[Autumn]

When it comes to melee weapons, typically the ones that you require building STR for, they often fall behind GUI scaling weapons due to them not quite dealing enough damage when you don't invest much for GUI, even building for 30-40 GUI can be a serious tax for a lot of melee critters when they should be focusing more on what's important and what differentiates STR weapons, and that's their SWA for the most part.

Axes are a supremely good example of what melee weapons should sort of look like, barring their accuracy of course, starting at 125% critical damage does them a lot of good as they only need to invest half as many points as Swords, Spears or god forbid Fists do to gain a respectable crit damage number. While axes can focus on the big number, they don't always have to, and have options when it comes to their builds.

Swords, Spears and Fists are not afforded this luxury unfortunately, given their extremely base critical damage, they can't just invest into STR, LUC and accounting for SWA, they have to be able to multiply that SWA too, given that crit damage scales very linearly I think raising these numbers will do little to overpower them, especially given that half of the damage of fist and spear basic attackers tend to be magic from on-hits anyway.

Therefore I propose raising the critical damage of Spears/Swords/Fists to 125% to match Axes, Axes will still have Deadliness and Spiked Axehead to differentiate them as the defacto critical damage weapons of the game, going from 125% to 140%, still 15% above the other 3 martial weapons, thus justifying their accuracy loss. (As for Keen weapons such as Wo-dao/Hisen/Duodent, they can be raised to 140%, remaining 15% above non-keen counterparts, this is where Battleaxe also sits at.)

I personally think this change will help STR critters feel more comfortable with their stats, and not always have to resort to 40 GUI to feel like they're dealing enough damage, instead you'd see 20-25 GUI be more common place on them, which considering you have to build a whole other additional stat than Daggers, Guns or Handshot gets? Seems like a pretty light investment enough to not make STR crit builds so hard to build in the first place.

[Ray2064]

I'm not too sure about buffing them to have the same base crit damage as axes do, even with the arguments presented- mostly because in this case axes themselves would be in a weirder spot, just having lower accuracy and almost no viable exclusive aills to work with like it's martial cousins, talents aside.

Something like 120 for swords and spears and 115 for Fists would imo already do them a pretty good service while not making them nearly as good as the de facto crit weapon. (Even if you could argue Fist are better in a good amount of cases)

I'm all for any way to make STR crit less of a hassle though

I don't necessarily think damage is the issue, either. If the problem truly boils down to saving stats? Just make STR give some crit. It's not like the extra critical damage is going to help spears much since they struggle to crit in the first place
Lol. Lmao.

Though that's likely never actually going to happen at any point in time

[Miller]

I have no problems with raising weapon critical damage to be roughly equal but this thread is phrased as if this will make STR crit builds outside of axes more comfortable with their stats when that honestly won't be the case even if this change were to go through? I personally don't think the stat spread would change at all, it'd just be a small damage boost for these builds.

LUC is the biggest tax that Crit builds NEED for an actual chance to crit unless they have access to a plethora of innate crit chance buffs and equipment, typically requiring 30 points of investment to be functional. Axes are blessed with equipment that can let them ignore building LUC while also having a talent that innately boosts their Crit unlike any other weapon. So I'd rather see a combination of critical damage and critical rates for these weapons in particular; either by giving STR some crit chance or by boosting these weapons' crit chances via means of weapon parts or base stats.

[Snake]

The spread is tight enough as is. This will not fix the problem with critical damage on melee weapons, but it will definitely help. Better than nothing, which is what we got right now.

[Autumn]

I have no problems with raising weapon critical damage to be roughly equal but this thread is phrased as if this will make STR crit builds outside of axes more comfortable with their stats when that honestly won't be the case even if this change were to go through? I personally don't think the stat spread would change at all, it'd just be a small damage boost for these builds.

LUC is the biggest tax that Crit builds NEED for an actual chance to crit unless they have access to a plethora of innate crit chance buffs and equipment, typically requiring 30 points of investment to be functional. Axes are blessed with equipment that can let them ignore building LUC while also having a talent that innately boosts their Crit unlike any other weapon. So I'd rather see a combination of critical damage and critical rates for these weapons in particular; either by giving STR some crit chance or by boosting these weapons' crit chances via means of weapon parts or base stats.

I phrase it this way mostly because in my opinion I feel as though building for SWA and Crit is pretty manageable just like how a VA building for GUI and crit is pretty manageable too, having to go LUC a lot of the time does suck and LUC very desperately needs a buff separately to a crit damage increase, it'd probably be better for the game of the stats were just merged into one at this point since either can be considered inefficient in some ways.

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.

That's why I think that 20-25 GUI would be more common place than 40+ GUI in some cases, as for axes losing their identity, I don't think so, as I said before they have the aforementioned Spiked Axehead and Deadliness available for a base 140% crit mod instead of 125%.

LUC only contributing about 30-40 of your crit does suck though and needs to be addressed at some point, it should be a bigger chunk than that.

[Miller]

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.

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.

[Poruku]

Critical damage does have diminishing returns, being an additive multiplier.

Going from 10% crit damage to 30% crit damage is not a 20% increase in damage, it's a 17% increase. Going from 30% to 50% is about a 15% increase, etc. So even though you get the same amount of total flat damage, the % bonus damage is a diminishing return, similarly to increasing your base damage.

This means that the more crit damage you get, the less efficient it's going to become, especially because guile, weapon crit damage, and other modifiers, are all additive. So if you have a 180% crit damage on your dagger build and you slap 25% more from deadly armaments, you are actually increasing your total damage by 14%. Because you're not multiplying your damage by 1.25, you're making the multiplier go from 1.8 to 2.05.

This is why a small amount of extra crit damage for builds that don't build guile is actually a big help. Because going from 120 to 135 is a big deal, being a buff in damage that is at least 50% more effective than guile builds, and it's especially big on two handed builds which have much better SWA than guile weapons.

I'm just sayin'.

But yeah I agree that buffing crit damage a bit would be great. An actual reason to pick up crit other than fleur for non-guile, non-axe weapons.

[Miller]

Critical damage does have diminishing returns, being an additive multiplier.

Going from 10% crit damage to 30% crit damage is not a 20% increase in damage, it's a 17% increase. Going from 30% to 50% is about a 15% increase, etc. So even though you get the same amount of total flat damage, the % bonus damage is a diminishing return, similarly to increasing your base damage.

This means that the more crit damage you get, the less efficient it's going to become, especially because guile, weapon crit damage, and other modifiers, are all additive. So if you have a 180% crit damage on your dagger build and you slap 25% more from deadly armaments, you are actually increasing your total damage by 14%. Because you're not multiplying your damage by 1.25, you're making the multiplier go from 1.8 to 2.05.

This in fact true, putting all of your resources into one multiplicative modifier will have less value compared to adding onto both, but this isn't necessarily diminishing returns by definition; GUI still gives you the same value per point.

That said, I was still wrong with how I interpreted the statement so I'll take the L regardless.

[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.

[Ray2064]

That more has to do with LUC being a generally useless stat that you tend to only build to be able to crit (sometimes) , or to use one of the arguably best elements in the game. Maybe if it offered something like Inflict or really anything of value.
STR might be a strong stat in a vacuum, but it's pretty much been established it's fairly detrimental to anyone who tries to crit while statting alongside it. It's more akin to offering it a multi purpose than just giving it a massive amount of buffs.
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By buffing LUC's crit rate outright, you're also buffing VAs and gunners' which aren't really in much need of a buff and already somewhat comfortably stated. The gap between GUI and STR crits remains mostly the same.