too fussed about it.

They wanted to nerf damage at the higher end of things, they accomplished it. Target Dummy DPS on magcro and and mag sorc for me went from like 101k to 96k, and I bet I can close that gap (havent parsed much this patch).

While I certainly havent run all PVE content since the patch, I frankly feel stronger than I did last patch even if my damage is slightly lower. More health and more regen are really nice. In PVP, I never built for crit anyway.

They didn’t really nerf that much damage off the top end to be honest, but those formerly at the top end that are now in the mid-upper tier of the spectrum got kneecapped more than others. The closer you were to 810 the more it hurt. To go from max damage to 90% isn’t all that bad either but getting those last 10% back takes a great deal of time under the new system. Moving the goal posts was OK in my book, however I feel like maybe they moved it too far.

Sangwyne

You can only nerf crit so much before everyone gives up on it and runs Malacath. The 20% baseline critical resistance in PvP and the versatility of needing only one item for 25% extra damage as opposed to two full critical sets is what first made Malacath overtake critical builds there, a 25% base critical damage reduction would have the same effect as implementing 25% critical resistance in PvE. Nerfing critical damage and buffing Shadow when it's already the default choice would just make other Mundus stones even less of an option. The issue is that ZOS recently reduced critical chance but added too many sources of critical damage to the game; Axes for 8%, Major Force buffed from 15 to 20%, Khajiit buffed from 10% to 12%, Minor Brittle for 10%, Fighting Finesse for 10% and Backstabber for 15%, of which the last two combined give as much as 100 points to Elfborn under the old system. If anything, Shadow needs a nerf to make running two critical sets less appealing, along with other tweaks to critical damage, as the prevalence of critical damage sources and lack of critical chance renders critical chance more necessary than ever.

MindOfTheSwarm

Sangwyne wrote: »

You can only nerf crit so much before everyone gives up on it and runs Malacath. The 20% baseline critical resistance in PvP and the versatility of needing only one item for 25% extra damage as opposed to two full critical sets is what first made Malacath overtake critical builds there, a 25% base critical damage reduction would have the same effect as implementing 25% critical resistance in PvE. Nerfing critical damage and buffing Shadow when it's already the default choice would just make other Mundus stones even less of an option. The issue is that ZOS recently reduced critical chance but added too many sources of critical damage to the game; Axes for 8%, Major Force buffed from 15 to 20%, Khajiit buffed from 10% to 12%, Minor Brittle for 10%, Fighting Finesse for 10% and Backstabber for 15%, of which the last two combined give as much as 100 points to Elfborn under the old system. If anything, Shadow needs a nerf to make running two critical sets less appealing, along with other tweaks to critical damage, as the prevalence of critical damage sources and lack of critical chance renders critical chance more necessary than ever.

Why not also buff other Mundus stones too then to compensate maybe add additional bonuses?

eg

The Serpent: Also increases Poison damage by 15%.

LightYagami

Buy new chapter to use Malacath?
I won't.

BXR_Lonestar

MindOfTheSwarm wrote: »

Nerfing Crit chance even further was a bad move in my opinion. It will just make stacking Crit Chance even more important as a result and have the reverse intended role of pushing players to play non Crit builds. In my opinion, if ZoS wants to nerf Crit builds then it is not chance that needs nerfing but damage. I propose the following:

Nerf Crit Damage by 25% baseline.
Buff Shadow Mundus by 7%.
Buff Crit Chance to what it was.
Buff Base Damage modifiers.

Why?

By nerfing it to 25% then non-crit builds would not be losing out too much especially if they equipped Malacath. However, focused Crit builds would benefit and would not be the go to build unless heavily invested in. In essence a Crit build would only be losing a total of 18% or even less if going Divines. This would pull them down closer to non-crit builds.

In summary a Crit build would get consistent Crits but not deal as much damage as they did before.

