Change Critical Meta

wills43b14_ESO

FrancisCrawford wrote: »

CP5 wrote: »

FrancisCrawford wrote: »

wills43b14_ESO wrote: »

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

I would rather not touch Critical Chance again but I would be all for increasing the competitiveness of other damage stats.

This would require:

• Reducing the Critical Damage stacking ceiling (or introducing Critical Resistance to PvE enemies)
• Increasing the "power budget" of item set bonuses (and, specifically, 5-piece bonuses...) such as Weapon/Spell Damage and Max Stats
• Increasing class-specific affinities for stacking alternative bonuses (e.g. Sorcerer Spell/Weapon Damage passive, Warden Northern Storm Max Magicka scaling, Templar unique Weapon Damage passive, etc.) so that different classes are incentivized to stack different types of damage stats

That would lead to a much healthier meta where different classes would reach peak damage output by stacking different damage stats rather than homogenizing everyone into stacking Critical Chance and Damage.

Good luck adjusting the power budget around the variance. That will be a nightmare for ZOS. They'll probably use the expectations (means), which isn't a great way to go around it whenever the uncertainty (variance) is very large.

It's still not clear what genuine problem you're trying to solve:

• Players are too stupid to understand combat logs with high variance (so we should dumb down the game for them)?
• Devs are too stupid to understand combat logs with high variance (so they should dumb down the game for themselves)?
• Fights with identically good or bad player rotations might last a different number of seconds when replayed (which is bad because -- why?)?

Let's say a fight has a particular target that needs to die in x seconds or else you wipe. Let's say on average with or without this change the player is able to kill this target and not wipe. With a high crit rate they are able to do this consistently and can manage a few hits not critting. Now if there is a huge difference between crits and normal hits, and the crit rate is low, the player is likely to either get lucky, score some extra crits and clear the target faster, or not score enough crits and die. This would require base damage to be high enough to clear without gambling on your success in the fight, forgoing crit chance, or leave crits so sought after you would build for them far more than people already do (since zos lowered crit rate and raised crit damage we already see how players react). This change would only make crit rate even more highly required.

In which particular fights have you experienced this problem?

The only close-call DPS check I've had for a while is when I took a garbage build into Spindleclutch 2 to see if that was a good place to farm vampires for the endeavor, and had to solo Bloodspawn (and another boss) before I had enough vampires racked up. That was not a situation likely to repeat, and one I could have averted with a better build anyway.

Actually, there also were a few times recently when @DarcyMardin and I struggled to duo the final boss of a vet dungeon we can breeze through on normal. But any time I've been in such a situation, my group (of 1 or 2 or 4 or whatever) is probably doing some hundreds of parcels of crittable damage across the whole fight. So how far off from the mean is total damage likely to be?

Bahsei HM is a great example right now where nuking colossi on a continuous burn matters. It will lead to a wipe if the rng is bad. The boss is stacked usually and you might crit high on the boss but low on atros... well there's a problem when multiple start spawning. And the OP's suggestion of low crit builds isn't good due to how high crit damage is. If crit dmg were tiny his response would be appropriate, but that would just nuke crit then for PvP and PvE. While crit dmg is as high as it is then it doesn't really matter. So, in this case, my suggestion is to nuke crit dmg if they want crit at 50%ish. If they want crit dmg high, then make crit chance really high or really low. I think this is the best option (high crit chance with high crit dmg) for the most reliability and maybe lower the base power some. In PvP, they would need to maximize on both or accept that it will take awhile to get a high burst combo if building for large crits, which I think is an acceptable tradeoff.

wills43b14_ESO

hundergrn wrote: »

IMO... Crit chance doesn't necessarily equate to Luck or RNG.

When testing builds, taking parses, against target dummies that are equivalent to end game content health and resistance you quickly find that the logs read fairly close to the prescribed percentages of Crit Chance. Whether it be 20,40,60,70%, if you hit the slab of meat (stone?) long enough the highs and lows even out to the build you present and give you an idea of how it should flow during longer fights.

