Crit % Chance Changes

Official News Developer & Patch Notes
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Hey everyone,

Created a crit % chance thread of it’s own, so it’s a one-stop place for questions and feedback.

It took a little longer than normal to get this together, as I wanted to ensure I had as much information as possible from your responses and asked the team my own questions.

Also getting a response written from the team, so big thanks to our Producer Morgs for putting this together for me.

Capping Critical Hit Chance to 80%

Why did we do it?

  • The original design of the game limited Crit Chance to only certain item slots. However, as the game developed and we got feedback, we applied it more broadly, but only across specific item sets, and eventually to all item sets, but at a reduced chance.

As the game has grown, this has ended up pushing Crit Chance far beyond where its original intention meant for it to go. While certain play metas are inevitable in games with loadouts, decks etc, we want to avoid situations where some Gear is the only reasonable choice someone could make.

Some builds, particularly in Versus, end up very unfairly advantaged vs others. Some builds were breaking 1000% Crit Damage, which, paired with 100% Crit Chance can be pretty unhealthy in the short and long term.

How did we do it?

  • When we were looking at our options for how to deal with this, it came down to either:
    • Nerfing particular items (which we don’t like doing and doesn’t help with systemic issues)
    • Cap Crit Chance and/or put in Anti-Crit somehow

We opted to cap the Crit Chance because:

  • We felt reintroducing some randomness to such a powerful effect would be a positive, as it is intended to be a chance of a Critical Hit, rather than a guarantee
  • We didn’t want to cap Crit Damage because this would’ve had a much bigger impact on more builds, and Crit Damage is a more natural place for a big effect.

This means that there is still a chance to land a critical hit and deal a very large amount of damage. Rather than leaving the crit chance as is, but seeing a much more reduced amount of damage applied or a damage limit being reached.

  • We were also hoping that there might be a minor meta introduced by the change that would encourage players to look for ways to hit caps efficiently, and then utilize other strategies to improve the build itself
  • We also gave Minions their extra abilities (which included Crit Chance reduction) in Versus to complement this, as Versus had further to go for balancing, and Minions often have very little to do.

Why wasn’t it in the Patch Notes?

Put simply, it got missed. We try to be as comprehensive as we can with changes to the game, and particularly with gameplay changes, so this oversight is obviously not acceptable.

We had more going on behind the scenes during the period of writing these patch notes than usual, and our quality control on them slipped. The result was a couple of items were either missed or in the wrong section

What’s to come?

We do believe that these changes are healthier overall, however, based on the feedback we’re hearing, it seems that the changes to Crit Chance are shedding more light on underlying issues with the metagame that we are going to review (for example, Enemy Spell Damage in PVE battles at higher levels).

As I have made this it’s own thread, please keep any further discussion/feedback here for me to collect. Keep in mind it is about to be the weekend, so there may not be further information from me or acknowledging posts till I’m back in the studio

Any bug reports should remain their own threads.

If I get any more information from the team, I will update as a comment or include it within the details above.

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Yeah, I think I feel so bad about this change, not so much because of the re-balance/limit, but more because I spend thousands of gems on re-roll chances at 200 gems a pop.

Now in an unexpected, unforeshadowed, unannounced, turn of events, that has resulted in me being past the cap once my Warlord bonus applies.
This means I effectively miss out on getting any benefit from some of my gear attributes, not to mention any alternative gear attribute combos I passed on in my pursuit of Critical Chance attribute AND all the gems/resources spent over the past few months on re-rolling attributes.

Ironically I only slowed down the final push to/past 100% since it seemed the new follower system would provide an alternative way to get specific attributes, rather than the blind luck method.

Since I assume there is no way to know how many attribute re-rolls an account has done, guess there is not much more to say about it.
But it does make me a bit sad.

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If its possible, I’d limit the critical hit chance 80% nerf cap to Tourneys only. Not really necessary to nerf it in other game modes IMO since its a PvE game for the most part. Win win for everyone.

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Really disappointing news.

First of all I agree that critical builds are probably the most powerful and efficient builds there are to kill high level enemies fast. But going as far as to say that it is the only reasonable choice… Plenty of players run spell damage based builds that can also do tons of damage.

The problem with this argument is that you see a big difference between, let’s say crit vs spell. Then you have 2 ways of balancing them: improving the worse ones or nerf the best ones. Spell based builds right now are really bad for newer players against Kingdom defense high level dragons, for example, you need a high level and gear quality to make them work. So my issue is that to address the issue, instead of improving spell builds (as we have been asking for ages) so that they perfom better (and faster) against high level enemies and feel more efficient and attractive, you decide to nerf crit builds making them worse. If to make players play less used options you have to make the most used one less attractive (instead of improving the unused ones to make them more attractive) then I believe you are taking the wrong path.