The problem with nerfing Crit Chance is that many builds cannot benefit from sets that boost their base damage as now basically you need to go full Crit Chance sets to get results. This in turn makes a lot of non-crit sets redundant. This is an issue as due to the fact that the Crit Damage is too good to pass up, everyone will now go for as much Crit Chance as possible. Making non-crit sets essentially useless for PVE.

By nerfing Damage instead of Chance you allow for other sets to be used, letting players settle for slightly less Crit Damage for more uptime and consistent results. While those looking for maximum Crit Damage can still do so.

The reason Crit is meta is due to 50% baseline damage. Not Crit Chance.

Thoughts?

I think nerfing the crit chance was actually probably the right way to go, but I don't think they really went far enough to make the changes that they wanted to make actually work. What they wanted to do was bring crit builds more in line with raw power builds in terms of average damage output. There are two ways that they could do this - reduce crit chance and reduce crit damage.

I think nerfing crit chance is the way they should go, but players need to be encouraged to invest in the critical chance stat to the exclusion of ALL other stats in order to bring a crit build's average damage down to the point where it is on level with a raw power build. Example? They could make critical chance glyphs to replace weapon/spell damage glyphs for jewelry that a person making a crit build would need in order to get their crit chance to an adequate level. This makes people building for crit choose between crit chance OR raw power.

Under the current paradigm, it is still way too easy for players to have over 50% crit chance AND around 4K-5K weapon power. So long as you can get stats like that, crit builds will always be king. Now, if they made it so characters who went ALL OUT for crit chance at the exclusion of weapon power had, say 2000 SD/WD, then with all the crit damage modifiers, their average damage output would be more on plane with a raw stats build.

That should really be the combat teams goal if they want to reduce the power of crit builds - put players into an "either/or" situation between crit chance and raw power.

zvavi

There are some good ways to make changes, and round about "nerf" crit, without making over the top changes to the game.

MindOfTheSwarm

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

MindOfTheSwarm wrote: »

Nerfing Crit chance even further was a bad move in my opinion. It will just make stacking Crit Chance even more important as a result and have the reverse intended role of pushing players to play non Crit builds. In my opinion, if ZoS wants to nerf Crit builds then it is not chance that needs nerfing but damage. I propose the following:

Nerf Crit Damage by 25% baseline.
Buff Shadow Mundus by 7%.
Buff Crit Chance to what it was.
Buff Base Damage modifiers.

Why?

By nerfing it to 25% then non-crit builds would not be losing out too much especially if they equipped Malacath. However, focused Crit builds would benefit and would not be the go to build unless heavily invested in. In essence a Crit build would only be losing a total of 18% or even less if going Divines. This would pull them down closer to non-crit builds.

In summary a Crit build would get consistent Crits but not deal as much damage as they did before.

The problem with nerfing Crit Chance is that many builds cannot benefit from sets that boost their base damage as now basically you need to go full Crit Chance sets to get results. This in turn makes a lot of non-crit sets redundant. This is an issue as due to the fact that the Crit Damage is too good to pass up, everyone will now go for as much Crit Chance as possible. Making non-crit sets essentially useless for PVE.

By nerfing Damage instead of Chance you allow for other sets to be used, letting players settle for slightly less Crit Damage for more uptime and consistent results. While those looking for maximum Crit Damage can still do so.

The reason Crit is meta is due to 50% baseline damage. Not Crit Chance.

Thoughts?

I think nerfing the crit chance was actually probably the right way to go, but I don't think they really went far enough to make the changes that they wanted to make actually work. What they wanted to do was bring crit builds more in line with raw power builds in terms of average damage output. There are two ways that they could do this - reduce crit chance and reduce crit damage.

I think nerfing crit chance is the way they should go, but players need to be encouraged to invest in the critical chance stat to the exclusion of ALL other stats in order to bring a crit build's average damage down to the point where it is on level with a raw power build. Example? They could make critical chance glyphs to replace weapon/spell damage glyphs for jewelry that a person making a crit build would need in order to get their crit chance to an adequate level. This makes people building for crit choose between crit chance OR raw power.

