Crit vs. Non-crit Builds : Do non-crit builds need a buff?

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Tsokushin wrote:

I'll be examining in-depth current game state across both spells and damage with regards to critical damage.

First off, let's go over exactly what crit has over non-crit builds:

Higher potential leech: Very simple facet. Crit large once, get tons of leech in just a single hit. Makes for easy recovery with less risk as you only need to land something once.

Guaranteed Elemental Status Effects: This is the largest boon crit has over non-crit. You no longer need to worry about hunting down Ignite, Freeze, Shock chance modifiers, you simply stack enough Critical Chance and then you simply go to town on enemies. This simplifies curses as you only need to either run Assassin's Mark or Elemental Weakness if capped, whereas a non-elementalist build will have to utilize the respective elemental curses to boost that chance.

Far Higher Damage Potential: You can stack critical strike multiplier until the cows come home, which often ends up being a far larger damage boost in comparison to many of the "more" multipliers available in the game. This is further exacerbated due to any baseline additional damage is further enhanced by all of these critical multipliers.

It is because of these two effects that we see the current possibilities in Vaal RF being capable of one-shotting end-game bosses. Now, while Vaal RF may indeed itself be nerfed, these colluding factors are still a large boon towards critical strike builds overall. This is especially seen in anything dealing with fire, as ignite is guaranteed on critical damage and is always affected by the initial hit.

Critical strikes always have higher damage hits than non-critical strike builds except in the few rare cases of melee attacks and 2handers. This, however, is a very rare occurance.


Now, these are all the boons to critical strikes. It's quite a boost over non-critical strike builds. What's more disturbing however, is that right in the middle of writing all of this, I was attempting to plan out the thoughts about the boons of non-crit builds but it just all falls apart when in comparison.

It's absurdly easy to reach crit-cap nowadays with anything except 2h maces and 2h axes. Even with those two, it's still obtainable to hit 50-80% which is either comparable or more dps to all non-crit builds utilizing them.

But, what can be done? Nerfing crit builds is out of the question, as it's important to give more tools to the player rather than take away, but I think some of the current options are already in the game.

Elemental Overload: This keystone is probably key to buffing non-crit builds, not in its specific purpose but instead in its format. We essentially need more passive nodes or reworked nodes that will provide more damage at the expense of crit multiplier. Elemental overload can itself possibly be buffed to 50-60% and not have a crit trigger requirement. Just a flat buff to non-crit builds.

Physical damage, or perhaps 2h maces and 2h axes themselves which already have the lowest crit chance, can definitely use a physical damage equivalent of Elemental Overload.

I am by no means saying that non-crit builds should be buffed to be equal to critical damage builds. Critical strikes should always be king. But, non-crit builds can use a definite buff.

TL;DR : Crit has too much stuff compared to non-crit. Give non-crit builds more damage at expense of crit multiplier like elemental overload.

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Axarion wrote:

Leech has nothing to do with crit at all. If you do more damage you leech more.

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crit is 100% better but.. is pretty easy to build. compared to what used to be in open beta. main change is accuracy (it is way easier now to reach acceptable hit/second - thanks to accuracy buff and general attack speed increase)

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sidtherat wrote:

much QQ

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Bataille wrote:

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sidtherat wrote:

much QQ

Isn't it ironic..

Crit is fine. RT could use some love, yes. 1h melee on the left side of the tree is in a bad place right now, but they already announced buffs so we'll see how that goes...

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Ueblesding wrote:

Last season i played with emberwake and had zero crits and my char did the same dmg as my crit char this season.

Crit is easy to push but there are a lot of non crit builds out there that out dmg crit builds.

The biggest down side on crit builds is reflect. Even a normal map without - max resi, you suddenly see how you drop nearly instant dead and know oh there was a reflect mob. With tanky mobs or -max resi you are just dead...vaal pact doesnt anything if the reflected crit is way higher than the amount you leeched...

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Phrazz wrote:

...1H non-crit physical Duelist or Marauder... How's your damage?