[zericosmic]

FAI and cevade are such popular stats nowadays that trying to play any critter without a stupidly high crit amp ability like veil off is absolutely awful, getting an extra 2m consistently this meta as a critter is borderline impossible because every 2nd person either has FAI out the ass or is running boneheart. DEF is dumped because of just how much better FAI is, FAITH IS VALUED MORE FOR DEFENSE THAN THE STAT LITERALLY NAMED 'DEFENSE', and on top of that provides Damage, some FP, and Healing. And if you're fighting someone who relies on crits, you get to negate almost all the stat points they've placed in to GUI, and now they're hitting you with a floppy noodle sword for 70 damage.. Not to mention basic hitters like critters are also the only people in the game affected by hesitation.

Playing a critter is just.. not fun in to most pvp matchups nowadays. It'd be nice if Crit evade reduced crit damage instead of just straight up making combat for critters not fun at all. Yeah, sure that'd require a lot of fine tuning to actually balance, but man it would actually make the game fun, because rn this just isn't fun.

[Poruku]

I definitely agree that it's rough being a crit build these days. I would add the caveat that certain crit builds (not all of them) can get crazy amounts of damage out from critical hits, and the crit evade meta could be quickly replaced by a crit meta. Fleur is the biggest offender of course, but then you also have the whole guile thing...

I do think crit evade can get crazy sometimes. But at the same time it's kind of the only good way to become actually tanky. If you don't have CE, you get shredded even if you have high defense and such.

As for your actual suggestion, yeah I do think that could be one solution. Introducing some %reduced crit damage passives while nerfing CE across the board could do a lot of good for game health.

[matthewmwps]

Playing a tank, I do feel like CE might be a bit crazy sometimes if people go all in on it.

Though I worry if this change is put in, it would cause problems with weapons that have 'on crit' effects. The electric axe with its promised irresistible sound attack on crit comes to mind. I think for the momentum economy it can work, but those would need some balancing too.

[Ray2064]

I still want Boneheart to 'cap' itself beyond a certain threshold, maybe in such a way that it'd stop bumping numbers around 85-90 Critical evade before other buffs. So if you had, say, 80 Cevade and put on Boneheart, it could only bump you up to 90 by itself rather than 105. It'd work a bit more like an equalizer than a kick to critters' shins.


That way, I think the change would  only really impact the much higher ends of critical evade (things like FAI BKs getting to the 120s, and the recent tank uprise with Solblader come to mind)

[caliaca]

I've been a proponent of crit reduc for months so im gonna voice my support here too.

If you vote the thread low, have a response so we can hear both sides instead.

[zericosmic]

My take for most of the worry of "what if it's not enough" is just that the numbers can be adjusted further to the point where it is balanced... and hell maybe it would make people build defense, instead of relying on Ogatas.

Playing a tank, I do feel like CE might be a bit crazy sometimes if people go all in on it.

Though I worry if this change is put in, it would cause problems with weapons that have 'on crit' effects. The electric axe with its promised irresistible sound attack on crit comes to mind. I think for the momentum economy it can work, but those would need some balancing too.

I feel like the answer here would just be to nerf Electric axe, or make it so that Cevade does actually reduce the damage of on-crits.

I still want Boneheart to 'cap' itself beyond a certain threshold, maybe in such a way that it'd stop bumping numbers around 85-90 Critical evade before other buffs. So if you had, say, 80 Cevade and put on Boneheart, it could only bump you up to 90 by itself rather than 105. It'd work a bit more like an equalizer than a kick to critters' shins.


That way, I think the change would  only really impact the much higher ends of critical evade (things like FAI BKs getting to the 120s, and the recent tank uprise with Solblader come to mind)

This would also work.. 


To compare Cevade to Evade, Evade itself is capped, and there's only so much you can get reasonably get, however you can also completely stomp over Evade with certain builds and get hit to the point where it doesn't exist, there's buttons that invalidate it, and there's tools to reduce it, cat mask for one is an item that many people can equip to get rid of evade buffs which are necessary to evade at all, and evade is a stat that requires -A LOT- more investment from the player, including constantly spending turns to reapply it.

Cevade on the other hand is largely passive, the stats it is attached to are good and provide offense, it has a huge chest enchantment boost which is easily quick-swappable to, and it makes the opponent have to spend momentum on buffs (buffs which are often rare to find) while you pelt them to even have a chance at critting, and nowadays even with Northen Wind + Bloody Karma it's not enough to get consistent results.

[Lolzytripd]

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%

[Collector]

Whether I like the current metagame or not (I do), there are principles that I've always found somewhat troublesome. A while after GR2 concluded and we started to figure out how to build again, a few key concepts started to appear:

• Crit damage is large, but non-crit sources of physical damage are lacklustre. Exceptions to the rule exist in Rapid Kick (largely un-reduceable) and rogue traps (with burn application for additional damage).
  

• Crit Evade, a derived stat, is more effective than the entirety of the Defense main stat. Crit Evade is frequently over 70% effective damage reduction against crit builds because of their denied extra action and lack of Guile crit modifier. Building for high Defense outside of BK is, frankly, shooting yourself in the foot comparatively.
  

• Fights involving a crit-only build are often feast or famine; they either deal over 1000 damage in two turns or roll over and die. Not taking alternative damage options, such as ghost spells, is crippling when confronted with a CE wall - especially in PvE or event content, though it's rare in the latter.
  

• Solblader's release added the ultimate in rock-paper-scissors match to melee crit builds. Like in the case of ST/VA against a caster or Verglas against Priest, one side is heavily favoured. Solblader is, consequent to its strengths or not, very popular.
  

The result is the most hostile climate towards crit builds I've seen in my 6 years playing the game. Whether I like the current metagame or not (I still do), it's plain to see where there's a level of frustration to be found here. I'm of the opinion that not pocketing alternatives to your crit is shooting yourself in the foot, but whether that should be the case or not is up for the debate; as stated, non-crit physical damage options aren't great right now.

Tangent, but Reaver is beyond crippled. Words cannot describe how bad that stance is.

I don't have an answer to this; what I've detailed are the principles I follow when building and what I've observed when putting my builds in practice. I do not play crit builds and I'd rather the people who do offer their input on what they'd like to happen instead of me, because in my position, I could live with this state of affairs indefinitely. The reasons listed definitely contribute to my complete avoidance of the archetype, though.

[Autumn]

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.

[Raigen.Convict]

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...