Game is too Critical Strike/Damage while applying status ailments Heavy. Solution Inside

Right now it seems that everyone crits. You'd be hard pressed to not see a character, who hasn't taken resolute technique, who doesn't rely on critical strikes and critical damage multtiplier.

Why is this?

Elemental status ailments, and elemantal damage.

Landing a critical strike with elemental damage AUTOMATICALLY induces the element's ailment effect (shock/burn/freeze). This is problematic cause it's so easy to stack elemental damage (gear mods, auras, and passives), and it's also so easy to stack critical strike chance (gear mods, and passives).

Why is this a problem?

Well, you see I like to look for things that break PoE so I can bring them to the devs attention for consideration, and this is one of them. Critical strikes AUTOMATICALLY triggering status ailments, when elemental damage is involved, makes physical damage and the whole concept behind "Chance to shock/freeze/burn" completely useless.

There is still no reason to stack physical damage, or invest anything into Chance to shock/burn/freeze. It's easy to stack elemental, and critting will automatically trigger shock/burn/freeze.

So why would anyone stack physical damage or even try to use Chance to shock/burn/freeze?

You see pre 0.9.11, i used to crit with lightning damage. My damage was fantastic. Shock stacking while critting? You have no idea. After patch I decided to do something different. This time I wanted to try "Chance to shock". Critting on everything for big damage got boring for me personally :/.

After playing with this new build for so long, and I still am, it hit me. Why would anyone invest into "Chance to ____"? There is absolutely no reason to.

1. How effective status ailments are (shock/freeze/burn) is dependent on the damage dealt in relation to the target's health. When you crit with elemental damage, and have huge critical damage multiplier, not only do you deal a huge damage from the critical strike, the status ailment is also improved. Whereas if you rely on "Chance to ____" with elemental damage, you'll never be as effective as someone who crits with elemental damage.

2. This also gimps physical damage. It's hard to stack physical. MUCH MUCH HARDER. Elemental is too easy. I wanted to make a physical damage only build, but why would I? I can stack elemental easily, and crit. If i crit with physical only my damage still won't be on par with elemental, and I don't get any status ailments. Till this day I have never seen a physical damage only build. Everyone stacks elemental, which is then further elevated by equipping the elemental auras.

3. "x% damage leeched back as life/mana from physical damage" is also useless when you have the support gems mana/life leech. Stack elemental damage, stack critical strike chance, and stack critical damage multiplier. It's bad enough that it's hard to stack physical, but this one is just a nail in the coffin for anyone who would even consider trying to rely on physical. The damage from critting with elemenatal damage with high crit damage multiplier while using the mana/life leech gems is incredible. I would know as my old build used to rely on it :D. 1000000x better than % leeched from physical damage.


Critical striking with elemental damage AUTOMATICALLY applying status ailments renders the "chance to ___" mechanic and physical damage useless. There is a way to fix this, and this is my solution.


1. Critical strikes should only be reliant on physical damage ONLY.
- What does this do? There will actually be a reason to go only physical or stack physical now.
- EVERYONE stacks elemental and crits right now. It's so streamlined and automated. This would separate damage dealing into several types, instead of the tried and true way that it is right now (stack elemental from passives--auras--gear, stack critical strike chance, critical strike multiplier)

2. Since critical strikes would not have anything to do with elemental damage, the "Chance to shock/freeze/burn" mechanic would actually have to be used now. YES THIS MEANS SPELL CASTERS CANNOT CRIT CAUSE CRIT WOULD BE A PHYSICAL DAMAGE COMPONENT ONLY. (Sorry for the caps i know that's the first thing that came to your mind :P).
- Using any elemental damage whatsoever should give you like a 2% base chance to apply it's ailment, and then you would have to increase your chance to shock/freeze/burn by either increasing the quality of the spell (assuming the quality increases it's Chance to ___) or through passives. It's already easy to stack elemental. Critting CONSTANTLY for huge damage cause of crit damage multiplier while AUTOMACIALLY applying status ailments, which are improved due to crit damage/mulplier is just overkill. Getting a high crit chance with high crit damage multiplier is soooooooo easy too.



What these changes do?

(a) Those who want to have a more consistent damage would go elemental. So their damage would be high and consistent.
(b) Those who want to have decent damage, with the chance to deal more would go physical. By doing this they sacrifice the chance to apply status ailments, and their damage also fluctuates. 1 moment it's less than pre elemental builds, the next higher.
(c) Then there would be those who go with a mixture of both.
(d) Spell casters will either go for high elemental damage with little "Chance to ___" or mainly go for "Chance to ___", with not as much elemental damage. The current auto freeze/burn/shock enemies FOREVER cause critting automatically induces status ailment system is broken. You then double it cause the effectiveness of the status ailment is dependent on the damage dealt, which is better when you crit and have high crit damage multiplier. Which is also oh so easy to stack.


