Critical strikes have been done wrong they could be better

Look marksmen are supposed to have a few strengths right

Like consistent reliable damage Damage from range

Which has been used to deal with objectives and tanks and the like because those had lots of health and defenses

Mostly effective for killing tanks and besieging structures you would want the safety of range for the structures and you needed a way to eventually kill of a tank

They are moving targets after all and do not like getting hit, they might not care as much as anyone else but they could just sidestep a mage combo since that is still better then face tanking it no matter how much damage it deals. So something that cannot be dodged and is consistent would be perfect

Enter the marksman Someone who can do these sorts of things Now the tank would still not be the most effective guy to target so you wont unless you got nothing else to hit or hes forcing you to

So far so good

But then crit happens now you can 3 shot tanks and squishes alike Tank thinks fuck that i build armor and tons of it Marksmen is sad now he can no longer 3 shot tanks but it's ok everyone else is dropping like flies And then later you get armorpen and everything is fine You are 1-3 shotting everyone including tanks again ( Maybe slightly exaggerated sometimes tank need 4 hits i get it)

Does anyone see a problem yet? No? Look closer!

Remember that reliable consistent damage part? You know the right clicks with like no form of counterplay or interaction. Oh and did you see the armorpen part, you know that stuff that everyone else can buy too now.

You know for something so reliable as a basic attack with the safety of range i find critical strikes to be far too effective vs everything And with anti defense (armorpen etc) being so abundant everyone can be good vs tanks just like the marksman used to be Paper turrets and everyone gaining damage vs them (including arpen works on turrets) didn't help either

You know crit turned reliable consistent damage into reliable oneshotting and ended up very inconsistent in the earlier stages of the game

The strengths of marksmen, being strong vs defensive targets has become sort of obsolete now that everyone can do it and now marksmen with all their uber crits get to be overpowered vs everything otherwise they are useless

Something just seems off about that to me

So what if we did critical strikes entirely different Made them less about obscene damage and more about other things

Like removing the damage part from the crit, well a lot of it anyway, and making them penetrate bonus armor, also crital strikes now work on structures

Then we can do away with the current iterations of last whisper and everyone who isn't supposed to be strong vs high defense targets no longer is, well less so anyway

And by comparison marksmen will therefore be a lot stronger vs those targets

As finishing touch we can add additional items which give extra effects like bonus damage to neutral monsters and structures based off of total crit for example Or debuffing critical strikes like applying grievous wounds or applying a bleed or crippling/grounding someone or even harder penetrating crits etc etc Items like IE in a way speaking off, it could remain and add bonus critical damage based on your amount of critical chance

I think this would be a far healthier system

It would add multiple balance levers to critical strike strength and would add a lot more potential new item possibilities for the marksmen class (and create more diversity), or anyone else who builds crit wants bonus effects i mean we all do the old troll build sometimes

Right now all we have to balance critical strength is by directly tuning critical strengths damage This would add the armorpen variable to that And you have all the different possible critical effects to redistribute strengths too as well

Though this would require a full change of all the ''marksmen items'' and add a bunch of new ones as well and would possibly require some tuning of a bunch of marksmen and some other champions to this change will they be out of whack for a bit? Sure! but who cares if it makes them a lot better and gives us many new tools and toys.

And i might finally be able to enjoy the class because i can do all kinds of variations in builds on all kinds of different marksmen Rather then picking the handful of marksmen who can abuse the current metagolem build the hardest