Crit build too strong?

[TyroRNG]

I'd say that critical hit builds are broken at the moment.
Critical is unaffected by the weapon multiplier (therefore heavily favoring fast firing weapons) but even with slow shooting weapons it gets too powerfull too quickly.
The main culprits are critical arrow, explosion and lightning being able to trigger more crits to cast more of them.
But the fact that litterally any damage source can crit and therefore trigger the above three is what makes it too strong.
Any DoT, Lightning bounces, AoE zones, shots, things triggered by shots.

Compared to other items the fact that it can trigger itself in a loop makes it too powerful.
Most other items can only be triggered by you shooting (on shoot, on hit, on enemy hit).
While the perk totem can make those better or comparable to crit, the random factor in what perks you get combined with the rarity of those items makes them very risky to build.

(About perks, can we talk about getting homing or sticky on those sticky homing thorns and how spiraling, chaotic, snaking etc are effectively downgrades, sometimes to the point of turning the items worthless...)

Elemental builds are fine (depending on the weapon) but they fall flat to the elite and boss stages with near elemental imunity (Sure you can get build where you can effect bosses but you need an overkill amount of elemental compared to normal stages).

[Bug Guy]

Crit is definitely good, but I like what this game is doing with it compared to others. Crit is so often in games because it sounds RPG roguelike, when all it functionally does it add %damage in a conditional way. This game has crit perks and things like crit arrow and crit lightning. Its fun and since crit arrow got nerfed its in a better place. Used to be unfathomably powerful.
Not at DoTs trigger it, but Arcane will. Those enhancements that add spiraling and such still add 50% damage, so unless it very negatively affects trajectory it should be an upgrade even if not ideal. And since boss elemental resistance got tuned down I find if Im actually building elemental and not just dipping my toe in it performs well.
TLDR yeah crits pretty great but I think it should be considering its an entire chest category on its own and requires investment. probably could be nerfed some more but I would say its low prio

[Casurin]

You need multiple items and each of them at a decent level. Certainly IF you manage to get that build going it is nice, but for that it is not all that strong either.

Just compare it to a thing i had recently:
Escalating Shot + Efficiency + All You can eat
3 items - but they are not uncommon. that gets the DPS rolling FAST. add on Windup/Moneyshot and you can get insane Damage/money early on. Sadly it was a run just for farming a few more keys but darn it was that OP. And certainly more likely to get than high crit-rate + crit-procs as just lvl1 on those 3 items is enough to reach the firerate-limit with medium-to-fast weapons on most islands.

Originally posted by Bug Guy:

Those enhancements that add spiraling and such still add 50% damage, so unless it very negatively affects trajectory it should be an upgrade even if not ideal.

They are an INSANE downgrade. Had a decent run with lvl 8 timeshot - and then got spiraling on it and suddenly all that nice Damage was gone.

[Rideps]

The only one that really feels BROKEN to me, is how, with a weak fast firing weapon, you can just unload into the biggest sponge in the area, and if you have critical lightning, everything ELSE will die.

Don't get me wrong, I love it. But it does feel a bit too much.

[Bug Guy]

Originally posted by Casurin:

They are an INSANE downgrade. Had a decent run with lvl 8 timeshot - and then got spiraling on it and suddenly all that nice Damage was gone.

Like I mentioned, if they mess with your ability to reliably hit, its a downgrade. But they do increase the damage, so if they dont mess you up, its fine. Especially if you roll homing on them anyway. If I get spiraling on mace shot, I dont mind. Now I can hit stuff at range and it does more damage as well. Its all context. Homing does not add damage, so getting it on thorn shot seemingly does actual nothing, but on spark shot can kill an elite before they finish spawning

[Alpagaus]

It's another multiplier, that's all. You can easily get insane damage with fire on fast firing weapons, which is not affected by crits and yet it does its job well - does that mean it's "broken"? No.

Especially on higher difficulties, namely true ultra nightmare where any "flaws" are brought to light and the real "damage calculation hell" comes to light.

Let's say you get 20% crit chance for 300% damage - that sounds good, right? It's a 40% damage increase. Meaning it's worse than one 50% raw damage increase, but, it multiplies what you have, so if you take a 50% damage increase, you get 50% damage increase, but if you take another one, we look at what you currently do, so you actually get less of an increase.

That's why different layers are important. Poison for example is another direct multiplier, but unlike crit which is based on your damage, it directly multiplies ALL your damage after every other calculation. I never had luck with poison but I also never tried hard to get it, but 20 stacks is a direct 20% damage increase, meaning at some point it will be better than even 10 perks of either damage or crit.

And that's why I like to judge these with highest difficulty in mind, where different options matter more - I once had damage aura with crit lightning and crits of course. I was proccing it left and right - loop 1 comes in and it's not enough to do enough damage and truth comes to light: I've wasted perks adding to it when I could've went for something else for elites. Because it wasn't dealing much damage to them and because I was going for crits and as much raw damage for lightning, my weapon and grenades didn't do enough.

It's great for small guys, just like many other things - but with hp scaling and damage scaling, you need both raw damage and these layers, with crit being just one. So I wouldn't call it broken - luck perks win this hands down because they either give more perks or allow you to get whatever you need directly increasing your power by less or more while giving you a chance for even more.

[Limdood]

Crit on it's own is quite sub-par.

Critical procs, on the other hand, can easily carry a True Nightmare run. Critical blast is an utter beast of a perk....as long as you can support it. Like all scaling proc-based perks, it scales quite sharply....10% for 50 damage at level 1, and 19% for 100 damage at level 2...roughly a x4 increase. Critical arrow is similar, but lacks the AoE of critical blast which is what takes critical blast from "pretty nice" to "overpowering"

It is worth noting that an "i win" setup for crit still does take some investment. You need to have a good ~24%+ crit chance and 2-3 Critical blasts (or critical arrows, but again, they'll struggle to deal with numbers), as well as either a fast firing weapon or a level of time shot in order to have any consistency with your procs. Once you GET that though, assuming you're going to keep pushing crit and crit-proc perks, you've got it made.


As several others have said in this thread though....it's merely a means to an end. There are loads of other quite strong options to "break the game wide open"....It needs some very specific perks, but it does have one significant advantage: It's fairly consistent, considering there are only 8 total crit perks (5 blue: power punch, sharpshooter, hot shot, critical arrow, critical thinking; 2 purple: critical blast, mega crit; and 1 legendary: critical lightning), it is generally easy to consistently push your crit-based damage higher and higher....any crit chest is very likely to give you a critical blast, sharpshooter, or critical arrow. If you're confident in your defense or have consistent armor, you can grab hot shot as well. Critical lightning is amazing, and power punch and mega crit are adequate. You're pretty much guaranteed to get something useful for your build in every crit island.

That being said, before you get it rolling, it's notoriously weak. Most any other damage increase option, perk for perk, will give you more benefit than crit will in the early game, so you need to be able to survive until you get what you need, which isn't always an option. crit islands have some similarities to luck or economy islands....you give up odds of getting items that will give you immediate effectiveness boosts in return for getting potentially bigger or more consistent payoff later.

[Dopey Shepard]

The only really broken thing about crits is Critical BLAST, nothing more

If you don't have crit blast, everything else is just whatever, really

Hot Shot got nerfed. Used to be 15%, and taking more dmg with that thing? No thank you

Critical Arrow in V1 update was 100% guarantee which was basically OP. Now got rightfully nerfed down to 12% chance. You need many levels of it to be 100% chance

So ye, by itself critical is ok. The only thing making it ridiculous is only critical blast, and nothing more.