Crit % Chance Changes

Official News Developer & Patch Notes
41

80% mana and 80% crit cap are not comparable, and your resulting comparison is flawed.

This is simply not true. They have only reduced the physical damage probability by 20%.

The 80% mana cap is a turn 1 cap and was introduced to prevent “turn 0” spell casting in PvP and PvE.

The 80% crit cap is persistent and has no bias towards the beginning of the fight like the mana cap does.

What this means in PvP:

Spells can kill you on turn 1: 0% of the time (disregarding Fallen Ring)
Critical hits can kill you on turn 1: 80% of the time.

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42

The whole point though is a critical hit build is no longer guaranteed to kill on turn 1. And while you can still kill with a critical build on turn 1, its also equally as likely to kill all 3 enemies on turn 2 with a spell build.

43

Then make this point with sound logic and good math.

Your above comparison of the two and rationale for the crit nerf are flawed because the underlying logic of the argument is flawed.

I am actually not saying that your conclusion is wrong or right, but the path you took to get there is incorrect.

44

I did though. I said you had till turn 2 to establish your win condition. Just because you get the kill on turn 1 doesn’t mean what I’m saying is wrong. Also minions have a much higher impact on critical hit chance than they do on starting mana. You are making assumptions based on things I never said in the first place.

45

You contradict yourself in consecutive sentences.

If the crit kill happens 80% of the time… you absolutely do NOT have until turn 2 to establish your win condition “most” of the time. 20% is not even close to “most”.

46

80% of the time without factoring in minions, which s a big part of tourneys, isn’t it? So no I didn’t contradict myself.

47

My logic is similar to Kenpo on this one.

Spell-based PvP (or PvE for that matter) builds require 2 turns minimum to start inflicting significant damage on the opponent, outside of the near-miracle Fallen Ring proc chance that just so happens to activate a major damage spell for a Turn 1 cast).

While not completely absolute in assurance because of the edge case noted above existing, the damage output from a spell-based build on turn 1 is highly likely to not one-shot the opponent, and is therefore immaterial to a PvP win condition against the skull-crit player.

Therefore, as long as a honed skull-crit build can skull crit on either turn 1 or 2, it does not matter at all what the spell build does or has equipped at all (generally, niche cases excepted), as current skull crit mechanics still easily overwhelm top end opponent defenses, just 80% of the time instead of 100%.

So, to me the math is for failing to skull crit on both Turn 1 and Turn 2 is:

100% win chance from skull crit - (20% chance of skull crit failure on Turn 1 * 20% chance of skull crit failure on Turn 2) = 100% - 4% = 96% of winning from skull critting on either turn 1 or 2.

Which is Kenpo’s primary point. It’s good enough for a rough estimate.

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Hot take on the crit situation: All the devs did was add the same 20% frustration factor from failing to Block and applied it as “failure to skull crit” as a similar offensive frustration factor. It just angers everyone involved and does little in general to resolve the balance in damage output between skull builds and spell builds. Skulls are still objectively >>>> Spells in all current combat situations, just perhaps that the gap is no longer an order of magnitude gapingly wide but still quite large.

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48

I was initially going to go over minions more, but I wanted to keep it simple. But I think if I had it might have made the comparison seem even more fair. The current battle I’m in right now for example has reduced my critical hit chance to 30% on turn 1, so its very likely, that the battle will go for at least 2 turns, whether I end it with a critical hit or spell damage. Sure I may get lucky and get a one shot on the first turn, but its much more fair than before where it was a guaranteed 100% chance of killing the AI player on turn 1 with melee damage and 0% chance to kill on turn 1 with spell damage. And as predicted turn 2 kill with critical hit damage, could have just as easily killed him on turn 2 with spell damage.

1 Like
49

Minions balance the playing field fairly well for the majority of the playerbase (those not at the very top end). ← Your point.

On the top end, minions show (for the wrong reasons) why skull crit is still the dominant meta for the game:

Mighty Minions: Extra stats are nice, and it is perhaps possible now to defend sometimes for a single turn on a successful block against a high skull crit build. If block is missed, then the stats are meaningless against 6-digit incoming damage at a minimum.

