[Lolzytripd]

I would like to provide some viewpoints and grievances on how we got here instead of providing a list of changes that I'd like to occur. I believe this might help in identifying a solution given that the crit evade meta is mostly driven by several factors. Excuse me for the ranting I might do.

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Critical Evade currently is the strongest form of "Defense" in the game, given that most physical damage aside from critical hits are not very threatening, I would chalk one of the reasons being the skills that run purely from SWA aren't quite as relevant as they were before, among a few other reasons.

We do need physical damage that feels threatening without needing to crit just to exploit builds that would for-go defense in favor of crit evade sources, mainly the best "SWA" attacking classes currently in the game are Kensei and Firebird, both are duelists and are considered more of a hybrid attacker, and lack the defensive utility that something like soldier might provide, leaving people who want to swing a sword and do some damage kinda stuck with those classes.

Namely classes like Black Knight, Demon Hunter, Boxer and Monk lack the up front damage or SWA increasing tools to really be considered SWA attackers atm, and they won't threaten the 0 DEF setups enough to make them consider the flaws in their own defensive structure, as critting does way more damage than them, that said:

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Critical hits are insanely strong, like they are legitimately the best form of offense in the game gated behind a consistency issue primarily, I'd go as far as to say they are straight up better than spells given that single target damage in pvp is generally better than AoE damage, especially now that the Cross is a thing. When it comes to single target damage this is just the way to go, its fun, its very good damage, and it allows you to play around with your most important resource: Momentum.

You can see why basic attacking is vastly more popular than SWA attacking, without specials having the previous reliability they did in the old evasion system, SWA attackers are forced into prioritizing hit instead of SWA, meaning they're playing the exact same game as basic attackers but are losing for it given the lack of extra momentum available from their attacks.

I don't believe that the current form of critical evade is very healthy for the game either, but I can see why it is so vastly popular to have critical evade, if you're playing a mage and you get rushed down by John Duelist hitting you 2-3 times a turn for over 300-600 damage, while you're casting spells once or twice at them and just can't seem to keep up for whatever reasons. (This is not to say Spellcasting is bad, far from it, spellcasting is consistently good, its about what SWA attacking should be.)

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Critical Evade's numbers compared to Critical Hit itself is simply too high, the most straight forward nerf that could nullify all my grievances with the system would be just to nerf primarily Boneheart and/or buff Crit for classes like Duelist and just move on with it.

Boneheart is the main problem, the stats that grant you crit evade are set up in a way to be more niche-ly sought after and are inconvenient to each other, LUC and FAI don't synergize the same way that LUC and SKI do, not even close. Also they're set up to be slightly higher in total value than SKI and LUC, which should be kept because weapons obtaining massive crit upgrades offsets this by a lot.

But I don't think this will be a fundamental solve to the issue, as soon as critical hitting becomes more consistent again, then people will just move back to trying to fit in shit like Pierce/Slash resistance and DW install into their builds.

The problem primarily lies in crits, sure Crit Evade (primarily boneheart and maybe FAI) needs a nerf, but critical strikes in this game are the base problem that should be addressed later.

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I know I said I wasn't going to provide a list of changes that I think should occur, but I am just going to talk about this for one second.

I think Critical Evade should be moved to a system that reduces critical rates far less (about by half) and instead decreases critical damage received, given that the momentum portion of a critical is way more important to keep consistent, than the damage.

Well said autumn, well said on every point here, the only point I feel that needs considered in addition to all of this would be "the power of a critical hit" which is  at the moment nebulous due to the amount of variance in critical damage from one crit build compared to another.

• A rebalance of crit vs crit evade that ensures the chance is fair, without either side fully capable to wall out the other.
  
• A refactor of the value of a critical hit, perhaps a squish or normalization of critical damage or perhaps a fullblown return to a single static crit modifier separate from guile.
  
• A look at the value of scaled weapon attack skills that do not critically hit to make them more worth the consistency they provide.
  