Changes that would be made?

1. Add more chance to ___ nodes to the tree. Chance to ___ should be capped at like 25%, and you should have to actually invest in it, just like you have to invest in physical damage, for it to be effective. No +10 or +5 chance to ____ nodes. No, more like +1 with a handful of +2 nodes. People shouldn't be able to just stack elemental, and put 3 points into Chance to nodes and be at 20%. No, an investment should be an investment. This is one of the game's current problems. You have to invest a lot into physical, and you'd still be weak. Pick a couple elemental nodes, get gear with high elemental bonuses which is easy, equip auras, and you're set. Crit chance/damage multipler auto applying ailments is too much.

2. People would need to have a small base chance to apply a status ailments (2%) when using elemental damage.

3. Physical damage buff. Way too hard to stack physical, making it pointless even if crits only applied to it.

4. Spell crit chance will be removed. Spells NOT MISSING, resolute technique comes to mind, is already strong enough, and not having to put points into accuracy gives spellcaster more points to stack more damage, and we all know how easy it is to stack elemental damage. Even without crits, spell casters deal soo much damage easily. Yes, critical strike chance would apply to physical damage only. If not all witches would just go elemental and high crit chance, which will make chance to ____ still useless. The difference from an ice witch stacking elemental damage and a chance to freeze witch would be the first witch dealing more damage with a little chance to freeze while having to kite better cause enemies aren't perma frozen all the time from crits like right now. The chance to freeze witch would deal less damage, but would be more reliant on freezing chance/duration.

(Freezing itself needs to be fixed, but that is for another thread)


These changes would make physical damage actually attractive. Elemental with crit chance/multiplier is the way to go right now. Critical strike damage and multiplier only applying to physical damage would make the physical damage investement, which is a lot, actually worth it.

Chance to ___ is currently useless, just like physical damage. There is no need to ever put a point into it when critting automatically induces status ailments, and the status ailment is strengthened from the crit.


If you delete all the physical damage and Chance to _____ nodes from the tree right now, people won't be affected cause no one who wants big damage, without gimping themselves on purpose like me, invests in physical or Chance to ____. Why choose either or when you can have both by stacking elemental and crit chance/damage multiplier, which will automatically induce ailments when you crit, and those ailments are better when you crit. It's pretty obvious

I mean there is no reason to every put a point in physical or chance to nodes or to not crit. Ever since i threw away my old crit build i rely on chance to shock, and chance to ignite for fire trap. Before I would crit all the time, while shock stacking, and fire trap was auto ignite on hit (chance to ignite was useless to me).

If no changes are made to the current elemental crit heavy gameplay, then the current streamlined gameplay will remain. No amount of change to the tree will do anything, cause the tried and true elemental crit heavy style will always be the most effective. Physical damage nodes and the chance to mechanic might as well be replaced with something else cause they are just on the tree for show.

I'm sorry if I came off as rude. I really like PoE, and I gimp myself on purpose to play styles i have fun with. The builds i want to make aren't gimped because I just want them to be weak. No. It's because once you start to step away from the basic formula, which can be fixed in this case, you automatically hit a huge wall and find yourself going back to **things** you were purposely trying to avoid with this new build.

To preface my response: you're dead right.

However...

I know you feel it'd be overpowered still (maybe), but why not just remove the crit damage bonus from elemental damage and retain the elemental effect? Buff spell and elemental nodes if need be, or not. I think removing crit damage from spells would still be seen as a MASSIVE nerf, and totally risky on GGG's behalf; what you're proposing seems even more drastic than that.

I've never liked it when elemental damage could critical at the same rate as physical in any game. Ever. It leads to so many broken builds. The status ailments of elemental damage right now are pretty devastating: freezing, burning and shocking all quite dramatically affect the enemy, although burning is probably the least effective of the three by itself.

I think removing the crit mechanic from spell damage altogether, as you've suggested would be time-consuming, and then throwing in another mechanic to calculate the chance to inflict status ailments no less so. We have to think right now about potential changes that won't take the devs too long to implement. This is the effective way to get a suggestion noticed and considered -- because the first response is going to be something likw 'do we have time to do that?'

Now, even my suggestion would be quite time consuming. The balancing of the nodes is never an easy thing.