Under the current paradigm, it is still way too easy for players to have over 50% crit chance AND around 4K-5K weapon power. So long as you can get stats like that, crit builds will always be king. Now, if they made it so characters who went ALL OUT for crit chance at the exclusion of weapon power had, say 2000 SD/WD, then with all the crit damage modifiers, their average damage output would be more on plane with a raw stats build.

That should really be the combat teams goal if they want to reduce the power of crit builds - put players into an "either/or" situation between crit chance and raw power.

This certainly is one way to do it but then what’s the point? Surely Crit builds should reward players for crits. Alternatively another way round is to nerf crit chance even further but buff damage further. Resulting in low up time of crits but when they proc you are rewarded with big damage. However, the issue from this is essentially you would have a proc set style build. I agree that players should have to focus on crit for it to work but I wouldn’t say 100% focus. I think nerfing crit damage while buffing base damage is the correct way to bring them in line with one another.

CableBomb

I agree that 150% is too much as a baseline, but I think 125% is weak sauce. Maybe something like 135%. This way folks will need to sacrifice more for Crit Damage and not just bloat Crit Chance without the pain of losing out elsewhere.

Even after the nerf building Crit Chance is still very easy. It's just too easy and I'm not sacrificing across the board to get to 80% Crit Chance and 200% + Crit Damage. I'm not calling for nerfs but your post brought to light some imbalances I've noticed recently when theorycrafting.

Good post!

master_vanargand

Don't nerf Critical anymore.
I want another 0.2% critical chance.
Because it will be an unattractive number like 65.8%.
If you have another 0.2% critical chance, it will be a beautiful 66%.

axi

MindOfTheSwarm wrote: »

Sangwyne wrote: »

You can only nerf crit so much before everyone gives up on it and runs Malacath. The 20% baseline critical resistance in PvP and the versatility of needing only one item for 25% extra damage as opposed to two full critical sets is what first made Malacath overtake critical builds there, a 25% base critical damage reduction would have the same effect as implementing 25% critical resistance in PvE. Nerfing critical damage and buffing Shadow when it's already the default choice would just make other Mundus stones even less of an option. The issue is that ZOS recently reduced critical chance but added too many sources of critical damage to the game; Axes for 8%, Major Force buffed from 15 to 20%, Khajiit buffed from 10% to 12%, Minor Brittle for 10%, Fighting Finesse for 10% and Backstabber for 15%, of which the last two combined give as much as 100 points to Elfborn under the old system. If anything, Shadow needs a nerf to make running two critical sets less appealing, along with other tweaks to critical damage, as the prevalence of critical damage sources and lack of critical chance renders critical chance more necessary than ever.

Why not also buff other Mundus stones too then to compensate maybe add additional bonuses?

eg

The Serpent: Also increases Poison damage by 15%.

Say hello to Twice Born Star as replacement to most of the meta sets then. Because if You want to buff shadow by almost 70% then other munduses would have to recive similar bufs in strenght and that would make TBS really strong. For example if You would buff thief proportionally to Your proposed shadow mundus buff then TBS would provide more crit chance then mother's sorrow when running thief and You could still use shadow.

Also I agree with the person You were responding too. There is a lot of things that buff crit dmg not just base 50% modifier. In properly supported PvE group and on proper setup You can reach 130-140% crit dmg. That is almost triple the amount of base crit modifier yet You think it's the base modifier that is responsible for crit dmg strenght.

MindOfTheSwarm

axi wrote: »

MindOfTheSwarm wrote: »

Sangwyne wrote: »

You can only nerf crit so much before everyone gives up on it and runs Malacath. The 20% baseline critical resistance in PvP and the versatility of needing only one item for 25% extra damage as opposed to two full critical sets is what first made Malacath overtake critical builds there, a 25% base critical damage reduction would have the same effect as implementing 25% critical resistance in PvE. Nerfing critical damage and buffing Shadow when it's already the default choice would just make other Mundus stones even less of an option. The issue is that ZOS recently reduced critical chance but added too many sources of critical damage to the game; Axes for 8%, Major Force buffed from 15 to 20%, Khajiit buffed from 10% to 12%, Minor Brittle for 10%, Fighting Finesse for 10% and Backstabber for 15%, of which the last two combined give as much as 100 points to Elfborn under the old system. If anything, Shadow needs a nerf to make running two critical sets less appealing, along with other tweaks to critical damage, as the prevalence of critical damage sources and lack of critical chance renders critical chance more necessary than ever.