The recent changes to Crit accumulation that brought the high end of pure crit from 70+ to ~60% while going full in on Crit chance only took Crit builds to push Crit chance and bonus and limited build variety for the play style. Further hindering Crit chance will only push those builds to cap quicker to focus on Bonus and Damage limiting the limited pool even further and possibly even finding larger dmg numbers to hit.

Min/Max players exist. They will either push full damage with a 25-35% Crit chance and as much damage they can muster between set bonus, buffs, wep dmg, and skills.

For my 2 NB, I have a few different builds for them. Some new, Some old.

The Magblade PvE builds sit at 2894 Spell DMG base with 13k Pen, and 50--60 Crit Chance depending on the set.
The Stamblade PvP build sits at 5640 Wep DMG base with 11k Pen, and 33.2% Crit Chance.
The Stamblade PvE build sits at 4670 Wep DMG base with 3.8k Pen, and 60.2% Crit Chance.

When I take them through the same PvE content, they do about the same DPS. When I parse them with a trail dummy the DPS between the 3 variations come within a 1-3k DPS in variation of each other. Why? Because with the same Crit Bonus Damage, the variation of Wep/Spell DMG, Penatration, and Crit Chance evens out over time.

TLDR if crit chance is capped at 40%, the limitation will push for capping Crit DMG Bonus and Weapon/Spell DMG. Dilute the build variety for players that want to maximize their toons, and chance next to nothing for the people who just follow meta (outside of gathering different gear)

This is true for large n (dots and such), but not true for small n, big hits (ults, frags, etc.).

wills43b14_ESO

Syrpynt wrote: »

CP5 wrote: »

Let's say a fight has a particular target that needs to die in x seconds or else you wipe. Let's say on average with or without this change the player is able to kill this target and not wipe. With a high crit rate they are able to do this consistently and can manage a few hits not critting. Now if there is a huge difference between crits and normal hits, and the crit rate is low, the player is likely to either get lucky, score some extra crits and clear the target faster, or not score enough crits and die.

Base damage needs to be fixed if crit damage gets adjusted.

Theoretically:

Total average power =
( BP*(100% - CC%) + BP*(1.5 + CDB)*(CC%) ) / (2 * 100%)

BD is base power
CC% is critical chance
CDB is summed Critical Damage bonuses in decimal form.
It's all divided by 2 to average the critical power and base power, and 100% to bring it back to decimal value form.

There should be a cap for critical chance, and sets should more base-power options.

CP5 wrote: »

This would require base damage to be high enough to clear without gambling on your success in the fight, forgoing crit chance, or leave crits so sought after you would build for them far more than people already do (since zos lowered crit rate and raised crit damage we already see how players react).

That's exactly the point. The game shouldn't be built with a meta hard-on for critical builds, and base damage should be higher, but if you want to "take the chance" and make a critical build (pun intended), then you are resting your skills on RNG to do 2.0x or 3.0x your base damage but less frequently (and I mean, with a chance cap of 40% +/- 5%).

This would also make critical strikes more like a true RNG-type of finisher/execution!

CP5 wrote: »

This change would only make crit rate even more highly required.

Not if base power became competitive enough, and critical chance was capped. But to compensate for critical chance cap--critical damage would be increased from 1.5x to 2.0 or 2.5. This would make combat less reliable, and more on luck. Which is what chance/luck is about.

Uhm, crit chance is already higher than that.... that's why we are complaining. Again, these arguments are more for PvP and have little to 0 bearing on PvE besides frustrating the high end and leading to wild inconsistencies on the low/mid tier just trying to figure it out and test where there's already an insane amount of variance from everything else.

Base damage can't be made that high unless crit dmg is neutered to very small amounts. If it was, then crits would 1 shot everyone in PvP on high pen high crit dmg builds with stealthed guaranteed crit...

dwig

Syrpynt wrote: »

Anyway, expecting a lot of disagreement here, but I'm not really interested in any person's opinion that disagrees just because ALL of their dps builds are currently set up for the crit meta and don't want to lose their "kingly status" as a dps lord. That's not an argument, that's a whine.