If the root of the problem is Versus, then limit the fix to Versus. There should be nothing wrong with us to be able to easily do general content. If you fear that we may get bored of not having enough challenges, then introduce more difficult ones (as we have also been asking a lot). Your decision of applying a crit cap in PvE too is clearly suggesting: “we don’t like players having it so easy to beat the enemies”. Otherwise, there are better alternatives to achieve your goals.

Can you define positive? When you are battling against the KD dragon, it is your last attack and you need a crit to get the rewards then leaving it to the chance feels pretty awful. Or battling against lvl 100 enemies where the difference between doing the crit or missing it means sudden death by overpowered spell… Randomness is an integral part of these games but most of the time feels bad (especially when we are now used at not having it).

I think this argument is pretty weak, since the same happened until now. We looked for ways to hit the 100% cap and then used other strategies to improve the build.

I will put it simply too, this is a huge and suspicious oversight. We are not talking about a minor change, but about a major nerf that will affect a lot of players, many of them having spent tons of resources (and money) on optimizing their builds according to the previous rules of no cap. This isn’t a change for a single line of text in the patch notes, this requires a whole big paragraph explaining the whys. So it being missed from the notes… Well, it has made the change feel like it has been sneaked in hoping we don’t realize, and has made its reception several times worse. I believe the team should already know us enough to be sure we will be detecting every change that happens, so I will accept the “missed it” explanation… But the team being able to miss such a big and hurtful change doesn’t make it feel much better. Do we really need to look the game and mechanics into detail after every update just in case something big has been missed in the notes?

Another really bad thing about this change is that you have decided to take the worst time to apply it, since the reworks have made high level enemies much more powerful due to the extra spell damage and farming high level dungeons fast has become a key way of progressing your gear. So just when we need all the extra power we can to keep advancing… You set us back. We report that high level enemies’ spells do now overpowered damage, and the response we get is getting our crit chance capped. Right, just add insult to injury.

At least you haven’t waited until after the crafters rework and us spending more resources on optimizing our builds for 100% crit chance, that would have meant war. But still, it just adds to the recent changes that slowly are making the game more grindy and worse for casual and F2P players.

So, in conclusion, I am strongly against a general critical chance cap. You cannot change the gear system to depend on opening tons of high level chests, and then nerfing our best build for doing it so fast, it just shows a lack of care for the players. I hope I get used to the crit misses, since right now my enjoyment while playing the game has been drastically reduced.

PD: @Lyrian I hope you are happy, you finally got your critical nerf even if it has been at our expense.

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If you want to make things even easier, why not just cap critical hit chance at 100% and slightly tweak minions to compensate this new number. This makes it much easier for debuffs to do their job or if a enemy has some sort of power to affect criticals and it makes it easier to make adjustments in tourney without punishing the players who have invested lots of resources on critical hit chance / critical damage loadouts.

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This is such a spiteful move, no wonder you didn’t put it in the patch notes.

We’ve spend so much time & resources getting our gear up to what it is now, only for you to do this to us.

If you wanted to reduce crit chance in PvP, then just add an event modifier like you do with event dungeons/sieges.

This is clearly so we don’t get our full gem rewards in KD, right as the time that upgrading gear is about cost a lot gems in 3.1.5. I’m not buying currency with real money, no matter how much you punish me for not doing so.

Why do you keep doing things like this to us?

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This 9000%
Nerfhammer rarely helps with balancing but just change or creates more problems, the magic 80 number that is also used twice for block and block dmg reduction looks to me like “an easy fix” to prevent doing something more elaborate but while having 100% block and the dmg reduction that goes with it would be completely op, forcing 20% of high end build’s hits to miss, yes on enemies with max block chance a non crit is like hitting water with a sword aka a miss in my book, this is not smart game design.
I hope this aspect will be reconsidered! For the non PVP modes at least, please. :pleading_face:

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I will have to wait a bit before I give feedback on this as right now the use of low class language would be my main response. Especially since we were told there would be no combat changes in the next update around two weeks ago.

However I will tell you that watching the high level players, a LOT of your income came from them tweaking gear to get 100% critical change and the highest level of critical bonus they could.

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I’d say this was unbelievable, but after playing Gems of War, this, Marvel PQ…it’s par for the course.

I will not spend to upgrade anything any longer. For in the future, it will absolutely be nerfed.

Once our cash is hand, the rules change.

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You are just doing too many things at once here. The “unannounced” change is a horrific oversight.

The pet changes were JUST just implemented to fix this problem for PvP. There was 0 time given to see how the changes to pets affects the game meta. So the timing of the Crit change is bad from a purely scientific point of view.

