[Kameron8]

The 'average' use case for this enchant, which is Boneheart + Luck with only Aptitude levels of faith, makes life generally unpleasant for crit setups that don't have a massive class crutch to help them out.  Using my own crit-duelist with a crit-favored weapon (Hisen) as an example, my stat-screen crit evade with Boneheart would be 86; and my stat-screen crit is 118.

Some classes don't care, and can jump this hurdle easily – my own class combination included, between north wind/veil off/duelist/kensei.  But it sure can suck if you aren't running some variant of duelist, rogue, or Bonder. It feels weird for a torso enchant to out-value all of the class option equivalents for crit evade, even with up to 3 points invested in a Black Knight skill dedicated to it. 

I don't believe the gouge scenario is worth giving much consideration.  A Faith/Luck theoretical Redtail is much more susceptible to dying to a crit build than just a semi-optimized tank using Body Guard or Akmedis would be (bonus points if it's a healer).  The latter is already functionally impossible to kill before dying for most crit builds, so min-max'd Redtails versus Veil Offers is a pointless metric in my mind.

I'd dock a few points off of Boneheart with that in mind, even if the majority of people can't be bothered to get a 2nd torso for slotting versus susceptible crit setups.  Though, I don't blame people for taking health over Boneheart – for most people, the real lethal opponents are mages or skill spammers, not usually the crit builds.

[Trexmaster]

The gouge scenario was just to illustrate that even without the biggest buffs Critical has it can still surmount Critical Evade's best efforts and nearly snag a guarantee. It is by no means an optimal or even feasible build competitively. I will point out that in my gouge scenario the Critical user did not use any of the big three (Bloody Karma, Volley Formation, Veil Off) to pass the near pinnacle of Critical Evade by over 50 if not higher if it could manage to fit in certain criteria like Airborne (which has gotten easier thanks to enchants like Winged).

For more realistic scenarios than that yes, you're looking at 50~ LUC + the 6-7 FAI you have from only buying APT for around the provided numbers.

Taking your numbers, with Northern Wind (24) Perfect Poise (30) and Absolute Fear + Sakki (20) you've got 100% crit on yourself even with unnerfed Boneheart. Veil Off would be absolute overkill, but exists.

I think the issue is expecting to see consistent Critical numbers when you aren't running anything that gives you support for it. Yes, you aren't going to see great mileage on crits if you're running neither rogue, duelist, bonder or shapeshifter, monk or boxer if you use fists, archer if you use bows, nor wearing a berserker shell if you're using axes. No one should expect to get crits consistently if they aren't going to run any of the available tools to do it.

Boneheart alone only serves to stop people who invest little to nothing (class/equipment wise) into crit and expect to crit, someone who actually builds crit (like your build) will just put up one more buff and 100% crit their ass into the pavement if they aren't stacking anything more than Boneheart.

If you look at it compared to class skills that grant Crit Evade the +25 is a lot, but you're paying potentially upwards of 100 HP to get it. Yeah, you can hotswap torsos to make sure you're always wearing a Boneheart vs critical builds but that's an issue of its own. The game rewards you far too greatly for metagaming your opponent's builds in 1v1 scenarios or on greater scales if you can accurately read enemy team compositions. Encouraging people to hotswap on others for an advantage is to me only perpetuating a toxic environment for PvP. I have nothing against the people who do it but it does not feel like a healthy thing to encourage and reward with how uneven the benefits are for some builds, it's why items like Red Letter and Circle Ring got taken out back and shot.

By that logic, shouldn't Boneheart be nerfed or adjusted? Considering how sparse Critical Evade is and how difficult it can be to build into on average, no. Simply docking numbers off Boneheart isn't going to make Crit v Crit Evade any healthier beyond giving Critical builds more free wins on matchups they were already winning in the first place bar incredibly bad RNG. The real issue is the system itself is so disorganized. The balancing of Crit v Crit Evade was an afterthought looking at some of the modifiers thrown around, mostly due in part to how much this game has built upon itself over the years and only updated some of its numbers to catch up with the times.

[Senna]

*Cough* You're forgetting Sarasha Gi *Cough*

[Ray2064]

I blame STR crit

[MothEnthusiast]

Trex is out here speaking words of absolute WISDOM. Before even considering touching boneheart, the entire crit vs crit evade dynamic needs to be addressed. I will say though, the idea of making the system (and in my mind, hit could potentially benefit from this as well) more like what defense is, a flat number with multiplicative % reductions holding it back, might be more fair in the long run.

It'd take a lot of number tweaking, but it'd curb a lot of this all or nothing that we see from both evade and crit, the former often having to be cheesed with more and more skills being evade-ignoring to make it even SEEM fair. IMO crit suffers the same issue, just because of how massive crit bonuses are.

