Critical Weakness

Chris remarked that this curse seems weak, in the lastest build of the week.

If you're looking to improve it, I would suggest the following:

Make it so physical critical strikes with this curse have some effect? Reduce armor/evasion for X seconds based on physical critical damage done?

projectile and ele still trump this clearly, boost the multiplier early on, but let damage gradient level around midgem.

Even more useless in 9.13. Leveling from level 1 to 2 adds 4 more mana cost (30-34) for 1% more crit damage,.1 duration, and 5% radius.

The weak link in this equation is the additional crit chance. 5% is significant for builds that dont care about crit, and insignificant for builds that center around crit. There's really no potential for it to be useful in its current form.

The extra damage from crits is useful, but really only for builds that carry around 3 diamond flasks, and frankly, diamond flasks are probably the main reason this curse is stuck in limbo. Buff it, and you buff diamond flasks, which are already incredibly powerful. Keep it where it stands, and it is useless without diamond flasks.



It seems to me that it would make the most sense to give the curse a flat "50% more damage taken from critical strikes" value, and allow levels/quality to modify the crit chance aspect of the skill.

Alternatively, the curse could go in an entirely different direction, by having some sort of effect every time a cursed mob is dealt a critical strike.

the modifications this curse is doing is additive not multiplicative.

ice spear for example will have 12% crit chance as a base (7% +5%). with same skill's extra effect, it'll have 84% chance to crit (12% *(1 +6.00). without the just lv 1 curse, 49% chance to crit on secondary effect.

now with 640% chance to crit from all crit chance boosting passives close to a witch as possible, a 5% base crit chance spell would have 37% chance to crit. with this curse at level 1, it is then 74% chance. so for basic weapons and "normal" spells, this curse doubles, chance to crit at level 1. that's not small at all and we're not even counting support gem, although most people would in order to fix the skill tree =p. either way, i shown that diamond flasks aren't all that necessary if players really are crit focused. however this is just the chance side of the equation, i didn't get to multiplier yet.

this skill would benefit diamond flasks only via the damage boost part of this curse. despite how oddly worded the damage boost part is the same in ether mechanic as followed. the damage boost either happens on foe taking damage instead of player's stats. or if it did affect stats, it is still a "more" and thus still after in order of operations of game calculation.

so at no passives/supports for crit damage, 1.5 *1.5 = 2.25 total boost
crit damage with a boost of 50%, (1.5 *(1+ 0.5)) *1.5 = 3.375 total boost

game cannot show any of the modified numbers above that involved this curse. the curse is on the foe, not you, not that being on you would do any benefit for yourself. reminder, calculations are done with a lv 1 version of the gem... its far stronger and covers larger radius on level up.

The problem there is that Elemental weakness or the specific elemental curses might increase your damage by over 100% against resistant mobs, and still ~30-40% against all others, completely independent of crits;
While some of them have additional effects, as do Projectile weakness and vulnerability.
Also, is the 5% base chance really additive to the passives?
I so far thought it would just add to the end result.

i love being wrong because it means i have to look at something else. then again in this case its a "shame on you". it should've been common sense and logical to be a "at the end" because of how i explained the damage calc. guess i was over eager.

but how about this? a lv 16 elemental weakness curse (specific element or not) is -45% res of an amount of res the monster has that we don't know. i assume is 100% at merciless despite mobs suffering from same cap as players of 75%. a same level crit strikes is a foe takes 65% more damage. i will assume a player will link thier attack with relevant penetration gem of same level for the element in question. total reduction for an element is 85% for using an ele curse, or 40% for the curse in topic.

math time for for mobs not resistant to anything; 85 is both support boosted skill and element curse, 1.5 is a crit, 1.4 is support, 1.65 is crit curse. all damage mods but happen on-hit except criting from passives.
200 dmg *1.4 =280 no crit
200 dmg *1.85 =370 no crit

200 dmg *1.5 *1.85 =555 crit
200 dmg *1.5 *1.4 *1.65 =693 crit (no assumed crit damage boost)

200 dmg *2.25 *1.4 *1.65 =1039.5 crit (assuming 50% crit damage boost passives/accessories)

now due to my painful mistake, that 280 will happen between 30% and 70% of the time vs the 370 damage is nearly all the time (90%). but then a 693 crit vs a 555 crit, i will not count the "further" damage case as that'll be rude (and messy). my next math is far wrong as i'm not fully aware of probability. so half the time a crit build is making normal hits and crits so... 140 dps for normal hits and 346.5 dps for crits, or 486.5 dps total if that's how the game summarizes. alternatively, 333 dps then 55.5 dps for non crit and crit elemental cursing, so 388.5 dps.

so power vs reliability comes into question, the duration for a crit curse is pretty minimal for such a (now) small chance boost making it harder to use due to the new curse costs. using a diamond flask helps but not nearly that much for someone already using this curse and (both) crit passives. diamond flasks are for getting damage when you know it which is a reliability thing. someone not putting points into crit will get average results from a diamond flask while the same person will get far more from crit weakness curse but not guaranteed. flask is free, curse is not; flask is max of 2 seconds, curse is max of 11.
monsters die moderately fast till endgame so that makes the flask the winner during leveling up and NO curse the winner till late where they cost much much more.

think i went on a rant... sorry.

Let's do a base calculation (yes, I want to do a calculation, too!^^):

Base damage: 100 (1/sec cast rate for ease of calculation)
Base Crit-C: 25%
Base CritMP: 300% (+100% mp from passives/gear)

Enemies have either 0% or 100% resist, at normal cap.

Both curses are level 11, requiring character level 49.

Base DPS:

75% * 100 + 25% * 100 * 1.5 = 112.5 DPS
Resistant Mobs take 1/4 the damage

Critical Weakness Curse:

Normal
75% * 100 + 33% * 100 * 3 = 174 DPS
Resistant
(75% * 100 + 33% * 100 * 3)*(1-75%) = 43.5 DPS

Elemental Weakness Curse:

Normal
(75% * 100 + 25% * 100 * 1.5)*1.4 = 157.5 DPS
Resistant
(75% * 100 + 33% * 100 * 3)*(1-60%) = 69.6 DPS

If 33% of Enemies are resistant against the used element, Critical Weakness results in 130.5 DPS, while Elemental Weakness results in 128.2 DPS.

Obviously, there's other factors; If the crit multiplier is higher than +100%, Crit weakness is improved, is enemy resistance is only 75%, Elemental weakness will be way stronger, weaker if the resistance is higher than projected.

Reflect mobs incur a higher chance of sudden death to crits, but criticals may result in status ailments; On the other hand, a burning effect on a highly fire resistant enemy won't do much.
Ultimately, the only thing negative to be said about crit weakness is it's lack of reliability.

The bad reputation of crit weakness seems to stem mostly from it's dropping usefulness for crit specs, where the +X% crit chance doesn't quite do it anymore in comparison to a base chance of 50%.
One has to see that projectile weakness might be better in certain cases, and if using only one Element, a specific Elemental Curse will allow a higher chance of status effects, possibly surpassing the chance of that happening from Critical weakness.

For builds with high crit multi this is a pretty good curse. For elemental, it outperforms the resist lowering curses in low resist situations and does worse in high resist situations, so that's as it should be. It's also a nice alternative for Ele Weakness in multiple element setups because it increases status effect application. For phys damage characters with good crit damage, I'm pretty sure this curse outperforms absolutely everything :)