The tittle say everything. Recently there is a lot of discussion abot this subject. Some people think that critical strikes should be removed, some people think that it should be reworked because of it's RNG and some people think it should be let as it is. So, we want to know, what is Riot's opinion ?
I've been thinking about crits a lot recently, and it made me recall a time when dodge was in the game. Everyone could build Ninja Tabis and gain like 10% dodge chance from auto attacks, and Jax's whole kit relied on dodging auto attacks. They removed dodge because they don't like the gambling, unreliable mechanic. Yet they kept crit, which is also a chance-based mechanic. Why?
Crit as a means of increasing damage is interesting, but it's unreliable, it's chance-based, and it doesn't feel good to receive a crit any more than it feels like you're really responsible for landing the crit. It's all chance.
The math of crits as it stands right now is this: for each percentage of crit you obtain, your average damage is increased by that percentage. Example: you have 100 AD and attack at a speed of 1 hit per second. Let's say you have 33% crit. Over 3 seconds, you will attack 3 times, and each hit has a 33% chance of dealing 200 damage instead of 100. This means that, on average, you will hit 1 crit for every 3 attacks, so you would hit one attack for 200, and two attacks for 100, or 400 total damage. 100 + 100 + 200 = 400 Instead of 300 damage in 3 seconds, you will be dealing 400 damage in 3 seconds. 400 is 33% greater than 300, which means your average damage increase is literally exactly equal to your crit chance.
So here's my suggested alternative: critical strikes no longer deal 200% damage BUT, when purchasing your first crit-based item, all attacks will now be critical strikes, and each item heightens the power of the critical strike
In other words, let's say you purchase a zeal. Instead of giving a 10% chance to crit for 200%, all of your basic attacks will now deal critical damage equal to 110% Any subsequent crit item would increase the damage of the crits by the same percentage they currently give right now. This mechanic would get rid of the unreliable mechanic of chance-crits, but still provide the exact same average damage as the current critical strike mechanism.
Doing so would significantly reduce the annoyance of early-game crits, which can often result in terrible one-sided fights, even though landing a crit with 10% crit chance has nothing to do with skill.
The reason I say to keep critical strikes in the game, rather than just making the crit items turn to flat damage or AD scaling items, is because you would have to rebalance towers if you relocate crit damage into flat damage. However, if you keep crits in the game, you can still only hit towers for normal damage, which being able to critical hit minions, monsters, and champions. It would require less rebalancing, but solve all the chance-based issues revolving around crit.
I agree that critical strike chance is a counter-intuitive mechanic. However, I believe that changing critical chance to flat damage increase is just as boring and is almost like simply increasing AD. I believe that a good work-around to this would be making crit chance a guaranteed chance. What I mean by this is that if one has 10% crit chance that EXACTLY every tenth auto attacks would crit. If one has 33% crit chance then EXACTLY every third auto attacks would crit. This would allow for much more consistent gameplay on the part or Marksmen in general, and it would allow for skill to play a much bigger part in teamfights, skirmishes, lane trades, and much more. This would also allow Yasuo to stay the way he is, but it would require a change to someone like Ashe (perhaps increasing her crit damage?). I think that it would also allow for Infinity Edge to remain an item.
As for crit chances that do not go evenly into 100 (17%, 21%, 45%, 99%), Riot could put in a bit of math to work around these things. My plan for working around odd percentages or prime numbers would be as follows: divide 100 by the number (ex. 100/17) figure that with their fancy in-game maths (5.9). Now, make the champion crit once in 6 auto attacks nine times in a row (because .9), and on the tenth time, they would crit on their fifth auto (the remaining .1). Do this math in reverse for percentages over 50%, and you have things like champions NOT critting on their third auto (66%), and so on. This would be much more confusing for the player, however, so maybe there could be a mechanic that SHOWS them when they will crit, rather than forcing players to count auto attacks or (even worse) download third part software that counts auto attack for them. What I mean by this is essentially make crit chance in general function in the way that Caitlyn's passive does.
There are a lot of really potentially interesting alternatives.
Doing something as simple as just removing Crit itemization and replacing Brawler's Gloves with Longswords and Cloaks with Pickaxes would make for a much more compelling game. It would allow Ranger kits to be diversified a bit more because with a lack of Crit more innate power could be added to them.
bump
Why would they remove crits? It works like it does in most games. I think making it a flat increase is redundant: it's just another form of AD. The reason dodge was remove is because it's a chance for your opponent to get unlucky, and perform based off of nothing he can change. You missed the auto that would have killed him? Too bad. Crit chance is just a bonus to your attack. It is possible to flip the tables and say that getting hit by 1 crit that killed you was completely un-preventative, but there are crit reduction masteries, as well as armor which reduces the damage overall. Crit isn't over or underpowered. The champions with a lot of crit built into their kits (i.e. trynd and yas) just means that they build differently. If they didn't have crit, they would be extremely boring bruisers (maybe not yas, but Trynd would be a mindless champion)