[Autumn]

This does not rise up from nowhere, it has been a largely in-part development over time. With more classes getting easy access to crit evade and improvements to their own kits that have lined them up with stats that go well with Crit Evade, like BKs finding LUC to be an overwhelmingly desirable stat, or Bonders getting access to some incredible basic attacking tools. But that's not the only reason either, the nerfs in question so far may include:

-Keyshot changed from 30 Critical rate to 15
-Zerker Shell quartered from what it was
-Old Fitting Form removed from the game (Ghost honestly hasn't recovered from this)
-Northern Wind changed from 32 to 24 crit.
-GR2's entire existence making Poise a worthless mechanic

And a couple more side-points that do effect the general worthwhileness of critical rates:
-LUC's changes in GR2 that make it significantly less desirable as a stat for the purposes of offense.
-General player knowledge floor has raised drastically (this is a good thing)

Regarding poise, I have attempted before to address how completely useless it is to a duelist and how crucial it is to their gameplan to have critical rates, and I was met with the usual disapproval over buffing anything basic attack related (especially when related to duelist). I have since deleted the thread due to my opinions from then lining up a bit differently now, but I have attempted addressing this from an individual case.

As for if this is a sudden targeted nerf? People have been pining about the Crit vs Crit Evade dynamic for a few months now in the main discord channels and sometimes on the OOC, it is a problem that is rooted somewhere that I don't think anything but a numbers change somewhere can change that necessarily.

I find it a little odd that crit evade is advantaged on a stat level due to crit evade being used as a baseline for it to be determined against, but that changes significantly with items and skills, I can't deny that.

Crit Evade would be far better as a crit reduction stat than the outright denial of crits which are essential to some classes to even function correctly. That is the only rework I could see to the stat being present, but as it stands I think Boneheart being +25 crit evade is far too effective on an enchant when most enchants are valued at 5-10 on any individual stat's level.

Its worth 25 of a stat, 25. Most are worth 10 at best.

[MothEnthusiast]

This whole argument of it being 25 raw stat points completely ignores one crucial fact about how the stats line up: it's not 25 points of a premium stat. It's 25 points of stats that people only go if they're going crit, need light/lightning attack, or have a rare weapon scaling, or are willing to gimp some of their other stats in the hopes of not dying to crits. That's also why crit chance is disadvantaged in the stat line-up.

.5 crit per point of SKI is LITERALLY just free crit. That's not a stat investment-- you HAVE to have skill to be a basic attacker (or to play the game, really). You also get free crit from your weapon, and the means to increase this further with parts. (to a point where you're easily overshadowing what boneheart gives through the weapon choice alone, mind you.) Meanwhile, there are very few builds that would consider that crit evade to be 'free' for their investment comparatively.

[Miller]

Some things I don't really understand is that in these arguments, the weight of needing 100% initial critical to even crit in the first place along with the denial of a third action is heavily overlooked. Denying a third action half of the time or even one third of the time is an insane amount of damage reduction on its own and it's especially valuable when a majority of these cases end up screwing over the crit fisher in terms of positioning.

You also only get around 78% Critical from Weapon + APT + SKI alone, still heavily under the 100% mark and not even accounting for the fact that the person running CEvade also has APT to give their selves an average baseline of 15 CEvade before equipment/stat investment is brought into the equation. With just this, you have to get 22% critical chance from other sources/stat investment to equalize the playing field.

I can see sources of CEvade and Crit that are class specific being hit to make the playing field more fair, but even then I still think Boneheart is the most valuable torso enchant by a landslide and it could stand to lose a few points, 15-20 sounds the most reasonable to me.

[MothEnthusiast]

... Why is the baseline that you SHOULD be getting an extra action over everyone else every turn? Action economy is the strongest thing in any game like this. You should be fighting tooth and nail to GET that boost, we shouldn't be fighting tooth and nail to PREVENT you from getting that boost. Which begs the question... What baseline of crit should reasonable investment on both sides end up being? 60%? 80%? Or would you have it that investment on both sides ends up with 100% crit rate?

Why is a 78% chance to crit considered an 'only' in this case? That's a LOT. Even in a non-duelist case, hitting the crit twice for an extra action has a 60.84% chance of happening in those two hits. That's, at a baseline of 2 hits, 60+% chance of getting a free action if they don't put points into crit evade. Not counting fleur, not counting extra hits from rogue baseclass, not counting if they simply buffed up at the beginning of the fight, and certainly not counting the fact that crits are some of the highest damage sources you can get if you build for them correctly. (Quick edit, I didn't really account for APT-base that anyone would have for crit evade innately, but it still wouldn't be very much without investment.)