Speedy: As has been stated elsewhere, hurts the offensive player and is near-meaningless to the AI player as it will auto-fill its spells in a single turn the majority of the time even they cost 500 mana to fill. The assistance the AI side receives in the background in all PvP aspects is so lopsided that speed minions against the AI side doesn’t really matter at all.

Cunning: Easily overwhelmed by raw crit stats. For example, using a experimental (read: total garbage) minion build that yielded over 450 Crit reduction, against Higure, still yielded these in-battle numbers:

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Crit is still maxed and I only get critted for 1333% instead of… 1800%? Yay, said no one?

For the most part, PvP is much fairer on all of my alts who are much lowered geared (but still forced to fight against the top ~20 in the game, which is super annoying, grrr…). For on my main, not that much has changed overall.

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50

So you’re complaining that someone who spent THOUSANDS of hours playing this game and theory crafting created an exceptionally powerful endgame build?

You know you can do it too.

Top level combat in anything is deadly. I don’t take my match shooting rifle out and challenge a military sharpshooter to see who can fire the most accurate shots at 1000 meters. I don’t expect Manfred von Richthofen and his Flying Circus to go out and challenge the Blue Angles in combat.

This equitable inequity occurs in almost every PvE game that tries to add PvP onto it. Heck, WoW came out with whole PvP armor sets that reduced critical chance and damage as PvE gear continued to increase in power.

Tying to slap a bandage onto a systemic problem does nothing but frustrate the player base more.

Heck, why doesn’t Vitality on armor and in the Citadel reduce Critical Damage? Does Melee Damage Reduction reduce critical hit damage already? If so, you can you build an armor set with the existing tools to survive his massive critical damage and make all his melee damage moot?

2 Likes
51

PvP is it’s own thing, if the crit cap was for that, then they should have just added another PvP debuff that caps your crit chance at 80%.

As for KD, it’s absolutely made a difference in people’s scores. Everyone in my kingdom is suffering a loss in points since the cap was added.

They’ve clearly done it so that players earn fewer rewards from KD and have to spend crowns on it. Luckily, we’re all of the opinion that spending any money on a free-to-play game is mental.

2 Likes
52

Right, all they really needed to do was cap critical hit chance at 100% and then tweak the minions slightly as needed to balance tourney better. That way outside of tourney people still have their 100% and it also allows things like the confuse debuff and boss powers to do their job better. It just makes the game easier to balance, or at least that’s the idea anyway. But I do understand their reasoning for doing it the way they did. You want diversity in builds, not everyone just running the same thing. Don’t forget the 80% spell cap, which was probably put in place for similar reasons.

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53

Those are overwhelming numbers indeed, but… Why do you only show a single example? If you really want to prove your vision of PvPs as a minefield full of fearsome, broken, overpowered critters then why don’t you show the critical stats of all the top opponents? Well, I have done the work for you, here you have the starting critical stats of all the top 10 opponents of the 3 champion leagues (using minions with a combined cunning of 307 (out of a max possible of 500):

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The results are quite meaningful:

  • 4/30 (13.3%) opponents with critical chance at cap
  • 5/30 (16.7%) opponents with critical damage of 800 or above and crit chance around 15-50
  • 5/30 (16.7%) opponents with critical chance of 24-50 but critical damage of around 250-400
  • 16/30 (53.3%) opponents with meaningless critical stats.

So, what conclusions can we draw?

