It seemed like the nerf to crit values was supposed to make other stats more competitive but that is obviously not the case. Now crit is even more important. The alternatives such as stat stacking and weapon/spell damage stacking just don't do enough damage to be competitive. Adding spell or weapon damage just doesn't do enough and adding stats doesn't do enough. That is why crit is so powerful, it actually modifies your damage.

I found post u29 that I need to run 2 crit sets to be the most effective but on some characters that is harder to do than on others. It took me a while to farm the inferno medusa staff but I think that is the way to go on a lot of mag toons.

Well, they wanted to make other specs more important, but as a result they made crit specs kinda useless...

Maybe it is still good for optimized & organised trial runs with group buffs, but other than that it is kinda bad.

I mean stacking enough crit chance (like 45% +) is too much tasking and you will be missing in other aspects of your build. So less dmg, penetration, sustain etc.

And it brings the final point: are crit dmg boosting stats (Khajiit, NB passive, CP, gear sets) good or bad ? Personally I think that for majority of playerbase and builds it will be kinda bad, especially if you consider a fact that basically crit rate is an RNG stat.
I think that stacking penetration and Weapon / spell dmg with max stats will be (overall) better and may even provide more consistent dmg. Especially if you pair it with brutality ring and other % dmg done modifiers (like CP or Essence Thief set for example).

Unless of course you can somehow stack enough crit chance alongside other stats, without sacrificing too many important stats.

Thats why crit is an awful system in any mmorpg. It whould be removed completely.

ThePedge wrote: »

Buffs, as you say.
Crit Damage
Base - 50%
NB only - 10%
Khajiit only - 12%
Major Force - 25%
Minor Force - 10%
Elemental Catalyst - 9%
Minor Brittle - 10%

So with all you're looking at 126%
Without NB Khajiit 114%
No brittle (not as common imo) 104

Unless I'm mistaken, it's more. Buff and debuff are multiplicative, not additive.
[50%+10%+12%+25%+10%] = 107% [9%+10%] = 19%
1 x 2.07 x 1.19 = 2.46
So with all you're looking at 146%

Tbh, Crit is so good vs. just power stacking because power stacking doesn't yield high enough average damage to be competitive with a crit damage build when you look at all the avenues crit builds have for ramping the damage they do WHEN they crit. And it is very difficult to tone that down because if you improve the damage power stacking gives you, its ultimately also going to multiply the damage done by crit builds by increasing the base damage that gets ramped up when they do a critical hit.

IMO, what they need to do is introduce a critical chance jewelry/weapon glyph, and really force those people who want to build for critical damage builds to REALLY lean into the concept of a critical damage build by pursuing the critical chance/critical damage stats to the exclusion of everything else. This is the only way to keep crit builds from benefiting from raising the average damage you can do with a raw power build so that they are at a more competitive level.

I mean there is a Ring in this game which increases your damage by 25% but disables critical strikes. People are still going for critical strikes in PvE because it scales so well. People are even opting to go with two one-piece-bonusses of critical strike chance from monster sets instead of one two-piece-bonus.

The reason being is the existence of critical damage modifiers in this game. Your base critical hit does 150% of your normal damage which would be fine from a balance perspective opposed to spell/weapon damage or maximum ressources. Since critical damage can easily be above 200% of your normal damage critical strikes became the number one priority in PvE after penetration.

If monsters in PvE would be given a base value of Impenetrable the value of critical strikes could be less. This is what we have seen in PvP with Malacath being pretty strong and almost mandatory.

My magward (with bear) has been running Julianos and Necropotence. Good spell damage, good magicka pool, good regen, good pen, poor crit%. Just made her a set of Mother's Sorrow to replace the Necropotence set (same quality, traits and pieces). Then parsed her vs 3M target dummy several times with each set up and saw no noticeable difference to her dps. Not sure what to make of that but put the MS in the bank and am keeping Necropotence.

Tommy_The_Gun wrote: »

Well, they wanted to make other specs more important, but as a result they made crit specs kinda useless...

Maybe it is still good for optimized & organised trial runs with group buffs, but other than that it is kinda bad.

I mean stacking enough crit chance (like 45% +) is too much tasking and you will be missing in other aspects of your build. So less dmg, penetration, sustain etc.

And it brings the final point: are crit dmg boosting stats (Khajiit, NB passive, CP, gear sets) good or bad ? Personally I think that for majority of playerbase and builds it will be kinda bad, especially if you consider a fact that basically crit rate is an RNG stat.
I think that stacking penetration and Weapon / spell dmg with max stats will be (overall) better and may even provide more consistent dmg. Especially if you pair it with brutality ring and other % dmg done modifiers (like CP or Essence Thief set for example).

Unless of course you can somehow stack enough crit chance alongside other stats, without sacrificing too many important stats.

AcadianPaladin wrote: »

My magward (with bear) has been running Julianos and Necropotence. Good spell damage, good magicka pool, good regen, good pen, poor crit%. Just made her a set of Mother's Sorrow to replace the Necropotence set (same quality, traits and pieces). Then parsed her vs 3M target dummy several times with each set up and saw no noticeable difference to her dps. Not sure what to make of that but put the MS in the bank and am keeping Necropotence.

