Removing Auto Crits and Direct Hits from WAR

[Cabalabob]

My idea for inner release was to change it from 100% direct crit rate to increase direct hit and critical hit rates by 50% and doubles the damage of critical and direct hits.

On paper this would work out to be the same as the current IR (a crit/direct every other hit at double damage vs a crit/direct hit at normal damage every hit). But it would also get rid of a few of the drawbacks of IR. direct hit as a stat wouldn’t be entirely bad for WAR anymore as even with IR on you would have room to further increase your direct hit rate as well as still increasing it outside of IR. It would also mean using infuriate during IR wouldn’t be inherently bad, you’d still be increasing your crit/direct hit rate further than what it was even with IR and the double damage that you wouldn’t get without IR would be pretty beefy.

[TouchandFeel]

My idea for inner release was to change it from 100% direct crit rate to increase direct hit and critical hit rates by 50% and doubles the damage of critical and direct hits.

On paper this would work out to be the same as the current IR (a crit/direct every other hit at double damage vs a crit/direct hit at normal damage every hit). But it would also get rid of a few of the drawbacks of IR. direct hit as a stat wouldn’t be entirely bad for WAR anymore as even with IR on you would have room to further increase your direct hit rate as well as still increasing it outside of IR. It would also mean using infuriate during IR wouldn’t be inherently bad, you’d still be increasing your crit/direct hit rate further than what it was even with IR and the double damage that you wouldn’t get without IR would be pretty beefy.

In a vacuum it would appear to look good on paper, but it doesn't account for some very relevant factors and in practice it would not work out that way and would result in a distinct dps increase.

All players have an existing crit% and dh% level that is based on their Crit and DH stats, of which looking at stats right about now a player is likely sitting between an ~15% chance to potentially over 20% chance for landing a dh, crit, dhcrit. Add an additional 50% to that and you are now sitting at ~65% to over 70% with the potential to go much higher pretty quickly as we get into this patch and stats jump up with the new gear that people are getting, not even considering farther into this expansion.

If you then double the damage done by a dh/crit/dhcrit under the assumption that it will compensate for supposedly getting those half as often, you are basing that assumption on the wrong numbers. If it was a static 50% chance for dh/crit/dhcrit and then you doubled the damage, that conceptually would balance out like you described, dh/crit/dhcrit half as often but each hit does the damage of two hits. It would result in some potentially extremely high damage spikes sometimes with very low damage troughs other times, which was sort of a big complaint with IR before, but statistically over time it should be about equitable overall.

However, as pointed out, you won't be working with a static 50% chance, and instead would be working with a decently higher percentage and so you will be landing dh/crit/dhcrit attacks in that window far more frequent than half of the time and so the doubled damage to compensate is now overcompensating and results in a hefty overall dps increase. If we are looking at 65%-70% chance, that still would potentially equate to 3 to 4 out of your 5 hits under IR being a dh/crit/dhcrit which with doubled damage would be equal to landing 6 to 8 regular dh/crit/dhcrits.

In fact, because the crit% and dh% chances are fluid since they are determined by ever changing and increasing stats, using an approach like this where you add to the %chance and then increase the damage to compensate will always be problematic since the %chance that you are trying to compensate for will always be in flux making the compensation amount never truly able to match up correctly.

If you locked the % chances at a number like the aforementioned 50% and then compensated with increased damage, you are still stuck with the same issue that we have now of it being locked at 100% as well as introducing the problems that I alluded to earlier of your burst period being at the mercy of rng.

I know that many players dislike the automatic DHCrits with IR, but to be honest it is the most consistent and functional "fix" to this issue, at least that I can come up with off the top of my head, outside of removing them entirely and rebalancing damage elsewhere in WAR's kit to compensate or a more drastic redesign.