The people with the highest dps under today's meta will have the highest dps under your new meta too.

This is because high dps is a matter of practice, practice, and more practice. The people who took the time to get good under today's meta will do it again for tomorrow's meta.

That's my observation from watching the game for the past 7 years at least. They throw a monkey wrench in the meta every year or so. A few people quit because they are tired of the game anyway, and the rest study the changes and end up right back on top of the charts a week later. Your changes won't really change anything about who gets the trifecta's.

wills43b14_ESO

FrancisCrawford wrote: »

wills43b14_ESO wrote: »

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

I would rather not touch Critical Chance again but I would be all for increasing the competitiveness of other damage stats.

This would require:

• Reducing the Critical Damage stacking ceiling (or introducing Critical Resistance to PvE enemies)
• Increasing the "power budget" of item set bonuses (and, specifically, 5-piece bonuses...) such as Weapon/Spell Damage and Max Stats
• Increasing class-specific affinities for stacking alternative bonuses (e.g. Sorcerer Spell/Weapon Damage passive, Warden Northern Storm Max Magicka scaling, Templar unique Weapon Damage passive, etc.) so that different classes are incentivized to stack different types of damage stats

That would lead to a much healthier meta where different classes would reach peak damage output by stacking different damage stats rather than homogenizing everyone into stacking Critical Chance and Damage.

Good luck adjusting the power budget around the variance. That will be a nightmare for ZOS. They'll probably use the expectations (means), which isn't a great way to go around it whenever the uncertainty (variance) is very large.

It's still not clear what genuine problem you're trying to solve:

• Players are too stupid to understand combat logs with high variance (so we should dumb down the game for them)?
  [snip]
• Fights with identically good or bad player rotations might last a different number of seconds when replayed (which is bad because -- why?)?

[edited for bashing]

1st point: no... that's not what I was implying at all. Let's talk about low/mid tier groups. They're trying to "figure it out" as is. There's a lot of variance from buff/debuff uptimes and pulls going to ***, etc. Adding in more variation makes it impossible for them to disentangle what's performing optimally for their groups as the distributions are so entwined there's no real way to separate the means without statistics... and that's a lot of data needed. High end groups will end up frustrated because their goal is to reduce variance to an acceptable level while maxing damage to perform consistently to achieve trinity and score run. Inconsistency is the absolute bane of PvE. So, like I've said before, this is mostly for PvP, but there are problems there too (see posts above).

2nd point: it's about testing, figuring things out, optimizing for consistency/clearing/score/time. There are a ton of mechanics where absolute lack of consistency is bad as the whole dynamic of the fight changes making the goals much harder to achieve (vAS HM (big one, especially for mid tier), vSS HM Lokke in some cases, vSS HM Naavi in some cases, vCR HM, and ESPECIALLY vRG HM right now. I'm sure I could think of more specific fights, but that's a good starter. See my above case for Bahsei HM, but when mini timers get off and mechanics begin to pile up... have fun.

ExistingRug61

wills43b14_ESO wrote: »

I guess what I'm trying to say if your points make more sense to PvP for me (without knowing some of the intricacies of build trade off), but make no sense in PvE, especially where a fight is very long with a lot of ticks on most stuff besides a few heavy hitters... although those heavy hitters really make it frustrating when variance is too large and it's no longer about skill.

PvE should be almost entirely skill based with a small amount of rng. For large skill gaps the variance doesn't matter, but when it's close it does.

Less reliable but bigger crits aren't necessarily a good thing for PvP either.

At the very least big crits are polarising to players and can cause misconceptions about classes/builds/skills strengths, because players tend to pay most attention to the things that actually kill them. And in a low crit chance/high crit damage environment death recaps will show a disproportionately high amount of crits - because death is most likely to align with when those infrequent crits occur.

At worst it could turn fights into a lottery - neither player is able to kill the other without getting a crit or two on a key ability, so the fight just becomes chance based as to who gets that key crit first. Unlike PvE where you have a large sample size of hits which evens out the average damage, in PvP a death may come from a burst combination of only a couple of abilities, and with high crit damage the variance of this burst would be large. In general I think PvPers don't like RNG deciding fights either.

