Critical Weakness

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The stat description on this skill is incorrect (fixed in 0.9.5). It is not an increase to the critical strike chance, but an addition. This is why it seems ridiculously low compared to other things which increase critical strike chance (that are in fact percentage increases).

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Epicurwin wrote:

I'm a little confused are you saying that if you have 10% on a spell it would make it 15% instead of 10.5%?

Yes.

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Xapti wrote:

I noticed critcal weakness used to say increased damage on critical hits, but now says increased critical multiplier... What's the difference? Is it just adding 1.5x the multiplier % to the existing multipler percentage? If so, that is a ridiculously huge nerf to critical weakness.

I don't recall a dev ever mentioning that the increased damage on critical weakness would be changed to me added critical multiplier... how does it work?

I believe it was always affecting the multiplier, the description was just misleading, and was fixed up for 0.9.5 with the stat description redo.

I'll get back to you after the weekend when I can double-check formulas and things at work.

The level 1 gem has a value of 50%. This is applied to the same stat you get from the passive to reduce enemy critical strike multiplier on you, except this applies a positive, rather than negative, percentage. It's effectively giving the monster "50% increased enemy critical strike multiplier on you". This means it's additive with other sources of the same stat (e.g. someone in PVP with those passives).

Because this is applied to someone else's stat, the value of that stat is determined, and then this modification applied. That is, your critical multiplier, including all modifications is worked out, and then the enemy's modification to it is applied, if any. It's not possible for the monster's stats to affect the internal calculation of your own stats, it has to affect the final value of the stat which comes out.

So if you cast it on a monster to increase the multiplier on them by 50%, and then attack them with a critical strike multiplier of 150%, then the 50% modification is appled to the 50% part which is above 100% (as of a change in 0.9.5 in how modifiers to enemy critical strike multiplier work), meaning you end up hitting with an effective 175% multiplier.

If your multiplier had been 500%, this would make it 700%, etc.

I'm not at all sure how you concluded that people with higher crit chance benefit less from this - it's increasing the damage you deal on each crit, and thus will always be better with higher crit chance than lower. Similarly, since it's a percentage increase to the multiplier, it will always be better with a higher multiplier than a lower one.

You are almost correct in that under the pre-0.9.5 way of increasing the whole multiplier it was very nearly functionally equivalent to just increasing critical damage, except for the fact that it's an additive enemy critical multiplier modification and that would matter in PVP (or if something else was able to give the monsters that stat, either positive or negative). So it's not the same, but there were no cases where it was different unless you were attacking other players.

I hope this clears things up a bit, please let me know if you have further questions.

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Xapti wrote:

Thanks for taking the time to address this.

One thing didn't seem to be entirely addressed though.

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Xapti wrote:

to be accurate and to follow proper wording this game seems to be using, it should say "total critical multiplier" instead of just "critical multiplier".

Can you comment on if you think the current name is appropriate? I consider it to be misleading.

If not "total critical multiplier", maybe "more critical multiplier" or something (since that seems to be used as well).

"Total" is not used for anything - it was used temporarily before 0.9.5 cleared up descriptions for the multiplicative ones, basically because Rory just put something in so they'd have a description and actually working out how to really describe them was left for the big change to the system.
"Increased" (and "decreased") means additive with other increases of the same type.
"More" (and "less") means multiplicative with other increases of the same type.

This is, technically, "increased" - it's additive with other changes to the same stat, but I do understand why it can feel like it's not - it's additive with other stats doing what it does (modifying the enemy's critical strike multiplier against you), but not with the enemy's stats which affect his multiplier. This brings it into a sort of middle ground in a way, and we haven't worked out the best way to make things clear yet - but "increased" technically fits more than "more" because it is inherently an additive stat. That said, I'd like to be able to make things more clear at some point. My current preferred option is to bring "total" back into the vocabulary to refer to stats which take affect on the final value of something after it's worked out - so this one would be something like "increased total enemy critical strike multiplier". There are a few cases where this comes up, basically because one entity's stats can't affect another's, they can only be used to modify the final value of it.
The ways it's described in the curse (where it's something you're doing which puts a stat on the enemy which means they affect the total critical strike multiplier of enemies hitting them) is more complicated still, but rest assured it's on my list to review.
On the whole I think it's okay for now at this point, but I would like to see it improved, yes.

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Xapti wrote:

Regarding critical multiplier in general (not on this curse), I think it would be more simple for a layperson to understand if the modifiers were described as "added multiplier percentage" or even "percentage points", and then increase the values by 50%.

ex. "60% increased critical multiplier" would be "+60% to critical multiplier" or better yet "additional 60 percentage points to critical multiplier" (which is obviously a bit long).
This way if a player sees 60% increased critical multiplier, they don't need to do 2 math calculations in their head (150% of 60%, then add that value to their current multiplier), they just need to add the value (90% in this case) to their critical multiplier, which is a far easier math calculation than multiplication.
Multipliers make sense in some scenarios such as when the base changes, but when your base value is a percentage, and the mods are always based off the base value (and not the current/previous/net value) then there's really no use for having it. 12% increased multiplier will always be +18% multiplier, no exceptions.

The base is not always the same. If you support a minion gem with the increased critical multiplier gem, then it's applying to a different base :P
That said, your idea has some merit if such corner cases don't lead to balance issues should we change it to an addition. I'll discuss with Carl and Chris at some point.

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Xapti wrote:

Thanks. Really prompt reply too, lol. In fact I had something else to add that I would have just edited in if you hadn't already answered the original post.

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I'm not at all sure how you concluded that people with higher crit chance benefit less from this - it's increasing the damage you deal on each crit, and thus will always be better with higher crit chance than lower. Similarly, since it's a percentage increase to the multiplier, it will always be better with a higher multiplier than a lower one.

Not always.
The most extreme example is if a character had 91% critical chance, and 150% critical multiplier, compared to a character who had 5% critical chance and 1100% critical multiplier.
While the curse always helps someone, whether they have a low or high critical chance or multiplier or both, it does not always help them by the same amount.

In the example, almost tripling the chance of a critical trumps out the fact that it's increasing the critical multiplier by a huge amount. The gains from the multiplier is a certain percent, but the gains from the critical chance increase is a much larger amount.

I concluded this based off math — it's just the way the cookie crumbles when an absolute additive mod is used instead of a multiplier.
Taekvideo's spreadsheet even shows this phenomenon

I'm aware that multiplier and chance affect it differently, I meant changing one independant of the other. I was referring to this part:

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Xapti wrote:

For someone who specializes in critical attacks, they would have a much much higher critical chance, let's say 33.8% chance, and hence get REDUCED benefit of using this curse compared to if they had a lower critical chance.

Where it appeared to me you were claiming that regardless of multiplier, increasing critical chance was reducing the benefit. That confused me.

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