If you get 40 FAI or LUC (post apt), boneheart, and the APT bonus, you're only looking at 75-80ish crit evade. That's INVESTMENT versus ZERO INVESTMENT stat-wise to achieve this. When you start accounting for investment vs investment, and active crit bonuses that can be applied in a fight, you're easily pushing into 50+% chance. Even a NERFED northern wind completely nullifies boneheart in 3m, for 6 rounds.

[Miller]

... Why is the baseline that you SHOULD be getting an extra action over everyone else every turn? Action economy is the strongest thing in any game like this. You should be fighting tooth and nail to GET that boost, we shouldn't be fighting tooth and nail to PREVENT you from getting that boost. Which begs the question... What baseline of crit should reasonable investment on both sides end up being? 60%? 80%? Or would you have it that investment on both sides ends up with 100% crit rate?

Why is a 78% chance to crit considered an 'only' in this case? That's a LOT. Even in a non-duelist case, hitting the crit twice for an extra action has a 60.84% chance of happening in those two hits. That's, at a baseline of 2 hits, 60+% chance of getting a free action if they don't put points into crit evade. Not counting fleur, not counting extra hits from rogue baseclass, not counting if they simply buffed up at the beginning of the fight, and certainly not counting the fact that crits are some of the highest damage sources you can get if you build for them correctly. (Quick edit, I didn't really account for APT-base that anyone would have for crit evade innately, but it still wouldn't be very much without investment.)

If you get 40 FAI or LUC (post apt), boneheart, and the APT bonus, you're only looking at 75-80ish crit evade. That's INVESTMENT versus ZERO INVESTMENT stat-wise to achieve this. When you start accounting for investment vs investment, and active crit bonuses that can be applied in a fight, you're easily pushing into 50+% chance. Even a NERFED northern wind completely nullifies boneheart in 3m, for 6 rounds.

Friend if you're using BIG HEAVY capitalization to deliver a point, it serves nothing but to deliver pointless aggression.

Why is a 78% chance to crit considered an 'only' in this case?
Critical builds heavily rely on the third action for a majority of the damage they deal and it heavily impacts their positioning after the damage. This archetype inherently needs a decent chunk of stat investment unless you have critical buffs/weapons with heavy crit to afford it; so a large chunk of that third action often goes to positioning or more damage. Non-Crits are 100% SWA, A physical skill is often 140% SWA for less investment, not to mention mages often have 100% SWA + an elemental attack.

Keep in mind that missing a crit is a ridiculous amount of damage lost against a generic hyper tank sporting a body guard due to armor applying at the end of calculations. Though, on that note; guess which equipment item that goes on your hand or boot slot provides more CEvade and armor at the same time? Food for thought.

Even in a non-duelist case, hitting the crit twice for an extra action has a 60.84% chance of happening in those two hits. 
In that example, the 78% crit chance is not accounting for your opponent's CEvade from APT; this would actually be more of a 33% chance (actually less in most cases!), discounting the mobility needed to deliver these two hits without twin dance/akimbo or a high range weapon. 

On the matter of it being less in most cases, an Imperialist with 50 APT is going to have 20 CEvade as a baseline.

Why is the baseline that you SHOULD be getting an extra action over everyone else every turn?
It's a bit odd to extrapolate something I've never said, but there should be a reasonably decent chance that a critical build can critical someone with similar investment.

If you get 40 FAI or LUC (post apt), boneheart, and the APT bonus, you're only looking at 75-80ish crit evade.
Against most builds without the presence of heavy critical amps, this puts the playing field against average crit joe from a range of 40% crit chance to 60% crit chance with similar investment. Weapon choice, hand slot choice, RoT+ and what not being a factor on the critical builds side. Your example is only factoring in a torso + boneheart and equal stat investment to an average critical build to achieve this, while most critical builds without buffs are going to be in this range. Can a critical build go way above this? Absolutely, but in that same regard you're also forcing them to use a buff and thus waste momentum unless they do it with spacing.

 and certainly not counting the fact that crits are some of the highest damage sources you can get if you build for them correctly.
I agree, criticals tend to be one of the highest numbers in the game, but the over generalizing nature of this statement is a tad concerning. Some weapon types/classes absolutely excel with critical hits should they land them. (Hell's Beating, GUI weapons are prominent examples)

you're easily pushing into 50+% chance. Even a NERFED northern wind completely nullifies boneheart in 3m, for 6 rounds.
Rogues' are one of the classes that can reach pretty high crit rates, yeah. Northern Wind is extremely potent and allows you to overcome the difference in CEvade quite well. Not every class has access to these buffs and northern wind only gains enough crit to null boneheart when done from the north. Does it last a bit too long? A little, but forcing someone to spend 3m on a buff can be circumstantially pretty valuable; even if it's typically done at battle start when everyone is spaced out.