Not to mention issues with abilities or sets that give guaranteed critical strikes, which aren't really used in PvE, but are a feature of PvP.

wills43b14_ESO

ExistingRug61 wrote: »

wills43b14_ESO wrote: »

I guess what I'm trying to say if your points make more sense to PvP for me (without knowing some of the intricacies of build trade off), but make no sense in PvE, especially where a fight is very long with a lot of ticks on most stuff besides a few heavy hitters... although those heavy hitters really make it frustrating when variance is too large and it's no longer about skill.

PvE should be almost entirely skill based with a small amount of rng. For large skill gaps the variance doesn't matter, but when it's close it does.

Less reliable but bigger crits aren't necessarily a good thing for PvP either.

At the very least big crits are polarising to players and can cause misconceptions about classes/builds/skills strengths, because players tend to pay most attention to the things that actually kill them. And in a low crit chance/high crit damage environment death recaps will show a disproportionately high amount of crits - because death is most likely to align with when those infrequent crits occur.

At worst it could turn fights into a lottery - neither player is able to kill the other without getting a crit or two on a key ability, so the fight just becomes chance based as to who gets that key crit first. Unlike PvE where you have a large sample size of hits which evens out the average damage, in PvP a death may come from a burst combination of only a couple of abilities, and with high crit damage the variance of this burst would be large. In general I think PvPers don't like RNG deciding fights either.

Not to mention issues with abilities or sets that give guaranteed critical strikes, which aren't really used in PvE, but are a feature of PvP.

Exactly - if the chance is too large then everyone will do it and stealth gank or crit gank (2+ big hits doing 15k-25k dmg each under this paradigm). RNG removes skill and when RNG is overtuned it's just frustrating all around.

Your first comment about it being polarizing lines up exactly with my description of low to mid tier groups in PvE. It just makes it horribly frustrating to figure out what's going on and get better. In fact, I'd say it will worsen the skill gap due to new players not having enough decisive information to actually make the best decisions.

Syrpynt

wills43b14_ESO wrote: »

I guess what I'm trying to say if your points make more sense to PvP for me (without knowing some of the intricacies of build trade off), but make no sense in PvE, especially where a fight is very long with a lot of ticks on most stuff besides a few heavy hitters... although those heavy hitters really make it frustrating when variance is too large and it's no longer about skill.

PvE should be almost entirely skill based with a small amount of rng. For large skill gaps the variance doesn't matter, but when it's close it does.

What do you mean it doesn't make sense for PvE? You keep stating that it would be unstable, but I'm saying that is as it SHOULD be! Critical Chance should be RNG, it should be unstable, and it should be like gambling! That is what it is, after all!

But with how ESO has it set up, "why even have raw power at all?"

Sure, it's there to increase the base potency for critical hits, but is that it? Everyone crits or is just second rate? The playstyle is so mundane and repetitive. There should be at least 2 dps playstyles like I said before.

If someone wants to do the reliable and consistent dps like you are stating, then raw power should be that stable choice everyone keeps using critical chance as!

If people can't handle moe RNG, then critical chance isn't for them.

wills43b14_ESO wrote: »

...The points I make still stand. If you want crit at 40-50%, then crit damage shouldn't be skyrocketed (this is one way to reduce variance) and then they can just increase base dmg. If they have moderate crit and high crit dmg this makes for extremely unstable hits...

I'm saying 40% max, maybe the sweet spot for balance is 36.3%?! Additionally, I HOPE the the curve skews left! Soft caps are useful in containing the gaps between players, they're existant already, but with more sets and metas each year, crit remains too reliable and constant. That's why Zenimax had to nerf critical chance sources this last update!

wills43b14_ESO wrote: »

...Content should be skill based, not RNG. You'll have everyone rage quit instantly if it's only RNG...

