[Autumn]

Oh boy another lightning critical thread, I do think since fire was finally touched up upon that the other problem enchantment might need to be finally toned down quite a bit, as someone who's been using lightning criticals for a while now, even I know how overtuned they are in their current state.

As it stands most autohits are balanced around certain numbers, for example a kensei autohit is usually around 140% SWA which is pretty standard, but has additional effects to them like DEF Shred/Ignoring Evasion/Knocking away tiles etc.

Add on lightning criticals to these autohits suddenly and you have the potential to nearly double the damage of it. This is absurd levels of damage and skews certain classes that benefit massively from elemental impacts, like Kensei or Demon Hunter to lean on lightning should they have the stats to support it.

I want to note out that a lightning critical build requires a lot of stats, you need LUC and SKI to crit, and your weapon's scaling, and GUI (OPTIONAL) if you want to scale those crits up, however due to how large the base damage on lightning criticals actually is you probably won't even need absurd levels of GUI.

Here is the end result of all that effort however, a normal hirazuki vs a lightning critical hirazuki.




Its really not that hard to see how high the damage on these can get, and I do think they are overtuned in some fashion.

The build in question being used is a lightning Kensei with 120 SWA and 40 GUI, so I actually have a lot of damage potential here, but the total modifier for the attack is 1.65x due to the base critical damage being 10% and tacking on an additional 15% from talents.

(Stats under spoiler)

This does not only extend to physical variant moves, I believe Rye and Ryemei are also quite a bit of a problem, Overload is its own problem due to recent stat changes.

Onto the points of trying to potentially play against lightning criticals:

Currently the only way to play against lightning criticals is to build critical evade, I don't think this is a very fun way to play against them currently but it is a solid way to actually negate them and protect yourself very well from potentially taking too much damage all at once. However many lightning critical builds are boasting serious crit booster mods like Veil Off/Bloody Karma/Sakki/Lucky Clover all in order to bolster their critical amounts.

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How to address this? Well other than removing the critical damage completely, for starters we could just simply cut out a lot of the extra damage, like was done with Cinders effectively giving tons of damage we'd cull down the damage output by a considerable margin, start with the base damage (10%) and make it start at 0%, after that we move to the talent (15%) and make it 5% instead. (SR*1 instead of SR*3)

That would lower the base damage they boast by 20% and start making it so more and more guile is required to do considerable damage with them, making having dummy fat amounts of SWA much less common in these builds. This would be a good start for the time being but I would also consider halving the GUI bonus damage on top of this if the damage numbers still seem too high.

TL;DR:

Currently redgull based criticals are the best way to boost your damage, you're stacking huge crit modifiers onto already higher than normal scaling attacks. it effectively turns sustained damage into burst damage while still being reliable and thats not okay.