Andor's Trail

The idea of a "cap" is not a new concept!!!!
Oskar has capped the "Bark Skin", "Strong Mind", "Pure Blood", "Encoding Body", "Evasion",and "failure mystery ".
He is doing this for competitive balance, so why not the "Better" & "More" critacals too?

I don't know why some of those are capped either, especially when most people aren't even getting one level in them, but I believe I illustrated earlier why Bark Skin is capped in my counterexample. There is a big difference between not being able to get hit (if Bark Skin wasn't capped I could have near 30 DR if I wanted) and hitting hard when going first, but probably getting hit hard if I don't. As was also mentioned previously, a character with over 20 million experience should be tearing up the screen, otherwise a character with 2 million wouldn't have a chance. The strength of my character is not a fair representation of whether or not the game is balanced...

i was checking out the code page, and there is a discussion about keeping crits balanced.
i read an appealing suggestion - the only damage that gets multiplied is your base damage

i agree that criticals are VERY over-powered, and happen FAR too often.
[keep in mind, this is coming from a very aggressive & offensive minded player]

i have almost 40% chance to crit @ 3x damage... WITHOUT crit skills.
IMO - that is astronomical, and a little absurd.

in my eyes, 25% @ x2 is pretty nice.
if its happening more than half the time, it really isnt even a critical hit anymore
it just starts feeling like you missed when you dont crit. (and land a standard blow)

so, in closing... i loved the idea to reduce the damage that gets multiplied to base damage only
nobody loses skills, and takes the least amount of adjustments.
furthermore, adding critical defenses for mobs & players alike can allow numbers to exceed 100%
and still not happen all the time. ( thus making a critical feel like it should)
not every other swing, and not for 1,000 damage.

just some thoughts

Adding to Nyktos' idea for blocking critical hits, I had a thought for how to give this ability to our enemies.

Give this ability/skill to some new enemies in the next update.

"Critical Divider" - on being hit, has 50% chance of reducing attackers Critical Multiplier to .5 for that specific attack (which means your total AD would be cut in half for that attack). You could even make it so there's a weak/young, regular, and strong version of this creature that can change your attack's CM to .5, .25, and 0 respectively. That way, even if your AD is so high that even .5 is enough, maybe .25 won't be, and 0 definitely wouldn't be.

Basically, this would give you 2 choices: un-equip your critical weapon so this doesn't affect you, or take your chances (its 50/50 after all).

And then maybe introduce some equipment (haven't been any new helmets lately...) that cuts our attacker's CM to .5 (50% chance) but maybe has a catch like reduced AC, BC or CC.

Edit: changed the suggested name from "Critical Drop" to "Critical Divider" since it affects the multiplier so divider seemed more appropriate.

Gonna go ahead and say all this CC hate talk is scaring me

Ok, how about this:
monsters that can only be damaged with specific grades of weapons: silver weapons for lycanthropes, minimum magical modifiers or specific augmentation (fire, ice, psionic).

Say for instance that the River Troll on the bridge to Rogorn had a slightly higher HP (say ~300) and an obscene regeneration ability like all trolls have in this format; in this format it would probably need to be at least 60HP/round.
Oh, and its DR is >30 to anything not fire based.

Now, I'm out looking for a fire based weapon (that won't have crits) or relying on very high hit rates with very high damage per attack.

We rely too much on a single attack strategy and we can expect that monsters will adapt.

Excellent points here. We will definitely consider come change for this in a future update. The critical hits were never intended to be used as the common type of attack, only for special or "rare" attacks that occasionally deal a lot more damage.

Some great suggestions that have been brought up that I think we should consider:

1. Changing the "+1 dmg" option when leveling up to being only +1 on max damage range, and not on both min and max damage range.
2. Changing the multiplier that is applied to a critical attack to be a random value between 1 and the player's critical modifier.
3. Changing critical hits so that the damage multiplier only applies to base damage.
4. Changing critical hits so that there can be at most one critical hit per fight
5. Changing critical chance to a nonlinear function instead of just a linear percentage.
6. Make certain classes of monsters totally immune to critical hits (for example, the "demon" class?)

Personally, I think I would prefer a combination of 1 and 5, since it would still keep the fun part in having critical hits (you can still get that massive damage attack), while still reducing the overpowered aspect of it (you will get that type of attack less often, and won't always be as powerful).

oskarwiksten wrote:Excellent points here. We will definitely consider come change for this in a future update. The critical hits were never intended to be used as the common type of attack, only for special or "rare" attacks that occasionally deal a lot more damage.

Some great suggestions that have been brought up that I think we should consider:

1. Changing the "+1 dmg" option when leveling up to being only +1 on max damage range, and not on both min and max damage range.
2. Changing the multiplier that is applied to a critical attack to be a random value between 1 and the player's critical modifier.
3. Changing critical hits so that the damage multiplier only applies to base damage.
4. Changing critical hits so that there can be at most one critical hit per fight
5. Changing critical chance to a nonlinear function instead of just a linear percentage.
6. Make certain classes of monsters totally immune to critical hits (for example, the "demon" class?)

Personally, I think I would prefer a combination of 1 and 5, since it would still keep the fun part in having critical hits (you can still get that massive damage attack), while still reducing the overpowered aspect of it (you will get that type of attack less often, and won't always be as powerful).

Great to see all those posts from you Oskar!

I think 2, 3 or 4 are better since they only change the way critical hits work, but not regular attacks. Option 1 would basically turn AD itself into a "critical attack" since several level ups could make it something like Min 5 AD - Max 80 AD depending on weapons and number of times a player has leveled up their AD stats. 6 is a good idea in general since its always good to see more types of monsters.

I still think that limiting the number of skill-ups of "better critical" & "more criticals" is the way to go. Just like "bark skin" is limited to 5 skill-ups.

tek wrote:I still think that limiting the number of skill-ups of "better critical" & "more criticals" is the way to go. Just like "bark skin" is limited to 5 skill-ups.

I'd be fine with that too, as long as anyone currently over the limit gets their skill points returned to use on something else.

Thinking about it further, limiting it to 1 critical hit per fight would make Cleave level 1 less useful so I don't think that should be done either (especially since I'm going for Cleave )