If raw power is more abundant, and crit sources become unstable, only those willing to play the unstable RNG type will play critical builds. The options to use different sets will be more interesting than everyone running FGD, Mother's Sorrow, Leviathan, VO, Drozakar's, Adv Yokeda, etc. who use the same youtube influencer rotations and builds over and over again...

wills43b14_ESO wrote: »

Third: raw power vs crit.... ZOS doesn't allow for enough raw power to make this viable. If they did, the crits would be insane (they would have to MASSIVELY dial down crit dmg for pvp, which is my entire argument of what they SHOULD do in the first place)! We're talking 4x damage. Even at expectation or slightly lower, that's an INSANE amount of raw power to get those numbers. PvP would be so busted. Again, you're focusing too much on point estimates or very low probabilities and not overall probability/distributions.

The alternative to reducing critical damage is to dial down critical chance. My cosine example shows low critical chance/frequency and high peaks (critical damage) is what would best average out to the same as constant damage (raw power) builds.

The purpose of this is to keep a divide between raw power builds and critical builds. "You can't keep your cake, but eat it too." Choose to keep the cake, or eat it.

wills43b14_ESO wrote: »

...Also, to finish this thought: building large crit % means sacrificing base power and crit dmg already, so that point is moot imo.

Once you put raw power into your build from a source, your critical damage power will lose a slot. Once you put critical chance into your build, you lose raw power. Make it so that having both makes your overall average dps output weaker than both! Choose the playstyle: Reliable constancy, or unstable but rewarding+unrewarding RNG! Yup, feels bad when you don't get it. But then again gamble crates keep players coming back and they put in a lot of money for those, something tells me they'll be willing to keep playing as crit for those MASSIVE crit damage hits, even if they are rare.

Syrpynt

ExistingRug61 wrote: »

At worst it could turn fights into a lottery - neither player is able to kill the other without getting a crit or two on a key ability, so the fight just becomes chance based as to who gets that key crit first. Unlike PvE where you have a large sample size of hits which evens out the average damage, in PvP a death may come from a burst combination of only a couple of abilities, and with high crit damage the variance of this burst would be large. In general I think PvPers don't like RNG deciding fights either.

Not to mention issues with abilities or sets that give guaranteed critical strikes, which aren't really used in PvE, but are a feature of PvP.

No one is forcing players to play critical builds if raw power becomes viable without the use of Malacath's.

The gauranteed critical strikes need a cooldown. Hell, all the skills in this game need cooldowns... Player side. "Ease the load."

Everest_Lionheart

wills43b14_ESO wrote: »

FrancisCrawford wrote: »

wills43b14_ESO wrote: »

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

I would rather not touch Critical Chance again but I would be all for increasing the competitiveness of other damage stats.

This would require:

• Reducing the Critical Damage stacking ceiling (or introducing Critical Resistance to PvE enemies)
• Increasing the "power budget" of item set bonuses (and, specifically, 5-piece bonuses...) such as Weapon/Spell Damage and Max Stats
• Increasing class-specific affinities for stacking alternative bonuses (e.g. Sorcerer Spell/Weapon Damage passive, Warden Northern Storm Max Magicka scaling, Templar unique Weapon Damage passive, etc.) so that different classes are incentivized to stack different types of damage stats

That would lead to a much healthier meta where different classes would reach peak damage output by stacking different damage stats rather than homogenizing everyone into stacking Critical Chance and Damage.

Good luck adjusting the power budget around the variance. That will be a nightmare for ZOS. They'll probably use the expectations (means), which isn't a great way to go around it whenever the uncertainty (variance) is very large.

It's still not clear what genuine problem you're trying to solve:

• Players are too stupid to understand combat logs with high variance (so we should dumb down the game for them)?
  [snip]
• Fights with identically good or bad player rotations might last a different number of seconds when replayed (which is bad because -- why?)?

