Increased Critical Damage

Yeah, I kind of feel like this gem is a major factor in the current 'crit or go home' DPS meta. Its just unbeatable if you're running a crit build, and it contributes to making it very, very easy to stack multi. Toss and this and maligaro's and you're basically set to steamroll 99% of the game's content.

I think it either needs to be nerfed pretty hard or more prerably the basic mechanics of crit multi need to start seeing some diminishing returns.

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C0Y0T3_SLY wrote:

the basic mechanics of crit multi need to start seeing some diminishing returns.

Critical Multiplier does have diminishing returns. The issue is it has a larger upper bound on its multiplier than the Increased% multiplier does. You can only get around 6.0x increased physical damage on maces endgame, while the crit multiplier multiplier can go nearly twice that. (And applies to all damage, obviously.)

Base: 150
From the stat tree: 270
From this gem: 225
From weapon slots: 180
From amulet slot: 100
From Maligaro's gloves: 50

Total multiplier: 9.75

So having critical damage is roughly an order of magnitude more powerful than not having it for weapons able to get into 80%+ critical chance.

The issues involved are really twofold:

* How base critical chance works. +20% chance to crit on a wand is not equal to +20% chance to crit on an axe. Better would be for off-weapon critical chance just give a flat bonus, like +1.5% chance to crit. The critical chance on weapons could then be jacked up since owning a wand with a +26% chance to crit wouldn't make it exponentially easier to get to 95% chance.

* CRITICAL MULTIPLIER IS A DAMAGE SUFFIX. Almost no suffixes increase damage. To "buff" resolute technique like the power creep camp wants, you'd have to add equivalent Increased% Damage suffixes. Such as "100% Physical Damage With Weapons." But. There's a problem with that: if sufficiently powerful, that also inflates the damage critical hits will do.

Nerfing it through gear has problems with cheesing people off with legacy gear. A better roundabout way is to nerf the power of Critical Multiplier by reducing how often it applies. With a max attainable critical chance of 50%, the difference between non-crit and crit would be a factor of 4 or 5, instead of an order of magnitude.

Looked at the math for red zone Spectral Throw Staves again.

For a poopload of stat points and this support gem, it was roughly 2x damage. 2.3x damage with increased crit chance on the weapon. With gear crit affixes loaded up to the gills, about 3.5x damage to 4x. I wouldn't even say 3.5x damage is too much for how stretched out the red zone makes your backbone when it comes to taking Stave crit. [1] Or how low the accuracy stat in the zone is. Power charges [2] are essential to really make it Worth It.

I don't think this support gem is overpowered. 2x damage for a support gem and ~15 stat points isn't unreasonable. Attacks with balanced crit, like Staves, are reasonable until you gather more multiplier on gear. As I've said years ago, it's an additional significant damage suffix that non-crit characters simply don't get access to.

At least in the case of support gems, power creep means there will eventually be an alternative to this support if there isn't one already. But you have to add a "you deal x% increased damage on non-critical hits" suffix to the pool if you want to balance gear. Which is... a bit awful.


[1] As opposed to Daggers, which get you up to >20% crit chance by taking stats you were going to take to begin with. [3]

[2] Why don't these things just give a flat +4% crit chance each? Endurance charges got hit with the nerf bat..

[3] Actually, the dagger implicit affix dang near achieves that +300% critical chance strike the passive tree offers other weapons almost on its own. Why does the implicit on daggers get to be like 20 stat points worth of power, while the implicit on wands is worth like one? What's up with that? That's just like those shields with +24% resist implicits in the early days.

The almost 50% nerf to this gem is pretty ridiculous.... was cutting it in half necessary?

The gem is totally useless now :D

From around 40% more damage in the best of cases to 23.7%.

Does nothing to impact map clear speed. Can't kill something in less than one hit.

Moving deck chairs on a ship and all that. Eh.

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LimitedRooster wrote:

From around 40% more damage in the best of cases to 23.7%.

Does nothing to impact map clear speed. Can't kill something in less than one hit.

Moving deck chairs on a ship and all that. Eh.

Yeah, the old Increased Critical Damage gem was too powerful. Especially its quality bonus.
But i think, the nerf to the gem was too harsh.
And instead of nerfing crit so hard, they should somehow add better options for non-crit weapons (a random mod on weapons/gem for increasing non-crit damage, etc).

And they nerfed crit multiplier in the tree, too.
What's the point going crit then, if so hard investments into it wont make big damage output (for most weapons)?

Also, for melee crit build, Abyssus now seems freaking OP.

How do you go from 5% quality to .5% quality? The nerf to this gem was a bit TOO extreme if you ask me and makes going crit a little worthless. If the tree remained as it was (regarding crit) it would have been better, but the combination of nerfing the gem AND the tree was a bit TOO much.