Why not also buff other Mundus stones too then to compensate maybe add additional bonuses?

eg

The Serpent: Also increases Poison damage by 15%.

Say hello to Twice Born Star as replacement to most of the meta sets then. Because if You want to buff shadow by almost 70% then other munduses would have to recive similar bufs in strenght and that would make TBS really strong. For example if You would buff thief proportionally to Your proposed shadow mundus buff then TBS would provide more crit chance then mother's sorrow when running thief and You could still use shadow.

Also I agree with the person You were responding too. There is a lot of things that buff crit dmg not just base 50% modifier. In properly supported PvE group and on proper setup You can reach 130-140% crit dmg. That is almost triple the amount of base crit modifier yet You think it's the base modifier that is responsible for crit dmg strenght.

All I’m suggesting is reducing base would mitigate the buffs provided in game.

nesakinter

Except, if you nerf crit damage, crit builds will become utterly useless in PvP. Also Khajiit will become the absolute go-to race for any content if crit damage gets nerfed.

BXR_Lonestar

MindOfTheSwarm wrote: »

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

MindOfTheSwarm wrote: »

Nerfing Crit chance even further was a bad move in my opinion. It will just make stacking Crit Chance even more important as a result and have the reverse intended role of pushing players to play non Crit builds. In my opinion, if ZoS wants to nerf Crit builds then it is not chance that needs nerfing but damage. I propose the following:

Nerf Crit Damage by 25% baseline.
Buff Shadow Mundus by 7%.
Buff Crit Chance to what it was.
Buff Base Damage modifiers.

Why?

By nerfing it to 25% then non-crit builds would not be losing out too much especially if they equipped Malacath. However, focused Crit builds would benefit and would not be the go to build unless heavily invested in. In essence a Crit build would only be losing a total of 18% or even less if going Divines. This would pull them down closer to non-crit builds.

In summary a Crit build would get consistent Crits but not deal as much damage as they did before.

The problem with nerfing Crit Chance is that many builds cannot benefit from sets that boost their base damage as now basically you need to go full Crit Chance sets to get results. This in turn makes a lot of non-crit sets redundant. This is an issue as due to the fact that the Crit Damage is too good to pass up, everyone will now go for as much Crit Chance as possible. Making non-crit sets essentially useless for PVE.

By nerfing Damage instead of Chance you allow for other sets to be used, letting players settle for slightly less Crit Damage for more uptime and consistent results. While those looking for maximum Crit Damage can still do so.

The reason Crit is meta is due to 50% baseline damage. Not Crit Chance.

Thoughts?

I think nerfing the crit chance was actually probably the right way to go, but I don't think they really went far enough to make the changes that they wanted to make actually work. What they wanted to do was bring crit builds more in line with raw power builds in terms of average damage output. There are two ways that they could do this - reduce crit chance and reduce crit damage.

I think nerfing crit chance is the way they should go, but players need to be encouraged to invest in the critical chance stat to the exclusion of ALL other stats in order to bring a crit build's average damage down to the point where it is on level with a raw power build. Example? They could make critical chance glyphs to replace weapon/spell damage glyphs for jewelry that a person making a crit build would need in order to get their crit chance to an adequate level. This makes people building for crit choose between crit chance OR raw power.

Under the current paradigm, it is still way too easy for players to have over 50% crit chance AND around 4K-5K weapon power. So long as you can get stats like that, crit builds will always be king. Now, if they made it so characters who went ALL OUT for crit chance at the exclusion of weapon power had, say 2000 SD/WD, then with all the crit damage modifiers, their average damage output would be more on plane with a raw stats build.

