If they do bring that back it should be one stat. the whole chc and chd has been done to death.
Let’s hope they look at this and crushing blow with a critical eye.
I actually like how many Role Playing Games handle these mechanics as opposed to ARPG’s simpler methods.
My point is that if you had 300% critical bonus damage than getting +1% crit chance will translate into doing roughly 3% more damage output over time.
Sure it wont be on every hit, but over the course of an entire dungeon crit chance would always beat attack speed in terms of pure damage output.
At 200 average damage +1% crit would mean on average every 100 attacks you do a bonus 600 damage, which comes out to an average 206 damage per attack.
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The problem of CC + CHD is that their value becomes highly variable when both exist, even if you can’t get both on the same item.
You could make it so that if the max AS you can get is 6%, then the max CC you can get is 2% but then those things are only equal if you have 300% CHD.
If the rest of your gear doesn’t have CHD, then CC is worthless. It means the only time you’d ever want crit is if you’re planning on stacking both stats on every piece of gear if that’s what the stat budget is balanced around.
I’d rather see CHD be a talent that can be highly controlled and compete with other talents that would also inflate the value of other stats(making it a player choice about which stat is the most valuable to you).
Either that or you’d have to cap CHD from gear at a very low number.
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That’s a comparison between two characters doing the same base damage (200). Of course the one having crits on top of that will do more average damage.
But in reality, he chose crits affixes over different ones that another character would have taken. So a crit character will always make less base damage, making his crit peaks not so powerful (in a well balanced game of course, not D3 ^^).
As an example, let’s take 2 characters with a 100 damage attack. Char A specializes in fire damage and Char B in crits.
Char A takes 6 affixes with +10% Fire damage and 4 +5% Damage, now he makes 180 damage average.
Char B takes 4 +10% Crit Chance affixes and 6 +30% Crit Damage, so a total of 30% Crit Chance and +180% Crit Damage. That means, on 10 attacks, 4 crit at 280 damage and 6 do 100. (4 x 280 + 6 x 100) / 10 = 172. That’s still less average damage than Char A.
The same goes for Attack Speed, it basically just increases average damage the same way a +% Damage does. It doesn’t favour crit builds more than normal builds.
Actually, only two factors really need to be overseen :
- make sure your base damage don’t increase much when you build a crit character.
- limit progression to either Crit Chance or Crit Damage, so they don’t synergize too much.
Being in D2 doesnt make it good tbh 
If it was only a few armor pieces that had defensive only, like only chest and legs for example, it might be fine.
But in general, I dont think armors should be so limited in what they can roll (it is fine that specific affixes are limited).
Anyway, plenty of people seem to favor, in a scenario where either CHC or CHD had to be removed (which I dont think it should), that CHD is the one to go.
I wonder if it was better if CHD remained and CHC was removed though?
Crit chance is already kinda similar to some other affixes; like Crushing Blow, and “Proc chance”. To keep Crit mechanically different, it might be better to have a static crit chance (which might still be affected through talents, and sometimes legendaries), while Crit damage was the part that was changeable through normal gear affixes.
Is it necessarily a bad thing if the desire for one stat is very dependent on another stat? Or that the two stats are only really worth it if you manage to stack them?
(though again, imo you could make focusing solely on CHC or CHD an interesting option through skill and talent design. Either through individual skills having fixed CHC or CHD, or by having talents like; Gain 2x CHC from gear, but crits always deal 200%)
My point is also not that you can’t balance CC + CHD vs two other random affixes, it’s that it becomes a mess to balance once you need to consider that CC and CHD are their own stats.
In your example that +40% crit has a value of nothing until you add CHD. Mostly because you forgot that most characters would have a baseline CHD but even if we set that to say 50%, CC still has a very low value until you stack enough CHD.
If we add that your Char B now does 192 damage per hit on average which may not seem bad in comparison to 180, but let’s try another:
Char C has 4 +10% CC affixes and 6 +5% damage ones. They do 156 damage on average, which is almost 25% less than what Char B can do.
That’s not an insignificant number once you scale it up to the thousands of damage we’ll likely be doing.
With CHD, then CC basically only becomes balanced IF you have a bunch of CHD to go with it.
I’d say it’s a bad thing because each stat should be able to stand on its own merits.
After having to put up with a few very skewed stat priorities in WoW, I’m really not a fan of things that lead us down that path. I had enough “I’m not even going to consider it unless it has haste” on my Shadow Priest in Legion(which was so bad it even was more valuable than my mainstat).
You can also still have talents/skills that play around with CC/CHD. I’m just saying remove CHD as a potential stat on gear so the value of CC isn’t extremely variable.
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Isn’t that a different matter (haste being OP) than one stat only being good if combined with another stat?
Like, attack speed makes you consume resource faster. You might want to increase mana regen to get the most out of attack speed etc. All affixes kinda interact in some way. Seems like a good thing that they do. That is what adds depth (not that crit chance and crit dmg is a deep interaction in any way).
It’s a similar but reverse effect. Rather than “I wont consider it if it doesn’t have haste” it becomes “I wont consider it if it has crit”. That is unless I’m stacking crit stats.
Attack speed makes you consume resources faster but it’s not a near worthless stat without increased resource regeneration. Especially considering it’ll increase the attack speed or any resource generating attacks you might have.
My problem is specifically with the part where CC and CHD on their own are near worthless stats because we would need to balance them around stacking a large amount of both.
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Sure. But that likely also holds true for 100+ other affixes you could get on the item. No matter which build you go for, only a tiny fraction of the affixes will be the ones you hope to get.