  • Open tourney has a majority of heavy critters (7/10). Yikes, how is it possible that fighting against the most powerful opponents of the game is so difficult, that is unreasonable!!! (irony mode ON). Still, only 3 with critical chance above 51.
  • Only 9 out of 30 opponents have a heavy critical build, with other 5 critical builds with reasonable damage. More than half of the opponents have no critical at all! I would say this argues against Critical builds being overpowering and warping the PvP meta around themselves. My experience is clear, I die much more often to minion spells than to criticals, and the numbers seem to agree with that. However, apart from the new minion powers the only other nerf has gone to critical, while the minion spells with their ridiculously low costs and overpowering damage values have remained unchanged. Are you sure devs you are focusing on the relevant issue here?
  • Only 4 opponents out of 30 have critical chance at the cap. If the cap was designed with PvP in mind, then it is clear a terrible decision since it will only help against a minority of PvP opponents (while hurting so many players in PvE). It seems that your views on all PvP opponents getting ridiculously high critical chances to bypass the minion debuffs was pretty off, @Lyrian

I hope this numbers serve to avoid generalizing from a single bad experience against particular opponents with too powerful critical builds. Overpowering critical builds are painful to go against, true, but they are a minority within the PvP tops, and that is a fact. This makes sense, since the resources needed for that are a lot and not every player can afford or is willing to do it. However, getting overpowered minion spells is pretty easy and most opponents can 1 shot regularly in their 2nd turn with them. Any build that doesn’t have a plan against the opponents spells will likely not have much success in PvPs (as well as any build that cannot withstand big damage hits, of course). However, only the critical has been nerfed and both on PvP and PvE to make it worse.

I don’t really understand this anti-critical crusade, I believe this is a case of what we say in Spanish: ponerse la venda antes de la herida (put on the bandaid before the injury). There was a fear of the Forge making critical builds too powerful so a “in case” nerf was included instead of waiting to see how the new PvPs evolved and then take action if it was needed. Well, now we do have the numbers, so it may be time to reconsider some things…

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54

Hey everyone,

Just wanted to jump in here while I had a quick chance to pass on some information from the team.

Again, feedback is continuously being shared even if you don’t see myself or another dev posting in here - we have our whole own thread in our work chat just for this discussion.

With that, here is what some of the team have responded to me with.

The intention (Minions & Start Mana)

  • Introducing the Minion debuffs was an initial way to add Minions uses in PvP, before we get a chance to do a better Minion rework in the future.
  • We will be doing a further PvP update in the future as well, these changes have been introduced as some initial changes. Also allows us to gather feedback earlier, before any additional changes are made

In the meantime

  • Spells were previously asymmetrical, but it is something we are keeping an eye on
  • We are also analyzing data on how many turns you are taking in PvP and in KD battles, as well as time spent completing these battles so we can investigate further how these changes have affected the length of battles.

Going forward

As we have mentioned, there are numerous mechanics that need attention such as Spell Damage and Skull builds which we think would ultimately improve the gameplay experience in a well-rounded way.

However, obviously it’s all well and good that we will be doing further reworks in future (preferably before 4.0), but these changes have affected your play experience now.

Therefore, until we’re able to undertake the full raft of changes, we will be halving the Minion Mana Debuffs across the board for both player and opponent.

Once I have an idea of when this will go live, I will post an update.

Note: This will not affect Gear Score.

55

I don’t think that’s necessary tbh.

56

I just wanted to point out a couple of things I believe it is really important to take into account when thinking about big changes and reworks:

  1. This game is mostly PvE, so please don’t focus your changes on PvP, or if you do make sure they only apply to it. Making changes to improve PvP that hurt our experience on the rest of the content isn’t a good idea. It would be nice to have great PvP experience, but not at the expense of the rest of content.

  2. Be careful with thinking of future nerfs. The comment about spell damage and skull builds have sent chills down my spine. If your idea of balancing both is nerfing things (such as the recent critical cap) you will find a lot of opposition here. The reworks are nice but have made this game even more grindy. So if you keep trying to take away our ability to beat high level content quickly you may make players lose any motivation to keep playing the game.

I mean, seeing that no new content is likely to be released soon my only goal right now is to try to get a “perfect” build through refining and honing. But that requires lots of farming high level content. The increase of enemy spell damage and the critical cap have already hurted my farming deeply (I never died while farming lvl 100 before 2.5, now dying is an upsettingly common ocurrence against some enemies) so if you keep introducing nerfs that make me have to invest even more time and effort to get any progress down… Well, if my current enjoyment comes from progressing my builds and I end up seeing I cannot progress them anymore, then I have a problem.

