Critical Strikes, Chance, and Skill: Potential Rework?

Hilltop Sunset·1/8/2015, 9:18:55 PM·5 votes·1,629 views

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 instead of increasing the chance each attack will crit

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, so buying a brawler's glove would increase the crit damage to 118%. 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 reallocate crit damage into flat damage. However, if you keep crits in the game, you can still only hit towers for normal damage, while being able to critical hit minions, monsters, and champions. It would require less rebalancing, but solve all the chance-based issues revolving around crit.

...eh? Eeeeeh?

9 Comments

Hilltop Sunset4/28/2015, 7:31:43 PM3 votes

Just want to say they did this for Ashe's rework. You're all welcome.

Drunk Rummate1/8/2015, 9:23:44 PM1 votes

So essentially you turn crit chance into a %damage modifier? I feel we would be better off simply removing the mechanic altogether and just reworking the flat AD on items to compensate. Remember that Riot is concerned about clarity in design. %damage modifiers (including crit, interestingly enough) aren't nearly as clear as just flat AD stats are.

Dr Jarjarbinks1/8/2015, 9:25:27 PM1 votes

no

Lord Dusteon1/8/2015, 9:25:55 PM1 votes

"Tryndamere please stop spinning everywhere at constant full fury"

ModKnightsKemplar1/8/2015, 10:42:14 PM1 votes

I absolutely think an "always crit" mechanic would be garbage. If they remove it, they should just remove it, plain and simple.