Critical Hits and AoEs

I was playing a witch today and I noticed that the crit rolls for my AoE spells are determined when I cast a spell, not individually for each target of the spell.

I'm not sure if I like this so much. Part of the reason I specced my witch for high crit is so that if I used AoE on a mob I'd be guaranteed a crit or two, and thus using AoEs to thin out large mobs with one or two casts before using more single target spells.

As it is, I either have to cast the spell five times, or I cast it once and everything just dies. I suppose performance spikes are part of the appeal of critical hits but I can't help but feel there's a sacrifice in subtlety here.

Is there any reason it's designed like this? Because I think it definitely changes the way certain builds will play.

Wow you read my mind ! I intended to make a thread about this today but you were the quickest :D

I don't like this mechanic either, mainly because it doesn't make sense from the true definition of a critical hit.

I'd also like to know the reasons behind such a design...
I guess it's because the "on crit" mods and effects would be harder too balance. But if you cap these at one maximum proc per attack/cast, it should be ok with little balance tweaking. You just have to consider that a crit build that uses aoe will crit every attack/cast.

Back on the current mechanic, it's even weirder considering the critical weakness curse that raises the critical hit chance for cursed mobs. Then it means that we can actually hit several mobs in aoe while not critical hiting all of them. So it's not a technical issue...

yeah, I asked this question a few days ago, but I can't find my post :-/

anyway, I was also wondering how the crit is calculated if a mob has Critical Weakness and others don't.

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kodr wrote:

anyway, I was also wondering how the crit is calculated if a mob has Critical Weakness and others don't.

The cast itself doesn't determine the crit. There is simply 1 chance-to-crit roll per cast, the result of which is then applied against each enemy individually. It's possible for a single cast to crit on some enemies, but not others.

mmmh so, the skill rolls a number and compares it with each enemies?

It compares it to whatever crit resistance or vulnerability each enemy has. Here's a quote from Mark explaining Critical Weakness:

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mark_ggg wrote:

The skill (this applies to all skills, not just spells, with only a few weird exceptions) uses the same crit roll for all it's hits, but if some of the monsters are easier to crit, then that roll could result in a crit on some monsters and not a crit on others.
If your chance to crit the cursed monsters is 15%, and against the non-cursed monsters is 5%, and the crit roll happens to be 10, then you'll crit against only the cursed monsters.

Still, one crit roll par cast doesn't make sense.

A critical hit is when you hit an ennemy's weak spot. You can't make one roll and say, "Nice roll ! I'm gonna hit all their weak spot with one attack" ...

Yes, it doesn't fit real-world logic. It was made as a mechanical change for balance. I doubt it will be changed back, unless they do a great amount of reworking crit chances. It would still be too exploitable for AoE users if they didn't change the base crits on many skills, and especially the amount you can get from passives.

It's not so much the real world logic that bugs me. So is the balance issue related to certain on-critical bonuses then, or is it something else?

As far as I know, it was changed because the Surgeon's flask mod was making it very easy to never run out of flask charges. There could be more on-crit things being planned that would also make this system necessary.