That’s how it works in D3 but it doesn’t necessary needs to be. Though it would make sense to have Crits do a minimum +100% Damage. OR have initial 20% CC and just a few means to increase it.
All the numbers I gave were just a simple example to make my point, which is that Crits can be balanced, as long as you don’t break the rules I mentioned in my previous message.
There’s also a difference between something being a bit better because of build choices and something being basically worthless without a lot of another stat around.
I’m opposed to the second part, not the first one. CC/CHD inherently create a scenario of the second one because of how much they synergize with each other.
Without a baseline it makes CC a literally useless stat at first, which I’m against having a stat that does absolutely nothing until you get another stat.
but again: My point wasn’t that we can’t balance CC/CHD as a combo, but rather it becomes problematic when trying to simultaneously balance them as a combo AND as individual stats.
Your example only included the combo, which I never said by itself can’t be balanced. I just said it causes problems elsewhere.
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I do agree, that’s why I suggested an initial 20% CC or +100% CHD.
With initial 20% CC, you’d get +CHD affixes only.
With initial +100% CHD you’d get CC affixes only.
That way, Crits are useful even at low level, but you’d still have to invest some (limited) talents or get legendary powers to boost your 20% CC / +100% CHD further in the game.
I would only be on those item pieces where it makes sense, which I would say are chest armor, helms, pants and boots, while pants and boots also have a focus on affixes that revolve around movement speed or movement abilities (like the dodge roll).
It makes thematically sense, so to sprinkle in a bit more RPG Realism in this aspect seems fitting, especially because if every armor piece could roll with every affix, it all would look the same, which would make itemization more boring.
It could be made that for example a Ranger-like class that uses bows and an agile melee class (like Assassin or Monk) have easy access to Crit Chance via the Attribute System, Talents and their class specific items (claws, daggers, bows, etc), but they don’t have access to Crit Damage (or just very little), while a class like a Barbarian has easy and more access to Crit Damage via Attributes, Talents and class specific items (like Crit Damage on a large 2handed Hammer).
That could be a possible solution to this problem.
This sums up the issue very well. 
I think the thing that Cyonan is referring to is that Crit Chance would be useless without Crit Damage and vice versa, while things like Fire Damage, x% increased damage against enemies in melee range and similar things, work well on their own, without needing a second affix first to become useful.
Yes, CHC + CHD can be balanced, but the point is that they are useless on their own (more so than any other affix) and you are kinda forced to have both, which limits your choice.
Yes I understood what he meant a bit later, see my last post. ^^
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Making it so that only one affix shows up on gear would be fine. That’s mostly what I’ve been trying to say is having them both as things on gear is a bad idea.
Personally I’d go for 100% CHD with only Crit Chance affixes. That way the numbers don’t start getting bigger and bigger, you just see the bigger number more often.
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It’s certainly the most elegant of the two because with +100% CHD, +1% CC means +1% Damage. Easy to read for beginers !
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What if Crit Chance is tied and dependent on individual skill level?
(lvl 10 Blizzard would Crit more often than a lower lvl one seems logical).
In other words, Crit Chance isn’t universal anymore, im sure many people suggest this.
Imagine being able to adjust the Crit Chance of any skill, depending on if its an AoE, single target, DoT or any other function. Without much thought, this seems to offer incredible balance flexibility, does it not?
I just don’t think a lvl 2 Fireball should Crit as often as a lvl 12 Blizzard.
While Crit Damage could really stay a fixed amount and only rare, powerful items would break this rule.
Edit: In this example Crit Chance is never found on items anymore, can’t roll.
I think this is one way to do it. That is basically what Grim Dawn did with Offensive ability… it determines your chance to hit, above 90% everything is a chance to crit (95% hit = 5% chance to crit) and there are thresholds for critical hit damage so that getting more offensive ability increases your chance of rolling the highest critical hit damage threshold. There are a few opportunities to increase the critical hit damage - much less available then D3.
That is a good solution.
I don’t think its the only way though. If a combination of things was different I think it could work with them being separate stats. 1) make resistances work like in D2, where they have increasing gains per point (relative to the previous point) which makes capping very important. Then make capping difficult without cutting into your ability to stack critical hit chance/damage. 2) make the numbers smaller, emerald modifier esp. is ridiculous, so is amulet. 3) make critical hit damage roll a number between the minimum value and whatever you have. 4) cap critical hit chance and or critical hit damage. 5) in D2 for example on weapons, you wanted to roll flat damage, enhanced damage, a second flat damage based on character level, attack speed, maybe life steal or damage /AR bonus to demons… it wasn’t without flaws, like elemental damage bonuses not scaling with enhanced damage nor skill weapon damage bonus so were very inferior options to the physical damage and also couldn’t get crushing blow open wounds deadly strike mods like uniques/runewords could… I guess I could sum this up as the affix pool has to be a lot more competitive. In Diablo 3 there just isn’t much competition for CHC/D.
Just because it didn’t work in D3, I don’t think that means it won’t work… maybe it won’t work but D3 isn’t any proof that it can’t be balanced because Blizzard made absolutely no attempt to ever do anything about it… I guess legendary gems and cooldown reduction/ elemental damage did a little bit but I still wouldn’t write it off yet.
Something definitely needs to be done though. It was ironic to me that they let it get that out of hand considering they removed chance to hit / attack rating then added so much critical damage that a non critical hit feels like missing.
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The case should be, that we hit normally most of the time and Crit sometimes.
But not - We normally Crit, but occasionally we do normal damage.
The second we Crit more often than we do normal hits, Critical becomes the norm, while it should be the exception. Just an opinion.
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