[Autumn]

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.

Opinions aside for a moment but, this statement just confuses me; it seems like you're implying critical damage has some sort of drop off the higher it goes outside of diminishing returns built into the game for each stat. This is completely false and even in the opening of the thread you mention it scales linearly, which is contradictory to the implication I'm getting here.

I'm not necessarily saying it has a drop off the higher it goes, but I do feel as though once you're starting to hit in the 200-250s or so you've gotten more than enough damage and so it starts to feel a bit more inefficient to me, that's mostly what it is, it doesn't fall off no and it's my mistake for framing it that way, its more so that going from 1.1x to 1.2x feels a bit more impactful than going from 1.5x to 1.6x as comparatively the former gains more damage percentage wise. Polk has expressed how I feel in a good way as well.

Concerning your opinion, I understand building for enough damage; but phrasing it as if it'll help stat leniency when it's not an objective requirement to play the build is a bit misleading. LUC is a required tax on almost all critical builds and having two damage stats (STR/GUI) that do nothing to alleviate it often means these builds run short on stat points. While daggers have both damage stats in one, they don't feel the LUC tax as badly.

If you want to alleviate the STR crit tax, you need to address the fact that these builds suffer with critical hit rates outside of axes; buffing LUC would benefit everyone and still keep most of the underlying issue. Hence why I believe these weapons should not only get a critical damage buff, but also increase their critical stats via means of weapon parts or base stat increases; that or giving STR some critical chance + reducing the value of axe support such as the talent and berserker shell.

Regarding this though, does not dropping the GUI tax to do damage achieve kind of the same result? I feel as though if you measure the game towards having tons of free crit, then LUC will just fall off super hard and not really be built for anything, where as GUI still is built for 2 weapon types, farshot and trickery chances. I'd like the game to be steered towards the choice of building one or the other, or both, and while some builds can build for GUI but no LUC, many cannot build for LUC but no GUI without feeling like they're dealing too little damage.

I don't agree with giving STR critical chance anymore given that its already a fairly strong stat numerically and that I've noticed that LUC is the weaker stat of the two in crit builds, STR was already the strongest stat in the game for a couple years before GR2 set everything haywire again.  I feel as though LUC could use 1.5 Crit per point instead of 1, as giving STR crit will just see LUC drop in usage a lot of the time. I also feel like a lot of the issues with crit can be attributed to underwhelming crit mechanics in the classes that focus on it like Duelist/Ghost/Firebird/MG which do need some fine tuning to how they achieve their crit rates, I'll also throw in DH in there too cause its a weird hybrid of specials and basics.

I haven't acknowledged much the weapons aside from spears having bad crit rates because they mostly share the same space as axes when it comes to actual crit rate, you know aside from Zerker shell shenanigans (Which I can't deny), axes pay for their crit advantage with a hit disadvantage, which both all 3 of Swords/Spears/Fists can remedy quite effectively with some really good additional hit rate buffs, I'd like to keep my post as concise and less rambly as possible but their weapon parts share a lot of similarities in actual stat amounts, with spears being on the lower end and swords/fists being on the higher end, the one thing I'd give to Spears mostly is making Barbed Spearhead 10 crit to match cutting axehead/razor blade, that does seem genuinely unfair for them.

Summarizing my opinion mostly on what you've brought up here, is like I was attempting to say before, I think that there's a lot of little parts that make them inferior to some other weapons, rather than trying to nail down 1 issue I'd probably like it better if a few of them were addressed individually.