But I completely agree with you that critical+elemental damage=extra damage PLUS status ailment is broken, or at the very least, discourages physical builds. I hate thinking along the lines of 'no matter what my build, these are the things I need' -- and right now, there are two things on that 'must-have' list: stacked life (if not going CI) and elemental damage boosts.

IF you were to remove critting from elemental damage, however, you'd definitely have to buff the basic elemental damage or spell nodes. There's no getting around that, I think. It'd be the only way to justify such a great reduction in the spellcaster's damage output via crits.

There's one last side-effect of this change that actually interests me right now -- it'd give the one and only physical spell, Ethereal Knives, a little bit more of a boost. And goodness knows it needs it.

If you feel your suggestion is superior to mine (and it may well be, I'm just brainstorming here), feel free to poke the necessary holes.

As an afterthought, by your system, the placement of 'chance to inflict status ailment' nodes could be a broad replacement of 'spell crit chance', perhaps. My system might still make it too easy to inflict status ailments. I'm not sure.

Another solution would be to add an ailment for physical crits, perhaps based on each weapon type. Puncture for pointy things, for example. Not sure what blunts would be, since they already have stun and knockback isn't always desired. I'm not that fond of this solution but for the fact that puncture is really limited player-wise right now -- only one skill can inflict it.

In short, I completely agree with you regarding spell crits blowing physical ones out of the water damage-wise, because they shouldn't.

I agree about the imbalance, but you can't take crits away from casters. It emotionally breaks the game for the three int and int-hybrid classes, even if their DPS is comparable to the physical damage builds.

Remember that half the fun of an ARPG is causing mayhem once your character gets powerful. Everyone loves to do a blast of damage, and preferably to one-shot some of the enemies you face. One of the things that fascinated me about WoW players when I was raiding was that some would stack crit even when it was the completely wrong thing to do for their build/spec. Why? Their love of burst damage and big numbers popping up outweighed the fact that they did 1/4 or even 1/3 less damage overall. There is powerful psychology at play with critical strikes in games.

I think what might be simplest is to have the elemental status ailments disconnected from crits. I was really surprised when both critical strikes AND a support gem could trigger burning. There are status ailment nodes and gems and at least for fire spells the status ailment is checked twice, once for %burn chance and once for crits. If both are true, the critical burn is applied. Taking the status ailments off crits might not be too drastic of a game engine change. A critical strike would then be the same for elemental as physical. It would be a %chance to crit modified by the crit damage% with nothing extra attached. Still emotionally satisfying when your fireball drops something in its tracks, but better balanced.

The one big problem is that right now freezing from cold crits is awfully important for kiting. Witches would need "chance to freeze" skill nodes pretty early in the game. Frost witches would be really broken without a skill tree revamp because Breath of Rime is in a bad place. Bow rangers use frost for kiting too, from Hatred aura and gear with added cold damage. There are other ways to kite but the traps are iffy, Freeze Mine is cumbersome and requires two skill slots, and there are enough curse-proof elites to make Temporal Chains unreliable. Not sure how to address it with rangers; I'd rather see the traps improved to be honest.

Oh, the screen would still shake and you'd get all the meaty effects. And as I proposed, your *base* damage would be significantly higher, since you're losing that chance to do double+ damage.

Disconnecting status ailments from crits would be ideal, yes, and I was slightly horrified to learn that's how it worked. I wanted my sword to have a much higher chance to ignite enemies, and the result of that request? Higher crit chance. Well, okay, that's nice, but not really what I wanted.

Then again, I think the status ailment being a result of a crit makes sense, given the percentage chance and the overall devastation of the ailment. Freezing is pretty badass. Chatters proved that before he was very considerably and considerately rebalanced.

If you had 'chance to' nodes, and they were primarily in the caster areas, would this change melee builds as well? Some non-casters are very fond of their status ailments, and you'd potentially be removing that from them unless they were willing to trek across the Skilldrasil.

This is a pretty complicated issue. The problem seems clear cut but the solution, not quite so apparent.

Regarding the kiting: there are of course two stages to cold damage's status ailment: chilled and frozen. You can and often will inflict chilled with cold damage without crits. I think chilled should be enough for kiting, whereas freezing is sort of a 'hey, got you know, SUCKER' type effect.

On that topic, why don't the other two elements have two stages? Other than the fact that they're as easily conceived, this disparity only further demonstrates how much love cold spells/damage got over fire/lightning. Hmph.

A slight tangent, but not entirely disconnected from the argument at hand.

