[Autumn]

Oh boy another lightning critical thread, I do think since fire was finally touched up upon that the other problem enchantment might need to be finally toned down quite a bit, as someone who's been using lightning criticals for a while now, even I know how overtuned they are in their current state.

As it stands most autohits are balanced around certain numbers, for example a kensei autohit is usually around 140% SWA which is pretty standard, but has additional effects to them like DEF Shred/Ignoring Evasion/Knocking away tiles etc.

Add on lightning criticals to these autohits suddenly and you have the potential to nearly double the damage of it. This is absurd levels of damage and skews certain classes that benefit massively from elemental impacts, like Kensei or Demon Hunter to lean on lightning should they have the stats to support it.

I want to note out that a lightning critical build requires a lot of stats, you need LUC and SKI to crit, and your weapon's scaling, and GUI (OPTIONAL) if you want to scale those crits up, however due to how large the base damage on lightning criticals actually is you probably won't even need absurd levels of GUI.

Here is the end result of all that effort however, a normal hirazuki vs a lightning critical hirazuki.




Its really not that hard to see how high the damage on these can get, and I do think they are overtuned in some fashion.

The build in question being used is a lightning Kensei with 120 SWA and 40 GUI, so I actually have a lot of damage potential here, but the total modifier for the attack is 1.65x due to the base critical damage being 10% and tacking on an additional 15% from talents.

(Stats under spoiler)

This does not only extend to physical variant moves, I believe Rye and Ryemei are also quite a bit of a problem, Overload is its own problem due to recent stat changes.

Onto the points of trying to potentially play against lightning criticals:

Currently the only way to play against lightning criticals is to build critical evade, I don't think this is a very fun way to play against them currently but it is a solid way to actually negate them and protect yourself very well from potentially taking too much damage all at once. However many lightning critical builds are boasting serious crit booster mods like Veil Off/Bloody Karma/Sakki/Lucky Clover all in order to bolster their critical amounts.

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How to address this? Well other than removing the critical damage completely, for starters we could just simply cut out a lot of the extra damage, like was done with Cinders effectively giving tons of damage we'd cull down the damage output by a considerable margin, start with the base damage (10%) and make it start at 0%, after that we move to the talent (15%) and make it 5% instead. (SR*1 instead of SR*3)

That would lower the base damage they boast by 20% and start making it so more and more guile is required to do considerable damage with them, making having dummy fat amounts of SWA much less common in these builds. This would be a good start for the time being but I would also consider halving the GUI bonus damage on top of this if the damage numbers still seem too high.

TL;DR:

Currently redgull based criticals are the best way to boost your damage, you're stacking huge crit modifiers onto already higher than normal scaling attacks. it effectively turns sustained damage into burst damage while still being reliable and thats not okay.

[Mr.SmileGod]

Redgull effects are infinitely better than any other in almost every case, given this. Take Earth for example: in most cases, it's just 10 extra damage. While Redgull gives the potential for an insane percentage more? Honestly, I'd be just fine with it being reduced down to crit chance for just a flat 10% bonus, 15% with the talent. But I can see why other people might not be willing to go that far with it.

Definitely okay with this suggested change, either way.

[MakeshiftWalrus]

With fire's recent nerf, lightning now rules supreme in terms of damage, and I think this would be a good start to bring lightning onto a more level field with the other elements. The stat investment generally doesn't matter much, as most of the people who take Redgull these days are people who stat in such a manner anyway for their optimal build.

I think wind, and earth in particular could use some better tuning overall, but that's for a different topic all together. I agree with the above-mentioned numbers.

[Snake]

GUI should probably only be half as effective on that.

Or, if the enemy triggers Evasion, the lightning critical will be denied.

[Neus]

Yeah, I figured I'd have to adjust Lightning next. Still thinking about how exactly I want to do it, so feel free to continue to discuss.

[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.

[Kameron8]

...omitted for brevity...

I fundamentally disagree with a few points you've brought up here.

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.

Or even removing your critical rate through debuffs, or simply not allowing you to have the momentum to crit combo into Wazabane > Hirazuki.