I really have no idea of what is going on behind the scenes, so I may be afraid of things that will not happen. But I just wanted to make sure you take this into account to avoid any future big issues. Balancing the game is important, but the focus should always be to “improve the gameplay experience”. So before applying any changes please try to think if it will be really improving our experience (i.e. making us enjoy the game more) or if it may have the opposite effect.

As always, thank you for all you hard work and effort. I look forward to see how the game keeps improving and becoming more enjoyable and interesting with time.

11 Likes
57

I feel like the minion mana debuff is the weakest of the 3 minion abilities anyway, am I in the minority on this? Spells in general and especially damage spells are in the best spot they’ve ever been in, IMO. So changing them again, why? And changing skull builds? Maybe I’m overreacting, but your post makes me a little uneasy for whats coming. Game feels really good right now, so I’d hate to see a bunch of unnecessary nerfs just to try and capture a better PvP experience, which IMO already feels pretty good now already.

1 Like
58

Nope. I’m scratching my head this morning over the minion change, as that directly buffs the skull meta in PvP, which is what I thought the intention was when the minion PvP buffs were introduced? So, there must be something unspoken that is yet to be released.

Agreed.

And now, time again for the hatefest against Lyrian.

Because the giant elephant in the room is that skull damage is still ~10x (a full order of magnitude) over spells, despite spells being in the best position they have ever been.

The primary culprits here are the Aim and Cleave attributes.

Aim allowed for guaranteed skull crit bonus damage, now nerfed to 80% max chance. There is no spell equivalent, as spells are locked to a 5% crit chance.

Cleave skull crit bonus is 10x stronger than the equivalent {element}-strike attribute.

So, how do the devs balance this giant discrepancy when planning future content, knowing how strong skulls currently are?

Door #1 - Nerf skull crit attributes in-line with spells? That’s a 90% skull damage nerf from current skull crit damage levels. This entire thread screams that no one wants this outcome for all sorts of reasons.

Door #2 - Buff spell crit to behave similarly to skulls? This is the inverse of Door #1. That means potentially buffing spell damage by up to 10x to bring spell crit chances and damage to be in-line with the current skull meta. While this outcome would appear equitable at first glance, in the long run this decision forces everyone into either a skull crit or spell crit build at all times, as the game going forward would have to be balanced expecting players will be fielding crit gear at all times. This greatly restricts, if not outright eliminates build diversity. IMO, this outcome sucks too.

Door #3 - Some solution somewhere in the middle for both sides. The great unknown. All sorts of balancing and gameplay gimmicks could happen here, which makes a lot of posters here very uncomfortable and rightfully so. Any further nerfage of skull damage is going to anger those players, even if they are not as extreme as the Door #1 outcome.

So, what do the devs do here? No matter what the devs decide to do, some group of players are going to be negatively impacted by those changes. It’s a very uncomfortable “wait and see situation”, for potentially as long as the rest of Season 3?. And as others have already posted above, that sucks too.

59

Please keep in mind that Buffs and additional content will gain much more player goodwill than nerfs and restrictions as these changes are planned. (The team has been doing a great job with improving the game.)

Please make sure when looking at how much damage people are doing, they are evaluating the total amount of game play and purchases the top accounts have. Basically, throw out the outliers in a statistical sense. We, in Throne of Odin, had a discussion about how many years, play hours, and monetary contributions some of the top players have put in. Some have many thousands of hours played, and have earned their endgame gear sets. I often wonder how many whales were disenfranchised by the gear rework.

Keep an eye on some of the explosions. In Gems of War, as they became more available, they led to an imbalance over time, that then when things were adjusted (nerfed) people were upset. The Godslayer is very fun, but may throw off your balance as more people can mythic it. There is also a Buccaneer combo out there that can do some pretty fun and boring things at the endgame. If I see it on PvP defense, I just skip that player.

60

You didn’t mention the crit chance cap.

All we want is the crit cap gone, there’s no need to mess around with everything even more, just let us get back to 100% crit chance.

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