[edited for bashing]

1st point: no... that's not what I was implying at all. Let's talk about low/mid tier groups. They're trying to "figure it out" as is. There's a lot of variance from buff/debuff uptimes and pulls going to ***, etc. Adding in more variation makes it impossible for them to disentangle what's performing optimally for their groups as the distributions are so entwined there's no real way to separate the means without statistics... and that's a lot of data needed. High end groups will end up frustrated because their goal is to reduce variance to an acceptable level while maxing damage to perform consistently to achieve trinity and score run. Inconsistency is the absolute bane of PvE. So, like I've said before, this is mostly for PvP, but there are problems there too (see posts above).

2nd point: it's about testing, figuring things out, optimizing for consistency/clearing/score/time. There are a ton of mechanics where absolute lack of consistency is bad as the whole dynamic of the fight changes making the goals much harder to achieve (vAS HM (big one, especially for mid tier), vSS HM Lokke in some cases, vSS HM Naavi in some cases, vCR HM, and ESPECIALLY vRG HM right now. I'm sure I could think of more specific fights, but that's a good starter. See my above case for Bahsei HM, but when mini timers get off and mechanics begin to pile up... have fun.

Your second point here is a big deal because the HM of this content is tuned for what players are capable of under the current system with regards to both crit percentage and crit damage. If crit gets under tuned than content will need to be adjusted accordingly.

Also to that effect over nerfing crit damage or percentage is going to make things exponentially harder to groups trying to prog/clear vet trials. Some of these groups, and I have been in them, need all the luck they can get in order to get past a certain point. The last thing you want to do is push people that were barely hitting 65-70k back another 10K or more DPS because they didn’t get lucky enough.

There need to be something consistent to offset the loss that needs to come close to balancing to make building for crit a true risk/reward instead of a necessity. Because as you’ve pointed out here we are looking for consistency especially at endgame content, and even for those working their way through the vet trials for the first time it’s consistency that hold them back as well. The hardest content in the game can fail if one member of your team has an off night in the consistency department. That’s how slim the margin is currently.

Syrpynt

Everest_Lionheart wrote: »

...There need to be something consistent to offset the loss that needs to come close to balancing to make building for crit a true risk/reward instead of a necessity.

Yeah, it's like I've been saying: Raw power should be the consistency people use for fights. ESO has crit set up, how raw power should be used in this game. Critical chance and critical strike should be something a rogue uses with a smaller chance to do some crazy damage.

Another example is the Mehrune's Razor: a < 3% chance for instant death. People would swipe with a wet noodle all day if they knew there was a 3% to instantly kill an enemy.

The point is that there's balance. Low chance is high risk, patience, and high reward if it happens. If people want to feel good all the time about something, they should use raw power. Raw power should be viable for player builds, and thus critical chance should be hard capped or soft capped.

WrathOfInnos

Syrpynt wrote: »

Everest_Lionheart wrote: »

...There need to be something consistent to offset the loss that needs to come close to balancing to make building for crit a true risk/reward instead of a necessity.

Yeah, it's like I've been saying: Raw power should be the consistency people use for fights. ESO has crit set up, how raw power should be used in this game. Critical chance and critical strike should be something a rogue uses with a smaller chance to do some crazy damage.

Another example is the Mehrune's Razor: a < 3% chance for instant death. People would swipe with a wet noodle all day if they knew there was a 3% to instantly kill an enemy.

The point is that there's balance. Low chance is high risk, patience, and high reward if it happens. If people want to feel good all the time about something, they should use raw power. Raw power should be viable for player builds, and thus critical chance should be hard capped or soft capped.

Mehrune’s Razor is the perfect example of why low crit chance (3%) and high crit damage (effectively infinity) would be terrible. You’d be relying entirely on RNG, and fail 97% of the time. The other 3% you’d one-shot the best PVPers, and kill trial bosses in world record times. It just becomes a game of resets and hoping, no fun, no skill.

High crit chance and moderate crit damage has proven very repeatable. It generates nearly constant DPS in PVE, and doesn’t instantly burst down players with lucky crits in PVP.

zvavi

WrathOfInnos wrote: »

Syrpynt wrote: »

Everest_Lionheart wrote: »

...There need to be something consistent to offset the loss that needs to come close to balancing to make building for crit a true risk/reward instead of a necessity.

