[Trexmaster]

TL;DR I believe Critical should have more active, class agnostic tools to deal with C.Evade rather than altering C.Evade into DR. That way Critical builds can play their favorite class combo but still get access to support to help them achieve reasonable Critical percentages.

The major difference between C.Evade and Evade is that Evade has plenty of ways to entirely bypass it, whereas C.Evade just has the one at the moment (Desperado Striker).

Otherwise they're similar in that if you cannot surmount them your build is dead in the water. This dynamic makes it very unfun when so few builds actually have the ability to function when walled by either.

As time goes by I have noticed rather than getting greater build diversity and more options to play with, we get less and less, at least when it comes to what performs the best/is competitive. It is rare when we get something new that isn't demanded to be taken away from us when it performs well.

To the point of the topic, as I broke down a little over a year ago, while Critical possesses a select few massive buffs they're either situational (Bloody Karma/Volley Formation) or very short (Veil Off). Most of the time the highest amount of Critical you can reasonably muster in combat is going to be around 40-50~. It's a similar conundrum to what Evade deals with except Critical has not received any class agnostic support until Deadly Shades over the past few years.

Thus you're either stuck only having 20-30~ Critical you can get extra or you're forced to play the select few combinations that can stack enough Critical to reliably get past the higher end of C.Evade in an environment that now heavily encourages FAI builds.

I hope for build freedom for all archetypes. It's why it's difficult for me to sign off on a solution to the current Critical v C.evade problem in good faith. Converting it into DR is about as good as it gets without any massive overhauls but as mentioned Fleur exists to ruin everything for everyone as usual on top of the aforementioned On Crit effects. It'd be like if Evade got converted into DR and everyone got to hit each other automatically...oh wait that was just GR1. Anyway.

One thing that came to mind is potentially changing Dark Water Vials into applying a status effect that treats the afflicted as being on Dark Water on top of allowing them to be reused from the same item slot. Even this isn't a perfect solution of course as this would have farther reaching ramifications to anyone who isn't a Solblader, but I believe it's a good example of the kind of tools Critical builds should have to help them fight against C.Evade more actively without having to be a specific class combination to have a chance. C.Evade already has Fulgurite and technically Tetraite if the fight is less than 4-5 rounds. Magic stones were a mistake.