80% to 100% is really not that significant on the math side, but on the “feel” side it is awful.
I can say this… It is not going to fix anything you think it will. Crit Damage is still insanely high for those that build for it. All of the Aim is going to go to Cleave. So now instead of 100% chance to take a 500% crit, it is going to be 80% chance to take an 800% crit.

All this change means to me is that every time a crit misses there will be a doubt as to whether or not it was RNG, bad programming. or worse, malicious programming. Considering the track record so far, I think questioning the programming is a valid concern.

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We 've been asking for harder challenges for years and your solution was to nerf us.
If you want an enemy to be tougher just add modifiers.
The only thing you do is rework stuff that already works to make them more profitable for you without adding anything new gameplay-wise.
I hope people understand what you re doing and stop spending money on this game because that’s the only feedback you listen to

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This is a huge nerf. Almost all top builds are made around crit damage and 100% crit chance.
For new players in high tier fights, you score a critical hit and win, or you don’t and die. There are no alternatives.

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@Lyrian Well done! As has been heralded throughout this thread the further enshittification of this game is now partly on your shoulders. I’m calling you out! account for yourself!

For the devs a question, what else are you going to change because @Lyrian doesn’t like it.

This change is abominable and as explained as an oversight not in the patch notes makes us all here to be considered as stupid morons, not a paying customer.

Do better, be better!

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ITT: people who used to have 100% crit.

Well, I mean, 100% chance to do 1000% damage is kinda crazy if you think about it.

That said, I love it. My fantasy character is barb SMASH, and smash he do.

But at the point you have enough gear to do that, it’s probably a pretty consistent steamroll in any reasonable build. Why take away the fun aspirational build toward goal?

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Blaming other for what’s happening is not ok. Everyone is focused on critical hit chance but why not focus on getting power via spells or weapons. (extra damage, + critical hit damage) for me getting higher power= higher damage is more important.

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Some of us just spent a bunch focusing on crit builds. Now if we focus on creating yet another type of awesome fun build, is that going to get whacked down with a stealth bug such as this, and then be told “oh, that much power was never intended so we nerfed it”

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If you know the common phrase “first they came for… (my crit build) and I said nothing !” they’ll be coming for yours too soon enough.

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Honestly, I think the major problem with crits in PvP was this bug here:
Bow bonus damage - Bug Reports - Puzzle Quest 3 Community

Fix this and 100% crit is less of a problem because a block will actually work and save your life.

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Umm… no? Sorry to burst your bubble on this one. If you are referring to the old argument on this topic, then the devs have decisively sided on your side of the argument and not mine as this is an “Official News” topic.

Why?

Pulling a pic from another thread, and cross referencing the OP,

image

This is now an officially blessed acceptable round of skull damage.

After all,

Well, as the dev team does not want to touch the gear generating these large damage numbers and do not want to in general cap stats to prevent out of control scaling, then the only conclusion that be ascertained is that the skull crit meta is working as designed and intended.

And as the current optimal skull build meta is ~10x (pre 3.1.5, likely to be even higher after the crafting update) more powerful than the most effective spell build, then a logical player must embrace that meta.

As such, I’ll be joining everyone with the now validated permanent skull crit meta on Monday.

I had a much longer post on this topic written out. However, the more I wrote I realized that at this point, I just don’t care about the crit situation anymore. I just wanted formal direction on how the game’s damage mechanics were and as of this post, those mechanics have been decided. At this point, knowing this information, I know what I need to do to modify my gear on Monday confidently going forward.

As they say in Hades II, so mote it be.

P.S. I highly expect any survivability issues from the reduction in skull crit to 80% to be resolved with the crafting update. I think most will be surprised on how much flexibility and power the system will give players to resolve these issues. The community will have a solution to this in 48 hours or less after the update.

P.P.S Yes, everyone here is absolutely in the right to vent about these changes for a myriad number of reasons that have already been mentioned and then some.

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This is what I really wanted to say in a nice way. Good work on trying to get them to understand. If the goal is to reduce damage, it would need to hit Bonus Critical Damage. I feel like anyone in the Software Engineering field should have seen this immediately. Then realized they are making players feel worse while not fixing what ever perceived issue is out there.

Was crit done to make PvP players happy? Because it is still basically PvE since there is no real time play.

If it is because of PvE not being a “Challenge” to the very end game players, accept that most of them will be looking to build out multiple sets of custom gear to tinker with every way they want to clear the dungeons and defend the Kingdom.

Yes, you probably do need a full combat system rework. This is something that should be heavy math behind the scenes. It needs to have a full Citadel Rework too. However, you want each and every player to feel they can progress and gain power. Artificial caps simply set a target that we know will be our maximum and we will spend time min-maxing elsewhere.

So in summary, capping the Critical Hit Chance does not reduce the average damage per attack once gear is adjusted. It just makes the players feel worse. Puzzle quest at its heart is a game about growing to feel more and more powerful.

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