Yeah, it's like I've been saying: Raw power should be the consistency people use for fights. ESO has crit set up, how raw power should be used in this game. Critical chance and critical strike should be something a rogue uses with a smaller chance to do some crazy damage.

Another example is the Mehrune's Razor: a < 3% chance for instant death. People would swipe with a wet noodle all day if they knew there was a 3% to instantly kill an enemy.

The point is that there's balance. Low chance is high risk, patience, and high reward if it happens. If people want to feel good all the time about something, they should use raw power. Raw power should be viable for player builds, and thus critical chance should be hard capped or soft capped.

Mehrune’s Razor is the perfect example of why low crit chance (3%) and high crit damage (effectively infinity) would be terrible. You’d be relying entirely on RNG, and fail 97% of the time. The other 3% you’d one-shot the best PVPers, and kill trial bosses in world record times. It just becomes a game of resets and hoping, no fun, no skill.

High crit chance and moderate crit damage has proven very repeatable. It generates nearly constant DPS in PVE, and doesn’t instantly burst down players with lucky crits in PVP.

I think you don't understand. This is exactly what he wants. This is exactly what he thinks will be fun.

Joy_Division

I'm not sure where you get the notion that Critical hits are supposed to be luck or risk-reward.

In just about every fantasy game I have ever played, critical hits have been more about skill: typically as character leveled up, they would be given options to critically hit more often. Or certain classes or weapons had innate properties that allowed them to critically hit more often.

Also, I don;t recall there ever being a risk. When you crit, it was all bonuses and when you didn't, it was nothing lost since it would be just another hit/miss. Critical is all reward.

BXR_Lonestar

Honestly, I don't like the critical meta because there is really only a narrow band of builds that work in endgame (at least for DPS) and they're all crit-centric. Either stacking crit chance or crit damage or both. Raw power builds are not competitive and there really is only two damage options - crit builds or raw power builds. Max stat builds went out the roof with the reordering of how damage scales, so those are no longer viable (RIP Necropotence + Crafty Alfiqi Petsorc).

With that in mind, the reason crit builds are so strong is that it is still easy to get around 4k-5k weapon/spell damage in a 4 man group with around 60% or more crit chance while running the Shadow Mundus. What they need to do is make players further choose between weapon power OR crit chance by introducing a critical chance glyph for jewelry and making it impossible to get over 50% chance crit without having both precise weapon trait AND 3x critical chance glyphs on jewelry. This will make it so players have to make a choice in terms of crit builds. They're either going to lose penetration from sharpened trait and weapon/spell damage, or they can have their crit build, but their damage output will be more in line with raw power builds due to lowered stats that also impact damage output.

Syrpynt

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

Honestly, I don't like the critical meta because there is really only a narrow band of builds that work in endgame (at least for DPS) and they're all crit-centric. Either stacking crit chance or crit damage or both. Raw power builds are not competitive and there really is only two damage options - crit builds or raw power builds. Max stat builds went out the roof with the reordering of how damage scales, so those are no longer viable (RIP Necropotence + Crafty Alfiqi Petsorc).

With that in mind, the reason crit builds are so strong is that it is still easy to get around 4k-5k weapon/spell damage in a 4 man group with around 60% or more crit chance while running the Shadow Mundus. What they need to do is make players further choose between weapon power OR crit chance by introducing a critical chance glyph for jewelry and making it impossible to get over 50% chance crit without having both precise weapon trait AND 3x critical chance glyphs on jewelry. This will make it so players have to make a choice in terms of crit builds. They're either going to lose penetration from sharpened trait and weapon/spell damage, or they can have their crit build, but their damage output will be more in line with raw power builds due to lowered stats that also impact damage output.

This is exactly what I've been saying. There needs to be a valley or gap between the two. Farming gear isn't skill either, so getting the same crit-oriented gear every year for end-game is just bland. I do like the idea of procs, but I also agree with keeping them "2nd rate" to stats because pure stats are what make skilled players shine. I just don't like that Crit is the main "end game" option for PvE.