An idea to change the Critical hit mechanic in a meaningfull way

J Eevo··2 votes·687 views

There's recently a lot of talk about the critical hit chance stat and how it stands against the idea of a fair skill based game given it's random nature (Winning a duel because of scoring multiple critical hits in a row while not having 100% chance) and how the stat in itself is not worth anything when you're unlucky yet worth more than anything else when you are. There's also the thing that you can't really itemize against critical hit, other than buying more armor (which you'd already be doing regardless).

I've thought about how it could be changed and I think I came up with an idea that the Dev team might want to take into consideration.

I've come to call it the 'Finding Weakness' mechanic. How it works is:

  • A full critical hit item, gives you a redone Critical Hit passive(Which means getting rid of the critical hit % items building the items with just AD for Infinity or Attack speed items for statik and phantom dancer).

  • The passive makes it so that every hit applies a stack of 'Finding Weakness' which make you critically strike when you reach 4 stacks. However every full Critical hit item lowers the needed stacks to score a critical hit by 1 down to a minimum of 2 stacks when you have 3 critical hit items.

  • Stacks of Finding Weakness fall off one at a time staying on a person for 2.5*YourAttackSpeed (More attack speed meaning less time of the passive stays on a person as to have a meaningfull counterplay and avoid situations where the person you're against can't engage because of being constantly in the danger of being critted).

  • Yasuo being a special case would get an innate Critical hit passive (so he starts on level 1 being able to crit after 4 strikes) and would be able to go down to the minimum of 1 stack effectively making him crit 100% of the time at 3 crit items (With the damage on his passive scaled accordingly).

The change I'm proposing would probably have to be looked at and redone or tweaked by the Dev team before being fully balanced but it would get rid of the randomness of critical hits while simultaneously adding a meaningfull counterplay for the opponent (You can back off or cc the ADC before the last stack triggers adding a bigger depth and a kind of a minigame playing between the ADcs)

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this.

4 Comments

Teridax682 votes

While I agree that crit needs to be reworked into not being random, the problem with a passive like this is that landing four autoattacks in a row against an enemy champion isn't going to happen that often, at least not early on, and would also punish marksmen for switching targets in the middle of a fight, which would potentially make for even more unstable damage output. You're effectively turning crit into Silver Bolts for every marksman, which definitely carries interesting gameplay, but still makes crit unreliable, even if it's no longer random, and may even make it less reliable than now.

A more minor issue here is that crit isn't worth the same on every item: item 3078 has 10% crit chance, for example, whereas item 3046 has 30% crit chance, but in the system you propose both contribute to crit equivalently. This could, however, be solved by rebalancing each item around this new mechanic.

J Eevo2 votes

You bring up a valid point, do you think the system would be more fair if the passive was innate (every Xth attack crits) allowing you to do things like stacking it up on minions before critting an enemy? And while I agree that it might be hard to bring in line the items as they are now, I'm sure that if the critical system were to change the items would have to be changed anyway ( Let's be frank, situations where a triforce user wins a trade by critting randomly three times in a row off of a passive 10% shouldn't really happen)

Teridax681 votes

Being able to stack crit on minions before attacking champions would turn crit into Caitlyn 's Headshot passive, which would heavily favor poke marksmen early to mid game.

While I agree that getting more or fewer crits than you should in a trade is a problem, crit runs on a pseudorandom number generator, rather than a "true" RNG, which means that your chance of getting a crit increases or decreases with every autoattack, depending on whether or not that autoattack was a crit. Effectively, getting three crits in a row with just a item 3078 is even less likely than its 0.1% likelihood of occurring in a completely random system (though it's still possible).

Espy Psyche1 votes

How about a new stat? Something maybe called "Resilience", or maybe "Fortification". It reduces damage taken from critical strikes, and having more resilience increases your damage reduction. Randuin's Omen and Thornmail would likely be the first items to get it, along with maybe a new item specifically for resilience.

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