[Ray2064]

I can only agree with making cevade reduce crit damage while making cevade much lower. Prob just lower the number gained per faith by 1 since its 2 per...

Are you high

[Rendar]

I'd go ahead and say Critters (when able to actually crit), do more than 70% damage than SWA users. Simply because (most) weapons have higher than 10% crit value, and (most) players have more than 10 GUI.. Which the highest SWA attack skill tenddddds to cap out at like.. 120%. Maybe 130%.

Not to mention things like Hanging that move you + crit attack. So you can move a LOT of distance and close in and actually get an attack. Which counteracts a really hard hitting status (Knockdown) which.. should halve most people's action economy. But.. with fleur.. Ope! They get 2 attacks still if you KD'd them and they're within range.

[Ray2064]

I'd go ahead and say Critters (when able to actually crit), do more than 70% damage than SWA users. Simply because (most) weapons have higher than 10% crit value, and (most) players have more than 10 GUI.. Which the highest SWA attack skill tenddddds to cap out at like.. 120%. Maybe 130%.

Not to mention things like Hanging that move you + crit attack. So you can move a LOT of distance and close in and actually get an attack. Which counteracts a really hard hitting status (Knockdown) which.. should halve most people's action economy. But.. with fleur.. Ope! They get 2 attacks still if you KD'd them and they're within range.

I'd say the problem moreso boils down to SWA than crit : SWA scalings are kind of just...pitiful, and god forbid if your weapon doesn't /can't have 2H to pad it up. (Boxer comes to mind. And most of Monk's offensive skills actually, there's a reason it's relegated strictly to a crit/utility class.)

I think Amber did that comparison with a base Fir (100% Fire Attack, 100% SWA) with a 'relatively' fine Fire attack of, say, 60, and something like, LET'S SAY a Rising Tide (130% of SWA, that's about where most offensive skills cap at bar exceptions) , both coming from a 130 SWA weapon. (Something reasonable for a 2H'd thingmajing)

The former would get you 200 power, something somewhat decent, before things like Idol. The latter 169, much less glamorous.





Reaver's been mentioned to be a rather poor stance offensively, which I agree with. If you nerf crit to be on par with SWA, then you just. Kind of make everyone miserable, since the problem is more with SWA scaling stuff being strictly inferior than it's elemental counterparts, or crit.

[Rendar]

I genuinely kind of wish 2hing was taken out of the game, or there were other 'styles' added.

Two-Handing a weapon
Sword and Shield (That ISN'T just Protect)
Dual-Wielding

Etc.

2h vs the other shit feels really really good because you just.. get over 20 damage in most cases to EVERYTHING you do.

[Ray2064]

So here's what I think.

50% of your luck could be your hard cap for your minimum crit rate, so if you had 60 luck and your enemy had 200 cevade, you'd always atleast have 30 crit.

and then on the flip side we can make the maximum 100- 50% of your faith, so if you had 60 faith and 100 cevade vs some poise stacker with 200 crit from buffs you'd aways atleast bring it down to 70%

I do actually really like the general idea behind this

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I genuinely kind of wish 2hing was taken out of the game, or there were other 'styles' added.

Two-Handing a weapon
Sword and Shield (That ISN'T just Protect)
Dual-Wielding

Etc.

2h vs the other shit feels really really good because you just.. get over 20 damage in most cases to EVERYTHING you do.

Also, I reiterate. Taking 2H out would just make EVERYONE miserable and make the viability of all martial weapons take an utter dumpster dive compared to options like fists, daggers, tomes...

It wouldn't fix anything since there's also no problem to begin with aside from your personal pet peeve. I don't think 2H has ever been the one thing making builds go over the edge, or at least not in recent times, since I'd argue martials have been at their lowest for a little bit now.

Every time you see something problematic, it tends to be something mage-related, or using DR stacking-

More styles would definitely be a nice way to bring more variety to the existing playstyles though

[zericosmic]

I would just like a shred of consistency.

