Critical Strike needs a proper rework.

TLDR; Critical Strike is currently unreactable randomness that is frustrating for both players building it and players who are against it. The solution is to change Critical Strike from a percent chance for double damage on basic attacks to a percent damage increase on basic attacks applied before resistance and damage reduction. No items require major changes.

To begin, why is Critical Strike a problem? Let me be clear, Critical Strike is balanced. However, it’s frustrating to play with when you have less than 100%. It’s also equally annoying when playing against it.

Farming with Critical Strike feels bad

Farming with critical strike is awkward when doing anything other than a slow push. If you want to shove the wave while still getting CS, you have to be aware that you could accidentally bring a minion to a lower hp than expected and lose it because you hit a 25% for double damage. This forces you into a constant state of last hitting until you get 100% Critical Strike, removing wave manipulation from the early game for Critical Strike users.

Trades are inconsistent

If you’ve ever died just barely because the enemy ADC got two crits in a row with only 25% Critical Strike, you understand the frustration of knowing you had a 93.875% chance of living there. Same goes when you miss a kill by 20 damage because you didn’t crit with 50% Critical Strike despite attacking three times. These situations are upsetting because it feels like you were outplayed by RNG, and not another player’s strategical prowess.

THE SOLUTION

Critical Chance should be changed from a percent chance for double damage to a percent damage increase on basic attacks. To elaborate on how this would work, let us suppose a situation in which you have 100AD and 50% Critical Strike. When you attack a 0 armour target you will either deal 100 or 200 damage. There’s a 50% chance for either outcome. After the proposed change you will deal 150 damage 100% of the time. The basic attack damage calculation would be as follows; (AD+(AD*Crit)+On-hit).

The Side Effects

No items need their stats changed. Because the long term damage output is identical, no balancing needs to be done in that regard. However, some ability effects and item passives need changes. The most notable ones are; Infinity Edge Let’s start with this passive. Oh boy is this passive misleading. On abilities that can critically strike for a reduced or increased %, IE is inconsistent with it’s effectiveness. Take Miss Fortune’s Bullet Time(R) and compare it to Kindred’s Mounting Dread(E). Bullet Time gains 20% bonus damage with crits, and becomes 25% with IE. This makes sense, as 5% is 20% of 25%, IE’s passive bonus damage. Mounting Dread deals 50% bonus damage on its guaranteed crit, so you’d think that IE would add 12.5% bonus damage. Instead it adds a full 37.5% bonus damage. This is a bit of a problem, because the item passive explains this terribly. I’ll be honest and say I don’t know how to fix IE, but in regards to only basic attacks, it should just increase the effectiveness of critical strike by 25%. As such, with 50% critical strike, your basic attacks would deal 62.5% more damage.

All abilities with the capability to critically strike An ability that deals 20% more damage with a critical strike will instead scale with 20% of critical strike. So if you have 50% critical strike, the ability will deal 10% more damage.

I’m getting tired so I’ll wrap this up.

I don’t know all the edge cases this change would affect, but I do believe it would be beneficial for the health of the game. If there are obvious holes or issues this would create, please share them.