[Autumn]

I have no problems with raising weapon critical damage to be roughly equal but this thread is phrased as if this will make STR crit builds outside of axes more comfortable with their stats when that honestly won't be the case even if this change were to go through? I personally don't think the stat spread would change at all, it'd just be a small damage boost for these builds.

LUC is the biggest tax that Crit builds NEED for an actual chance to crit unless they have access to a plethora of innate crit chance buffs and equipment, typically requiring 30 points of investment to be functional. Axes are blessed with equipment that can let them ignore building LUC while also having a talent that innately boosts their Crit unlike any other weapon. So I'd rather see a combination of critical damage and critical rates for these weapons in particular; either by giving STR some crit chance or by boosting these weapons' crit chances via means of weapon parts or base stats.

I phrase it this way mostly because in my opinion I feel as though building for SWA and Crit is pretty manageable just like how a VA building for GUI and crit is pretty manageable too, having to go LUC a lot of the time does suck and LUC very desperately needs a buff separately to a crit damage increase, it'd probably be better for the game of the stats were just merged into one at this point since either can be considered inefficient in some ways.

I try to always build for having "Enough" damage, and while raising the general damage of these weapons will increase what "Enough" could be, I also think that the nature of how crit damage feels when scaling earlier on than later on helps control what a respectable amount of GUI should be in this case, as you could consider the stat to be a lot like LUC in it's later stages, kind of inefficient.

That's why I think that 20-25 GUI would be more common place than 40+ GUI in some cases, as for axes losing their identity, I don't think so, as I said before they have the aforementioned Spiked Axehead and Deadliness available for a base 140% crit mod instead of 125%.

LUC only contributing about 30-40 of your crit does suck though and needs to be addressed at some point, it should be a bigger chunk than that.