I have a certain distaste towards evade already, but evade has consistent tools that can be used to work around it or even just outright negate it, or you can just play ranger and not care about evasion existing due to the absurd amount of hit you can get. But in general evasion has an absurd amount of tools that you can use to work against it, including the new star graphs.

Cevade, not nearly as much. Why on earth does it get this privilege? This one stat gets to bully the entirety of the sword weapon class in to nonviability when it comes to basic attacking..

When I started playing this game, outside of evasion dice rolls, most generally you'd have some idea of what you can expect out of performing each and every move and action, the game felt to me at least, more tactical.. As it is right now, there is now another degree of RNG that plagues almost every single match, and it's cevade, and not only does FAI provide you with this layer of RNG protection, it can also give you defense against status infliction, so that those have to be rolled now too! How fun, it's like i get to roll dice instead of engaging in mechanical pvp.

Maybe duelist players were just having too much fun the prior years, but man.. These recent months have been some of the least fun I've ever had with this game.

[Poruku]

If we had tools to reduce CE by a percentage rather than everything giving merely flat amounts of crit, it would make stacking CE have diminishing returns, and make crit playstyle more consistent. Ideally something gear-related or talent/trait related so any class can benefit from it.

For example, could add a trait called expose weak point, which would reduce CE by 25%. Versus someone with 100 CE, that's +25 crit. If they have 40 CE, it's +10 crit.

[caliaca]

Yall that ranger build isn't even the highest hit gimme a break lol

I'm with Zeri here on pretty much everything.

Rework crit evade or reduce its sources.

[Senna]

I can see with Zeri since she wasn't there back in the day but before, in the Wild West, back when we had OLD Kensei, back when Kensei was just a passive class

The era of the Crit meta.

Wanna know what happened back then? The fights ended in 2~3 rounds against people who didn't build doomwalls; back before Def/Res was nerfed and 90~100% reduction was possible. Who combo'ed first won. Wanna know why? Because back then, Crit went unchecked. Crit evade wasn't enough to keep up with people sitting on 200+ crit while easily doing +300 damage a crit.

Back then, people didn't build crit evade because it was pointless. It was better to build impossible amount of reduction and installing Drown woman which made summoners a very meta pick just for its defensive options.

Which in return, got certain things nerfed and changed that had nothing to do with it. While I don't play this game as much these days (I still pvp on the test), I rather you lots not put a gun to your head and squeeze the trigger for a temporary high and have history repeat itself.

Crit evade exists to counter Crit or lower the chance of it. Just like everything else in this game, there's something to counter another. That's what the basis of balance is.

For example, Crit evade loses its purpose against anything that doesn't care about crit. So, those crit evade items and enchantment suddenly became dead weight.

Nothing has changed for crit evade since the few years GR2 happened and the start of Korv. All that happened was more classes and items existed that promoted the usage of Faith and Luck.

Which in return, makes crit feels like shit because everyone is building those stats for those classes/items. What about the tanks that aren't building that much faith/luck? That barely has enough to force a 50/50? Those people don't need to be punished because of that.

There are many tools in different classes and even potions that can improve your odds of critting. Example? One potion people consistently forgot to exist. "Dark Water Vial".

It would have been better if people suggested that those be stackable like blue potions to deal with Faith stacking crit evade builds. Make it easier to make if crafting it is the problem.

Or even asking for the return of Four Leaf Clover. Ask for Zeran Prayer return but in a Star Graph under Jupiter. There are many options and better things to suggest without breaking anything than a complete rework of a system that has been working fine for years now, which will only cause a chain reaction for other systems to be adjusted and other skills due to the change. Sending the game down a long buggy period.

Nerfing the numbers because 'this class is popular that uses faith and luck' doesn't help as that shoots other tanks and classes that do not run those stats but build enough to not get shredded in a turn by crit's high damage.

I understand the need to consistently crit your target and missing important crits hurts, but that approach isn't ideal. It's just how RNG works sometimes.