A suggestion for removing RNG from Crits

[I wanted to link KSHarrison's original discussion since it's a fantastic thread]

#Background

So I just found myself back at some of Morello's comments on crits, and I wanted to take a crack at a suggestion for changing crit, and also hopefully increase visibility on the topic since I think it's an important system change.

There are three major things I took away from Morello’s comment:

1. Crits just “might kill you”; they don’t really create interesting gameplay
2. Crits are most problematic in lane, less so in teamfights
3. Carries (of the right-clicking variety) desire a multiplier for their damage to reach explosive levels

(Note: I’ve seen some suggestions pop up from time to time about changing crit into some more consistent scalar. The problem with a flat increase is that it won’t allow for a more exponential power curve, which I think is more desirable for the game. Someone else before may have suggested my idea, though I haven’t seen it/don’t remember seeing it)

Thanks to Arkblue for linking me to xDemon's thread, another great read. It's effectively the same idea, though from what I read, it has a slightly different implementation system.

#The Idea

My idea is to implement an AD ratio on basic attacks, and have the crit multiplier increase that ratio. What this means is, your auto attacks have a 100% AD ratio at the beginning of the game, and for every 1% crit, your AD ratio on auto attacks increases by 1%. This is different than just increasing your attack damage; similar to how you can have 100 AP but an 80% AP ratio, and thus only do 80 damage even though you ‘paid for’ 100 AP.

Let’s look at a scenario: EDIT: Reformatted a graphs for greater clarity. Champions with greater AD benefit more from this "crit", thus the scaling is multiplicative https://i.imgur.com/zRIpG1G.png https://i.imgur.com/yq7ElST.png

• Champion A has 100 AD and 0% crit (ie. 100% AD ratio on auto attacks); they do 100 damage per auto attack (not taking into account resistances)
• Champion B has 100 AD and 50% crit (150% AD on auto attacks); they do 150 damage per auto attack
• Champion C has 200 AD and 50% crit; they do 300 damage per auto
• Champion D has 200 AD and 100% crit; they do 400 damage per auto
• Champion E has 100 AD and 100% crit; they do 200 damage per auto

What this does is provide two linear scalars for a champion’s auto attacks to scale with; attack damage and crit chance. Taken alone, they don’t do much, so that 1% crit rune increases your damage by a very small amount (below 100 AD, it’s worse than a flat AD mark, higher than 100 AD, it’s very slightly better). However, in conjunction, they work to increase your damage multiplicatively, as seen with the increase between champion C and D (50% increase in stat resulting in a 100 damage increase). Note DPS might actually be less under this change, so it might be necessary to make crit an easier stat to buy to keep consistent with DPS in the live game.

#Pros

• This mitigates the impact of early game crit, while still providing a multiplicative source of damage amplification for carries.
• Champions also have a more gradual power curve; instead of Yasuo suddenly being at the point where he’s dealing double damage all the time, he gets more incremental increases in damage that grow exponentially as he accumulates more AD and crit
• Bruiser type champions won’t benefit as much since they cannot afford to buy as much crit chance as carries; crit only becomes valuable with either large amounts of crit or high amounts of AD, neither of which bruiser type champions can afford to buy a lot of. This eliminates a balance concern where this multiplicative damage should be more reserved for carries who dedicate their entire build towards damage, instead of someone like Critplank getting a lucky shot off in lane and winning based off that.
• Additionally, this type of change will not eliminate the value of buying AD on most champions, as their abilities still scale with AD. As seen with the above scenario as well, Champion E has as much crit as Champion D, but is dealing less damage than Champion C because they have lower base AD.
• It opens up alternative build paths; buying low amounts of crit early feels better than it does in live since it’s providing at least some consistent damage increase.
• It adds another lever for game balance. Yay levers :P
• I think it’s actually easier than some suggestions to implement in game; you don’t have to worry about rebalancing all champions AD ratios since this only impacts basic attacks (or attacks that can crit, ie Gangplank Q will also scale with this crit modifier in-some-way-to-be-determined; I think either directly benefitting the existing AD ratio or adding an overall multiplier that includes the base damage, to be more true to the live game. Abilities like Pantheon Q are unaffected since they're already guaranteed). AP scaling champions don’t need to worry since they just keep their 100% AD ratio on basic attacks, same as before

#Cons

(I can’t think of many cons, but if you come up with some leave a comment and I’ll edit the post)

• DPS might actually be lower, as mentioned before, crit values might have to be adjusted to bring things up to par with the live game.
• Junglerboy16 brought up that we might lose some cool crit animations; they also brought up that the animation could just be added to their rotation of attack animations.
• This system doesn't really allow for any more gameplay around the damage multiplier, only more consistency. I think overall a system that allows for interesting gameplay is preferable.

#Other interesting bits

• I’m sort of wondering if over 100% crit should be allowed; this would allow for even more exponential scaling in some cases, but overall I think it could open up some cool build paths.

• Going with above, what if Ashe’s passive, instead of stacking Focus, added bonus crit, up to 100%? A few options with this; First, same as it is now, once it stacks to 100%, it is used on her next auto, with extra crit chance reducing the amount of stacks she needs. She remains basically the same. Second, instead of the extra crit reducing the amount of stacks she needs, it’s a 100% bonus crit chance overall, meaning with extra crit chance, she can hit multipliers over 100% crit chance; her empowered auto is going to hit like a truck, but it has to reset back down to 0, meaning there’s longer down time between when she uses that crazy powerful auto. Third, the crit chance is continuously used as it generates, meaning her autos in lane deal slightly more damage overall, but it’s more difficult get to that 100% crit damage as before unless you’re not attacking at all. The last option is debatable whether she can charge over 100% crit.

#Suggested ideas from the comments

{quoted} Here's the same suggestion I made: Crit animations. : the % crit is the % chance of your attack animation being replaced with a crit animation. Champions interaction would need a retune champ by champ.

For example, is intuitive how to balance Yasuo without moving him from where he is, less so with Tryndamere who also relies on crit to reduce his E cooldown.

#Thanks for reading!

Let me know what you guys think!