[Autumn]

So I just did some napkin math for this. The actual effect the torso has isn't very intuitive because it's a flat modifier to a multiplicative damage source; ie, it's not purely 25% DR against low-power crits.

The formula for critical damage is essentially base damage multiplied by the critical rate, or D(1+0.01x), where D is the damage before crits and x is the critical modifier. The formula for critical damage reduced by the torso is D(1+0.01(x-25)). With fancy math shenanigans, we can divide the new damage by the old damage, reduce it, and come up with something that looks like y=(0.75+0.01x)/(1.00+0.01x) to see how much effective damage resistance this item gives based on the user's effective critical damage.

You can even graph it if you want, but effectively, at 50% critical damage, you receive 16.7% DR. At 100% critical damage, like daggers can easily achieve, you would receive 12.5% DR against crits. Powerful and useful, but still situational and even in those situations, not gamebreaking like this thread would lead you to believe.

In short, stop kneejerking about new items actually being potentially useful before even seeing how they affect the game.

No one has ever said that it ever decreased someone's damage by 25%, even the effective DRs you have listed are really strong to just have on a torso slot item, keeping in mind Lucky Amulet had to be changed for some of the exact reasons as this (which can stack additively with this item slot as well.)

Additionally, this still screws over weapons with lower critical damage the most, which is a very wide spectrum of weapons when you consider that Swords/Spears/Fists/Bows are worth building Crit for, but usually not critical damage, opting into SWA instead, this affects their damage FAR FAR more than daggers, daggers are unironically the least affected by this torso armor despite being a mitigation tool vs critical damage. The fact that Lucky Amulet before could make those weapon classes useless for gaining critical damage with meant it HAD to be changed.

I don't think anyone is quite knee jerking here, and at least I am saying that the effect is powerful and cool but is deserving of a condition, quite frankly I think dismissing people's thoughts on items as kneejerk reactions without a good reason to doesn't add anything constructive to the thread.