I certainly agree as well. I definitely wish there was a way to get the status ailments WITHOUT the criticals. Of course, I still sorta love when I critical a split shot with 100% pierce, and the screen shakes and all the enemies explode into ice chunks. Very satisfying.

Let me start by saying that I entertain the idea of having some new Passive Skills & Support Gems through which a disconnection between Crit / Status Ailments can be achieved.

Like the Flicker-Strike cooldown, I see this as a nice way of making the game more strategic.

HOWEVER!

During the past months, the game has been made increasingly harder and I'm also extremely dissatisfied by the fact that Chaos Innoculation was returned to 50%, almost annihilating a valid Merciless build.

From one patch to the other, there are less and less ways to succeed in POE on Merciless. Soon, only 2-3 build types will be valid for each class, and, whether you like it or not, this game will become something that only offers the illusion of choice, but even the slightest misstep in the Skilldrasil will ruin your chance of making it on Merciless.

We all know a few games who offer the illusion of choice, don't we?

I'm not saying make it easier, but I strongly oppose any further nerf.

Disconnect? Ok.

Nerf? No.

"

There is still no reason to stack physical damage

yes there is.

here is the first (there are two at least ;) ):

"

3. "x% damage leeched back as life/mana from physical damage" is also useless when you have the support gems mana/life leech.

two support gems that gives you no damage increase is a HUGE deal.
one or two good rolled rare (rings, gloves, amu) will not gimp your dps that hard. with really good rolls you will not even notice.
for some builds warlords mark is a very good option also (flasks, later good endurance charge rate)

"

[...] It's bad enough that it's hard to stack physical, [...]

i dont see this, could you explain this with the skilltree and the typical gems and the typical suffixes/affixes (especially on weapons...) and a typical class that is intended to use physical dmg like maybe duelist or mara or so.



and now the second reasen:

the dealt -% of physical damage increses with increasing physical dmage. ("armor")
the dealt -% of elemental damage is constant with increasing elemental damage ("elemental resistance")


shock buff is only really usefull against highlife monsters like bosses, because you need two hits at least, as far as i know.
freeze is for control
burn is something between that (chance to flee+dot)

i dont say its all fine and balanced, but somehow it works for me.
lot of elementaldmg is based on good physical damage for example. its not some kind 1 dimensional problem. the two ways of dealing damage work together.
i play with about 80% physicaldmg on my toon, and i cant complain about a low killspeed or so.
and i have never seen a caster setting up the pace like Usain Bolt

This is a huge big part of the damage mechanics of this game, if you remove that, the game will be broken,the mechanics you want to add is only a physical damage buff, the game must be fun, and i dont see anything funny that i wanna play in your comments, only change to a "all-physical dmg builds" (thats gonna happen, because like you guys say, is so easy to stack crit and crti dmg, and almost imposible to stack elemental damage if you dont use a physical weapon) and that is so much boring whithout elemental ailment.



Maybe this can be remplace whith another original idea, but not whith this guys, this is a boring mechanic :/.

"

From one patch to the other, there are less and less ways to succeed in POE on Merciless. Soon, only 2-3 build types will be valid for each class, and, whether you like it or not, this game will become something that only offers the illusion of choice, but even the slightest misstep in the Skilldrasil will ruin your chance of making it on Merciless.

We all know a few games who offer the illusion of choice, don't we?

I feel the same way.

Oh my dear god, this idea is incredible.

Just because the pure physical isn't good as every elemental path, the other paths need to be even worse?
Thats your balancing, dumbing things down to be boring?

This idea is all about to make the marauder the best tank, best damage dealer and most fun build with criticals only. A bit overplayed, yes.

This suggestion cant be serious....

Physical allready stuns enemies on every hit. The duration is based on the damage to maxhp ratio.
The pure phys way with strength is not about max damage output, its about a mix of survival and damage with aditional stuns.
So its between the elemental ways.

What you want is phys to be like an all in one element with all advantages at once.

srsly dude -.-

I Like Charans idea of removing crit dmg from elemental attacks while keeping status alignments and improving its base dmg.

Is sure would need some rebalancing around the spell dmg/ele dmg nodes but it would nicely buffout out physical.

Also I would keep the "chance to x" nodes/gems/on skills so elemental no crit based could still burn/freeze/shock from time to time but with lesser effect than crit based ones (f.e crit based would take into calculation how much dmg it would made if it still could crit)

Furhtermore to make non crit ele dmg viable fire and lightining could also have some on hit alignment like chill (but dont realy know what put on them )