The topic shouldn't be framed as an issue with Kensei -- it isn't, it's an issue with the disproportionate damage output lightning criticals do when compared with almost everything else in the game. Kensei is excellent at leveraging lightning criticals, but the logic should never be to leave a broader system (lightning criticals) alone because of narrower impacts with something else entirely (Kensei will be bad without lightning criticals). If a class was only able to function when using a single mechanic like that, it's a class that needs fundamental changes, not to keep its crutch. This also applies in reverse: we shouldn't keep a broken system as is because one other outlier is comparable (e.g. Custom Seed spells). Both should be addressed.

As it stands, classes who can use two-handed swords with 140-170 Scaled Weapon Attack obviously benefit more from lightning crits than classes that use tomes or non-two-hand-viable weapons.

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.

I don't disagree with the premise that critical hits should hurt people with no critical evade. However, how easy it is for critical builds to crit and how much they hurt them when they do crit are the two points of interest as far as the thread is concerned. The critting autohit system is far less risky than Evade vs. Hit: instead of risking a miss entirely when trying to crit your counterpart, Lightning Crit vs Crit Evade's stakes are risking doing less damage or getting lucky enough to dunk the guy for almost double damage. The counter doesn't always accomplish something, and when it does, it's far less impactful than its counterpart (dodging a basic attack completely).

Most lightning crit autohits do lightning damage, which are also cushioned by anyone running a decent amount of lightning resist.

Lightning is one of the hardest elements in the game to resist, since it's one of the few without shoes or accessories that provide 30% flat resist. Outside of (likely) tanking your build to wear a Beldam Aegis, the best you're going to get is materials, Cloaks of Many Color, Sanctity, and maybe a class-based resistance if you're running something like Lantern Bearer.

Additionally, the implementation of Soaked gives the element a unique means of fighting the scarce resists, if the lightning user uses or teams up with Tactician/Spell Thief/Ranger/etc.

And if lightning were to be hypothetically nerfed to the ground, people would just move on to the next thing.

This is inevitable regardless of what good thing gets nerfed. It doesn't mean overpowered things shouldn't be nerfed, the goal is to shorten the distance between the best things and everything else, so the difference isn't so glaring.

TL;DR:
Issues:

• Lightning crits do too much damage compared to other autohits.
  
• Lightning crits offer more damage than basic attack crits, without inheriting the risk of missing an evasive target completely. Basic attack crits have the worst of both worlds.
  
• Elemental Impacts are so powerful that it's almost unheard of to run autohit-centric classes without them, where supported.
  

After saying all of this, though, it isn't as though I have some magical fix to the issue. It's extremely volatile to try and change only damage numbers on a % multiplier. I don't think making Evasion beat it out is the best idea, since Evasion-ignoring attacks like Kagekiri exist, and Knockdown removes it outright. I'd honestly rather see lightning's Elemental Impact change to be something beside critical strikes. I'd also like to see people not so harshly punished for not including elements in most builds, but that's a topic for another time.

[Fern]

I can't say I disagree with most of the points brought up by Kameron, though I don't think Elemental Impacts outside of lightning are excessively powerful. Personally I like the 'critical hit' part of lightning autohits because it's fun/satisfying to witness, so I don't think that should change myself. Kagekiri is the only evasion ignoring move in the game that can lightning critical as far as I know too.

It's probably easier to cut the extra damage bonus from Fulgurmancy talent for now, if Evasion dismissing lightning crits isn't an option.

[Autumn]

I was going to make a large post but it seems like Kameron has already covered most of the points I wanted to address in the way that I'd have tackled them. Though I'm still on the fence on changing the critical effect entirely. It'd probably be healthier for the game if enchants weren't strictly "Ok this one does more damage" since those have always been the better enchants historically.

[Miller]

I'm all for changing the talent's damage bonus to SR*1 or perhaps changing it to a different bonus all together frankly. I feel like halving the GUI bonus would be excessive if that wasn't enough, but that's all I really have to say about it.

The critical rate for lightning criticals in my opinion, is fine where it currently stands.

That said, I personally think the magic sources of lightning criticals tend to be the biggest offender rather than elemental impacts for lightning. Rye and Ryemei can easily puncture through 60%~ magic DR total without even putting overload into play, the latter also receives bonuses from CM.

I'm also personally against changing the critical effect but if it had to be changed, something akin to chain lightning (Which soaked already does to a degree if I recall) would be neat. But I believe lightning's gimmick is dealing a ton of single targeted damage rather than AoE.