The changes to how Critical Strike Damage is calculated in Season 2 appear to have a hidden nerf to Lightning builds. There’s a separate stat for ‘Lightning Critical Strike Damage’ that allows lightning builds to stack higher amounts of crit damage. Stacking Lightning Critical Strike Damage will now become pointless as anything beyond 50x critical strike damage will be additive. Going by Blizzard’s track record, this is probably an oversight.
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intentional. they just nerfed/made additive that too, along with earth crit damage, imb, and w/e others
- Yes right. All crit dmg modifiers will be less important, but also not totally useless. Other modifiers are more viable now. I agree that it is a nerf to lightning.
- Just to correct your formula: 2 things happen on a crit
A) all your crit dmg modifiers get added to the big additive damage bucket.
B) all damage is is increased by x50% multiplicative
I think they should keep it multiplicative because this is not your usual critical damage source. It’s more a specific bucket for a specific build. The devs mentioned they want players to be able to focus on their main source of damage and be equally successful and strong.
I think this is a bug if it becomes additive. Is there a confirmation that this has been changed to additive?
I agree it won’t be totally useless; however, other damage stats have a higher upper range so if it’s all going to be additive anyway, you might as well just stack the other damage stats. For example, ‘Damage to Close Enemies’ can go up to +35.3%, whereas ‘Lightning Critical Strike Damage’ only goes up to +26.2%.
Yup, also close damage has higher uptime than critting. We’ll just ignore every single crit damage roll and go with other stats. But at least it’s now easier to roll good mana ragen gear because all of the damage stats are somewhat close to each other so they don’t matter that much anymore.
I can see this sort of nerfing gear chase in the end though because the power gains will be quite minor with possibly getting 10%-20% additional addative damage per new item, which now will go up to like over 1000%. So you won’t even see the damage change.
but only crits will proc crackling energy (or ligning ball but I’m playing chain-lightning), and lightnin sorcs need it more than ever because of lightning surge nerf.
so how would a lighning sorc gear look like now, regarding stats priority ? I’m no theorycrafter, but if crits are useless (sort), res are required, mana issues are bigger than ever , lighning damages are indirectly nerfed … where is the balance, if a good balance can be found ?
I haven’t seen anything yet that officially cites Lightning Critical Strike Damage is now additive, but given how they framed the changes to Critical Strike Damage, I’m inclined to think it’s going to be additive as well. It would suck, yes, because this was meant to be something unique to Lightning builds, and they ‘balanced’ lightning skills with this in mind, so if they took it away as multiplicative damage I would expect that they would have to compensate for the damage loss elsewhere as this is quite a big nerf to lightning. However, I don’t see in the patch notes any wholesale changes to lightining that would indicate any damage recalibration. Since the season has already started, maybe others have already tested the effect of this?