Critical Strike Protection: Limited on templars and duelists

One interesting thing i do like about the three defence types is that they all have different ways of protecting against Criticals.

Evasion has its double roll to prevent enemies from scoring crits.
Energy Shield has its very high buffer, preventing criticals from being as likely to oneshot you.
Armour has low critical protection, but is in the strength area of the tree, where 30% critical damage reduction is located.

Now the thing is, it's right at the start of the marauder. This almost seems like it would be good to move it into a place more accesible to duelists and templars without forcing them to take the marauder start, but that got me thinking... it would basically be mandatory to get this node. Armour side of the tree is the only one that doesn't have innate protection against criticals, as criticals are designed to go straight through armour.

So what i propose is something that will help both life-based builds deal with criticals, and make hybrid builds a bit more interesting.

Based on your Life:ES ratio, you will modify the amount of critical damage you take.

At all life and zero ES, you will take 30% reduced extra damage from critical strikes, just like having the two nodes.

At 1:1 you will take 15% reduced extra damage from critical strikes. Having a similar amount of HP and ES is enough to give you a decent buffer, but not a CI or ES level buffer. You get a weaker critical damage reduction to compensate for the buffer not being quite as big.

At 3:1 and above, you will take standard critical damage.

Naturally, the values will scale fully from 0-30%, not just 0, 15, 30.

Yes, this will help evasion builds a bit more than armour ones, but hey, evasion could use a little bit of a boost that isn't just higher percentage. Big crits are the main reason people don't like playing evasion, so being able to cut down on them by being pure HP would be a nice benefit without increasing their actual evade %.

Are you talking about pvp, or pvm? If you mean PVM, then:

Monsters normally have a crit multiplier of 130%, and a crit chance of 5%. Against normal monsters, the two crit reduction nodes reduce the crit multiplier to 121%. So your EHP against most monsters from those nodes is increased by less than 1%.

Those nodes are only really even remotely worthwhile against the enemies with increased crit strikes and crit dmg, and even then they are only useful to slightly lessen spike dmg. Even against an enemy with 300% crit multiplier who crits every time, the nodes only reduce the multiplier to 240%. So you take 20% less damage from those crits.

I don't know what it's like for most players, but I get hit with a crit that I actually notice is different from a normal hit about once a week or so. In high level maps the enemies hurt a lot more, but most players on those maps are massively over-levelled and won't die to a rare crit-boosted enemy even if they do crit.

So really, your feedback only seems like it's relevant to the top level of harcore players who want to be absolutely sure than some unlucky crit from a map boss won't kill them.

The difference between 1.3 and 1.21 can actually be 500+ damage on high hits.

If 9% of the dmg is 500, then 121% of it will be 6.7k

So unless you have Kaom's (or, as you say, ES), you'll still die to the reduced crit.

So Critical Strikes would just be a disadvantage for Energy Shield?

"

PolarisOrbit wrote:

So Critical Strikes would just be a disadvantage for Energy Shield?

Learn to read. I'm not going to say anything more than that. The answer has already been given.

So if ES is a workable defense against critical strikes due to the buffer, what about additional health? It seems to me that the strength third of the tree is pretty good about providing health, both in the starting areas and as additional nodes. Also because STR grants flat amounts, which combines well with the % boosts found across most of the tree.

Just going to say, the reduction from this critical strike dmg only has an effect on the very high end of hits. In general, crits from mobs are not significantly threatening

Seems too fiddly and unintuitive. Those nodes arent really out of the way for life/armor stacking duelists/templars anyway, since theyll probably want the mara life line and possibly restech and will already be in the area.

"

Xendran wrote:

"

PolarisOrbit wrote:

So Critical Strikes would just be a disadvantage for Energy Shield?

Learn to read. I'm not going to say anything more than that. The answer has already been given.

Just because you say something is balanced doesn't mean it is. You might make better suggestions if you were open minded.

Or at least one that would be worth learning to read.