Do we expect too much from GGG?

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

There's plenty of evidence that the most fundamental elements of PoE were mistakes made along the way from which GGG must learn.

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Crits? Spells. Should. Not. Crit.

What?

I can at least understand your opinion on the "shouldn't be able to reach 95% crit" thing - I disagree with it, personally, but I can understand why some people wouldn't. But coming from someone like you who's usually good at backing up what they say, this being thrown out with no justification (that I can see) seriously confuses me. Why shouldn't spells be able to crit? I can't from the top of my head name any game I've played including both spells and crits where they can't (but such games may well exist). I'd certainly expect that if I started a new game and it had both spells as a means of dealing damage and some form of crit mechanic, that the two would have some overlap.

Not trying to troll*, but I'd be genuinely interested in your reasoning for holding this belief, especially since you seem to hold it so strongly.

*I'm pretty sure you actually know that without me saying it, but for the sake of some people who might view the thread and misinterpret my intent, I felt like clarifying.

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Antnee wrote:

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Mark_GGG wrote:

I can at least understand your opinion on the "shouldn't be able to reach 95% crit" thing - I disagree with it, personally, but I can understand why some people wouldn't.

It's no longer is a lucky, powerful strike. It's just a creamy smoothie of death. Thematically it makes no sense that all your hits are lucky.

I don't believe critical strikes have to be lucky. I consider them to represent a hit you managed to get past the enemy's defences - striking the weak point, slipping your blade between the plates of their armour, etc. While such events can happen to anyone when they're lucky (hence a low base chance to get a critical strike), someone who specifically trains for it should be able to successfully land such strikes far more often. Crits are aligned with intelligence in PoE because - as I understand it - it takes presence of mind and quick thinking to find (and thus take advantage of) such openings.

This (and most other descriptions I've heard of the flavour justifications for crits in games) admittedly don't mesh perfectly with the ways AoE crits are handled in PoE, which was done more for a 'feel' reason than a 'realism' or 'justification' one - we found people not noticing or caring when they got crits on individual enemies using AoE spells, where critting all enemies felt like a significant "cool" event. It also allowed some on-crit effects to be more powerful at the expense of only counting once in that situation for the whole skill.

To start with -

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

The reason I didn't 'back my argument up' is because I thought all of this was obvious. And now I feel like I've taken a dead horse and abused it with a barbed stick. I'm sorry. :(

Don't be. That was and interesting read, and I'm glad you posted it. I do think it's interested that this concept seems so obvious to you and at the same time so alien to me. This is probably more a factor of what games we grew up on than anything else, and it's always interesting to hear such a differing perspective.

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

Firstly, I've been playing a lot of SMITE lately, and spells there cannot crit. Then again, neither can attack skills, only basic attacks, so that's probably some food for thought. What this means is that the damage range of spells (and skills) is much easier to regulate and balance. Of course, we're comparing a MOBA to an ARPG, so there's probably wiggle room there.

I don't want to completely derail the topic, but if you could expand a bit more on this, or link me to a good source of information on how this works out, I'd be quite interested. I'm particularly intruiged to know how often you're using basic attacks (and what can count as a "basic attack" for this purpose) compared to other skills.

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

To my knowledge, spells can't crit in Dungeons and Dragons either, but I only played up to 3/3.5, so if they've changed that (I hear WoTC has tried to make D and D more like an ARPG), I can't speak to it.

They can in 4th and 5th edition. I did a little digging and from what I can tell the crit mechanic doesn't generally apply to spells in 3/3.5 because you're not making an attack roll (that could roll high and thus be a crit), rather the enemy is failing a save roll against the spell. Apparently touch spells could crit because they require an attack roll for the touch, but take that with a grain of salt because it's something I just read on the Internet about a game system I'm not overly familiar with.

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

A critical hit to me is one that strikes a vital organ or 'weak spot', and is typically associated with attacks that aim for such. This is why daggers are so commonly associated with critical hits. Certainly, other melee weapons can and should have the chance of dealing a critical strike (because it could be anything from a punctured lung to a shattered skull, etc), but really, to me whether or not you crit comes down to targeting, expertise and anatomical knowledge.

Spells generally don't bother with any of that. They're far more constant in effect: one fireball should be, give or take, the same size as any other fireball assumed both are cast the same way and by the same person. Said ball of fire hits, and the damage it deals doesn't really discriminate. You don't get to pick targets. The amount of damage really isn't relevant, but because we're talking about a ball of fire, let's say it does more damage per hit than a dagger stab or an arrow shot. That's the constant nature of the spell. Reliable damage. Very lucrative. Not much gamble. Fire ball hits, things get set aflame and take lots of fire damage. Yay.

That's just one spell of course. Feel free to substitute in any other. With the exception of a spell type that targets specific areas of an opponent, there just isn't the same synergy as with the aforementioned dagger to the [insert targeted squishy bit here].

I can understand where you're coming from, but I don't see that this is necessarily really a spell/attack distinction. An attack like sweep, swinging the weapon around in a circle to hit many foes, isn't really going to be aimed at a specific body part, and and laser/beam like spells certainly feel like they would. I'd certainly grant that weapon attacks more often lend themselves to this kind of aiming.
For a hypothetical, how would you feel about a game where single target spells and attacks could crit, but AoE ones could not? That actually feels more like the distinction you're making to me, although I could be wrong.

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

I'm not saying that spell critting is always a bad thing, but it's usually a factor of imbalance.

I don't see any reason why spells critting would necessarily be any more a sign of imbalance than attacks critting - particularly ranged attacks, since spells tend to be ranged. This may again be a case of us being exposed to different games, but the general association of spell crit with imbalance is not one I've developed over my gaming life.

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

Spells in PoE cannot miss. They almost always have a secondary effect when they crit, and those secondary effects can be devastating.

This is certainly true, and particularly since the addition of accuracy checks on crits, does present a reason why spell crits are inherently more powerful than non-spell crits in PoE.
Spells not missing never made much sense to me personally - if I were making my own game I'm not sure it would occur to me to have attacks miss and spells not (although using different stats to determine their accuracy would).

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

The chance to crit on daggers should be local, not global, but when I asked Chris why this is the case long ago, the answer was very clear: to give spell-casters more options as weapons. There's no real logic why wielding two otherwise non-magical daggers (two white kris', for example) should make your spells hit any harder; the concept of the dagger as a weapon that enhances critical hits should be tied to the idea that a dagger is a precision weapon.

Thematically, we wanted daggers to work with spells on the basis of the "ritual dagger" which is a longstanding trope, and certainly are sometimes seen as implements of spellcasting. Mechanically, we needed other weapons to work with spells. Design-wise, global crit made sense as a stat that thematically fit the dagger = crit association, and worked with both spells and attacks without giving them two implicits.

Thanks for explaining where you were coming from, it was an interesting read (and I certainly don't disagree with all of it).

On-topic, I think some people do expect too much, some expect to little (and many are probably in both groups with respect to different issues). Certainly the percentage of people who claim to know how easy something is to implement or change and are actually correct is at the very least on the low side - this job has taught me a lot about not assuming I know how another person's code works and what changes make sense.
I think in many cases it isn't so much that people expect too much, but that they expected something different to what they got, and tend to take the position that what they had expected is what should have happened, or even what we actually wanted, and see what we delivered as a failure from that perspective.