I think you may both be right. I get the theory other's have laid out in this post - there are an awful lot of buffs out there for crit damage. Thing is, outside an organised group, trial group or iron atro parse, you're unlikely to see them - and without those, crit obv isn't going to be as strong.

I guess the question is *where* Zos have pitched it. I was looking at adding Medusa on top of MS, but just throwing a rough set together and doing a few quick and dirty tests on the 3m, I was coming out as it being a net dps loss against sets like overwhelming surge, which are good all rounders but definitely not BIS.

Like I say, this was really quick and dirty; I'll try and doing something more scientific if I get the time. And I suspect that if I repeat the test on the iron atro Ill get the opposite result. But it was kind of an eye opener. It makes me wonder if I shd take another look at MS as well.

I'm wondering if zos, in trying to make crit specs more balanced against other specs in high end groups, have ended up making it slightly worse than other specs where high uptime on major force etc aren't present. Like I say though, quick and dirty. It might be other variables.

First of all, crit still has the highest expectation value compared to building dmg. All the group buff increases your w/sd will also increase crit dmg value but reversely not the case. And while fighting bosses having large health pool, it’s less rng but really close to the expectation. Finally, crit utility is not linear, so it’s more than just expectation. For example even in over land farming, it is more effective to have a crit land and one shot things based on your crit chance instead of having to consistently two shot things without crit/didn’t crit. Plus people like to see some big numbers instead of tedious consistent numbers on their screen

Been doing some rough testing (not scientific or precise at all, just me shooting spells at my dummy and comparing the numbers) for sets vs mundus and so on on my magblade. My usual gameplay is stuff like Maelstrom, vet dungeons, that kinda thing; so I'm not optimising for trials. For me the reliability of big damage (and therefore self healing) in controlled windows is more important than the statistical average of big damage over long parses.

What I have come up with seems to be that in real world practical terms, you want to keep your crit chance and crit damage balanced; i.e if you have 70% crit chance, you want 70% crit damage, investing into one side of this equation without balancing it on the other side is less rewarding than just adding pure damage (i.e spell damage or magicka.) Worth noting that in my comparisons I'm running 3x Infused and 4x Divines.

Running Medusa, Mother's Sorrow alongside the Thief gave me ~85% crit chance, but with 70% crit damage and comparatively low spell damage, resulting in lower overall damage. Swapping sorrow for Julianos actually improved damage, because the crit rating and crit damage values were balanced at ~70% each, with ~300 more base damage. Running Sorrow, Medusa and Shadow mundus gave similar results with a higher maximum, but slightly lower average; or in other words more variability. Running Sorrow and Medusa together with Apprentice mundus seemed to give the most balanced overall results, but that's unsurprising taken with the general trend here, because functionally in stat terms it's almost the same thing as running Julianos + Medusa with Thief mundus, or Julianos + Sorrow with the Shadow mundus.

In other words, the diminishing returns point on my build seems to be ~70%, or in general whatever your ceiling is before one stat is out of balance with the others, if we use the cube visualisation from the poster above. Hypothetically, when I have enough CP to max out the Fighting Finesse slottable, that's when it'll be worth taking off the stopper and building fully towards crit- I'll have lower base damage but with 80x80 crit vs crit damage, the improvement is larger than simply adding raw damage currently.

Swapping and changing things out like this to figure it out yourself does give an insight into how these things are balanced. The differences are very slight, because (wouldn't you know it) they calculated these things to be more or less equivalent to one another- When you change one source of stats for another, you're usually trading the equivalent amount. It's all about making sure they are in harmony; currently the challenge is making the most of your crits, and the sources you have available to do so will affect what you should be using.

The top end meta only applies to you if you're running top end content with other top end players, and might not be the best thing for you running around soloing world bosses, for example. That's important to keep in mind.

Uvi_AUT wrote: »

katorga wrote: »

Uvi_AUT wrote: »

Thats why crit is an awful system in any mmorpg. It whould be removed completely.

Heh. It has only been present in every MMO since Ultima Online. Players love it.

No developers love it. RNG is an easy way to mask a lot of tuning without actually having to explain everything, because its RNG after all.

IDK...Blizz did a decent job with agility for mid-weight armor classes. BDO's crit is linked more to individual skills.
I don't think it needs to be removed, but it is too spread out and easily accessible imo.
Racials, weapons, armor weight, passives, CP, sets, mundus, pots, everywhere
I do agree that devs overuse it though. In Zeni's case I think they've just grown dependent on it being THE dps stat with everything else being filler. Everything takes second chair to those juicy do everything for you dlc sets

Great thread. I've wondered what to spec for too - crit or spell damage or penetration.

Funny thing is I've come away seeing different opinions and experiences.

I usually solo, but I'd like to be able to solo vet dungeons. (All these build makers say their certain solo builds can do this. I have a magplar, beamplar.) They all go heavy crit. But I wondered. Guess I'll see.

Bodycounter wrote: »

I mean there is a Ring in this game which increases your damage by 25% but disables critical strikes. People are still going for critical strikes in PvE because it scales so well. People are even opting to go with two one-piece-bonusses of critical strike chance from monster sets instead of one two-piece-bonus.

You're quoting the OLD setting of Malacatch Band.
Now it's 16% more damage and reduce your critical damage by half.

https://eso-sets.com/set/malacaths-band-of-brutality