Game Balance: Marksmen and Their Damage
Critical Strikes are being too good right now where marksmen can become ranged assassins, especially with Infinity Edge (being too good as a stand alone item, get to this later), while still doing their job as objective takers and tank busters (tank is a broad category, this includes juggernauts, bruisers, etc anyone who is durable and hard to kill needs sustain damage to take down).
I am going to propose some crazy ideas, so beware now. If you like or dislike something then please say exactly what it is and give your own ideas to help improve the post for the future!
~ Everyone starts the game off with 20% critical strike chance, but critical damage is reduced to 20% from 100% so there are not huge surprise damage amounts when a crit happens. This helps tone back burst damage and make crit users (basically most marksmen) focused on sustain damage rather than trying to kill other squishies. There will be more on this.
~ Critical strike chance is capped at 80% rather than going all the way to 100%. There should always be some kind of RNG element to critical strikes and you should not be allowed to remove the RNG to them, just increase the RNG in your favour rather than against you with critical strike chance items.
~ There will be a new stat made which is Additional Critical Damage, or +10% Critical Damage for an example (one example), which is a stat and not a passive to build up your damage with items. Infinity Edge will still have the same multiplier passive where it increases all of your Critical Damage by 50% (multiplied by 1.5 times) which places it more towards Rageblade style in the terms of needs other items to be good and gets stronger with more items that buffs up its unique very powerful passive, rather than be strong on its own. ~ ~ ~ If all of the critical items grant +10% critical damage, and assuming you have boots, you have +50% critical damage for a total of 70% critical damage, Infinity Edge multiplies this to 105%, this is an end-game damage build so you get significantly less damage than they do now. Here is the thing though, you control a marksman's damage a lot better then you can do more with them and give them more cool items for better build diversity. ~ ~ ~ Also critical damage items do not need critical strike chance on them, for example Blade of the Ruined King would get critical damage too despite not having crit chance since it is a basic attacking item.
~ Penetration and Lethality stacking needs to be removed to both balance assassins and marksmen. To do this you separate how they are used, where Lethality only affects physical damage from abilities (assassins) and Penetration can have its % bonus armour value increased quite a bit, but only applies on critical strikes from basic attacks. Have one thing only work for abilities and the other only work on basic attacks to control the balance of their power a lot better, forces the user to decide what they value more between helping out there abilities or helping out there basic attacks. ~ ~ ~ Separating Lethality and Penetration from each other can do cool things like introduce more cool items and not worry about marksmen abusing the lethality item or assassins abusing the penetration item.
~ There could be an additional effect to critical damage, or as a new item's passive, that amplified critical damage by 50% against targets above 3000 health (with Infinity Edge's passive this be 100% increased critical damage against durable targets). This would trigger against epic monsters as well. ~ ~ ~ If as an item, then it would be a lot cheaper than Infinity Edge since it is the same effect, but only against specific targets.
I guess the short end of this would be:
- Reduce marksmen burst damage and focus on their sustain damage
- Critical damage moved into a system that builds on itself, kind of like the new Rageblade and building items that buff it up, Infinity Edge should be like that
- Separate lethality and penetration to remove stacking of these two effects, control balance better
Hope you enjoy the thoughts and have a nice day! [sg-kiko]
