[Fern]

(TL;DR at bottom.)

There's a reason people say Lightning Kensei is the only good Kensei. The other elemental impacts are fairly lacking in comparison to lightning when it comes to Kensei, that's right, but they're also not too useful in general. Specially Quaking, which has it worst.

If Lightning gets too nerfed, Kensei enters the territory of 'weak class' once again. Onto the main point, though.

People shouldn't be able to freely ignore their critical evade like they did prior to the tank adjustments that happened recently. If lightning criticals become far less threatening, then people will feel much safer ignoring their critical evade entirely in favor of more general DR again. Critical builds should hurt people that they can crit, but that's my opinion.

Keep in mind weapon critical isn't accounted for in lightning crits, too. It goes off your base critical rate, then additions from Fulgurmancy talent (+10 critical) and other statuses such as Poise, the Kensei debuff, etc.

Hirazuki is the biggest physical lightning crit damage in the game that I know of, besides melee Execute which is more situational. It removes the target's damage reduction with Fray before calculating damage, so it's bound to get fairly high numbers when you do manage to pull it off.

That is, if the person isn't actively avoiding that even on a non-critical evade build by either knock down spamming you, kiting you or slowing you down with other forms of control. Or even removing your critical rate through debuffs, or simply not allowing you to have the momentum to crit combo into Wazabane > Hirazuki.

Most lightning crit autohits do lightning damage, which are also cushioned by anyone running a decent amount of lightning resist. Chaser, Execute and Kensei autos are the exceptions off the top of my head, where Chaser/Execute use your original weapon damage type and Kensei does slash/pierce damage. Hirazuki is less easier to conveniently shrug off because it means you have to do the usual Canvas + Sayakana set up or do all cloth if you really want to stop it alongside most sources of pierce damage.

Out of the current critical modifiers that I can personally consider huge, I can only list Veil Off and Bloody Karma. Veil Off is far easier to pull off than the latter because you only need to get smacked with decent magic damage once for your Void Energy to be capped, whereas Bloody Karma requires you to actively spend momentum to refresh it if the person removed it with Cleanse Potion or other sources of dispelling. While Bloody Karma provides more total critical than Veil Off does, it's also a bit more rough to maintain. Not to mention you can also dispel Veil Off with an universally accesible item known as Requinite if you really wanted them to not have crits.

I can agree in that Overload does an absurd amount of damage without Charge Mind and when it goes off it can almost instantly murder most people, compared to all the other Evoker invocations before CM. But I can't agree with Rye and Ryemei being as offensive as Overload when they're single target and require RNG to even pull out their pseudo-nuke potential. They're -good- in 1v1, but lightning mage usefulness drops down a lot in groups when they're often the first to die due to not being able to invest much into survival.

And if lightning were to be hypothetically nerfed to the ground, people would just move on to the next thing. Mages wanting to hurt people keep moving onto Explosion spam in order to smack big groups, for example, if Rye/Ryemei were to get slapped hard. Duelists would likely move straight to Wind/Raging since it's the next best thing they can get due to the extra range in a world where lightning is not as good anymore. Damage stacking is not too hard and you can see similar numbers from things that aren't lightning pretty often, usually from other magic. Custom spells being the easiest way.






I'm not okay, personally, with lightning being nerfed too much. I'd rather the other elemental impacts be made slightly better, Quaking specially, so there's less reason to full focus on magic for the meta spectrum of things. Since as it stands, magic tends to be more damaging that lightning crits are with custom tomes and technically with knockdown seed spammers as well, specially against evade characters. A lightning critical build versus a custom tome with knockdown would suffer because they are normally investing evade stats as a lightning user and as we all already know, being knocked down as an evade character in front of a mage or autohitter is a death sentence. Custom tomes, in special, since they already break from 400 to 900~ Impure Element damage depending on how much you're optimizing for the damage it'll dish out. Not that you need Impure Element for them to be good - the seeds are a good pocket nuke regardless.

If lightning absolutely needed a nerf, I'd say the one it could get is it not being able to lightning critical when the target procs Evasion! red text. Not only it makes sense because you didn't even score a direct hit, but it also gives dodgies a little bit of an extra oomph. (EDIT) It also provides another universally accesible counterplay to the mix. (/EDIT)

Alternatively just make Hirazuki not apply Fray before damage, but that would be pretty cruel on Kensei and its other elemental impact versions I'd say.

Also, as far as I know, physical DR can go into the negatives with Fray. Something to keep in mind for that Prinny test if it's still the case, since he has no DR and if it still works that way you're getting +15% damage on him.
TL;DR if it really needs a nerf just make it not lightning critical against Evasion red text.

EDIT: Added a small line I forgot to mention.