That should really be the combat teams goal if they want to reduce the power of crit builds - put players into an "either/or" situation between crit chance and raw power.

This certainly is one way to do it but then what’s the point? Surely Crit builds should reward players for crits. Alternatively another way round is to nerf crit chance even further but buff damage further. Resulting in low up time of crits but when they proc you are rewarded with big damage. However, the issue from this is essentially you would have a proc set style build. I agree that players should have to focus on crit for it to work but I wouldn’t say 100% focus. I think nerfing crit damage while buffing base damage is the correct way to bring them in line with one another.

I disagree that nerfing crit damage modifier is the way to go, simply because crit builds will ALWAYS be the way to go so long as you can have a really good chance of hitting a critical hit PLUS really high base damage is easy to accomplish. Sure, you can also reduce the damage modifier, but so long as the base damage AND crit chance remain high, crit builds will always outpace raw stats builds in average damage output. There is simply no way to make up that gap unless you bring average dps output of crit builds down, and the best way to do that, IMO, is to really reduce the crit chance available to force people to build for it at the cost of weapon/spell power.

An alternative way to go about doing this could be to make sustain harder and force people with crit builds to build for crit at the cost of sustain. That would force crit builds to rely on external sources for sustain, giving raw power builds an advantage, especially in small scale play or in scenarios where you don't have proper support roles.

Yet a third way to do this would be to increase the influence of having large stat pools (max magika or max stamina) so that by sacrificing stats for crit damage, you are giving up something big that also influences total damage output.

The bottom line is right now, players just aren't forced to make enough meaningful decisions when building their DPS character because you can basically have it all - high crit chance, high base damage modifier, and decent stat pool. Players need to be made to choose to take 2 out of those 3 at most so they are missing something in their build that balances it with other ways to make your character.

axi

MindOfTheSwarm wrote: »

axi wrote: »

MindOfTheSwarm wrote: »

Sangwyne wrote: »

You can only nerf crit so much before everyone gives up on it and runs Malacath. The 20% baseline critical resistance in PvP and the versatility of needing only one item for 25% extra damage as opposed to two full critical sets is what first made Malacath overtake critical builds there, a 25% base critical damage reduction would have the same effect as implementing 25% critical resistance in PvE. Nerfing critical damage and buffing Shadow when it's already the default choice would just make other Mundus stones even less of an option. The issue is that ZOS recently reduced critical chance but added too many sources of critical damage to the game; Axes for 8%, Major Force buffed from 15 to 20%, Khajiit buffed from 10% to 12%, Minor Brittle for 10%, Fighting Finesse for 10% and Backstabber for 15%, of which the last two combined give as much as 100 points to Elfborn under the old system. If anything, Shadow needs a nerf to make running two critical sets less appealing, along with other tweaks to critical damage, as the prevalence of critical damage sources and lack of critical chance renders critical chance more necessary than ever.

Why not also buff other Mundus stones too then to compensate maybe add additional bonuses?

eg

The Serpent: Also increases Poison damage by 15%.

Say hello to Twice Born Star as replacement to most of the meta sets then. Because if You want to buff shadow by almost 70% then other munduses would have to recive similar bufs in strenght and that would make TBS really strong. For example if You would buff thief proportionally to Your proposed shadow mundus buff then TBS would provide more crit chance then mother's sorrow when running thief and You could still use shadow.

Also I agree with the person You were responding too. There is a lot of things that buff crit dmg not just base 50% modifier. In properly supported PvE group and on proper setup You can reach 130-140% crit dmg. That is almost triple the amount of base crit modifier yet You think it's the base modifier that is responsible for crit dmg strenght.

All I’m suggesting is reducing base would mitigate the buffs provided in game.

Which makes no sense. You want to nerf base value that was in the game since the release and that many things were designed around juist to keep something You like about current values of crit chance just to get more imbalances in return.