Spell Non-Crit ~= full resist

Discussion in 'Casters' started by Mookus, Aug 16, 2019.

  1. Mookus Augur

    Over the many expansions crit AAs have gotten larger and larger. And I gues to balance this, they have accordingly not increased our spell damage very much. But of course they've increased NPC hit points by orders of magnitude. My biggest wizard nuke can hit for 90k or it can crit into the low 2millions.

    When I don't crit a nuke, it does essentially no perceptible dmg as a % to the mob. Maybe 1-2% if it wasn't a twincast.

    Just putting it out there... they gotta stop making this a game of crit or not.

    Balancing insanely large crits with streaks of essentially full resists is getting out of hand as mob HP goes up and up.


    Anyway - its just another wizard thing that's been bothering me lately. I was wondering if anyone else agrees.
    Skewert and menown like this.
  2. Syylke_EMarr Augur

    Definitely not just a Wizard thing, though it's not quite as noticeable for melees simply due to the number of attacks per second. Can be very noticeable with heals as well.

    It all averages out in the end, of course, so I'm not sure it's really a problem that needs fixed. And a fix would not be easy at all, since crits are multiplicative so increases to base damage would just make crits even more powerful, and nerfs to crits in a new expansion would have weird effects elsewhere.
    Moldar and Sancus like this.
  3. Cragzop Cranky Wizard

    I agree with the basic premise that the difference between non-criticals and criticals is too large. But that's the system were in and I do agree that changing the system now would be a huge undertaking. I would be nice if instead of having just a separate track for critical damage increase, there was one for just non-critical damage. They try to do a work around by having the various straight +damage adds at the end of the damage equation … but particularly for wizards, it's really hard to notice.

    I do think their environment changes have had a much bigger effect (larger resists, snare/root immunity, root/damage changes, nasty non-removable negative effects especially run speed changes, ridiculous dots/aes) on game play than the increase in mob hit points. Casting a spell takes time. If you are having to move or getting hit or having to cast two spells just to get one to land …or dead, higher non-crits aren't going to do anything for you. I feel like the solo/molo player is pretty much ignored as a valid playstyle. If you are a class that can make it work with a merc (charming, pet, can take a hit or two, etc.), great...but if you cannot (aka the wizard)...well, that's just not our problem.

    I'll have to disagree with Syylke about averaging out though. Casters, particularly non-dot casting, have been behind for at least two expansions now and the overall trend has been a downward spiral for longer than that. Wizards get the worst end since they can only nuke. Whatever the developers are using as a model to keep classes 'balanced" is failing and from what little I've seen and read, I don't expect improvement during the next expansion release.
  4. Mookus Augur

    Ya they can't undo where we currently are.

    But they can stop making crits bigger and balancing the rest accordingly. Stop making this problem worse and worse.
  5. its_a_secret Journeyman

    Not entirely true. Blizzard's World of Warcraft had a problem with inflated hit points, item stats, and other values. They did a "stat squish" (can google and read about it), and revamp on all items in the non-current expansion to give them a more linear progression in damage values, and stats from one expansion or tier to the next effectively lowering all values.
  6. kizant Augur

    This would only be a problem if you have a long streak without a crit but our base crit rate is high enough where that will never happen. I'm not sure how meaningful it is to make this comparison.
    Sancus likes this.
  7. Lannin Elder

    How many devs did Blizzard have to throw at that problem to come up with a stat squish ? We all know DB doesn't have the man power to do something like that.

    As an enchanter I feel your pain , because our base crit rate isn't any where near a wizard. Most of the time im nuking not for the damage but to proc something for someone else. I would love to have a wizard like crit rate , even though the base on our DD spells is a lot less.
  8. kizant Augur

    Your base crit rate is higher than a wizards. In fact, if you factor in gift of hazy thoughts your minimum average rate is actually pretty nice. Although, I guess the DoT crit rate is a lot lower? I never tried to average that out hmm.
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  9. Beimeith Lord of the Game

    It actually isn't all that complicated. You could cut our crit damage mods in half while doubling the base damage of our nukes and it would mostly even out.

    Ethereals right now on a non-crit average ~150k, while on a crit they average ~500k.

    When burning, this disparity increases from around 200k non-crit to 1m+ on a crit since the vast majority of our gains from ADPS are crit mods.


    Cutting our crit mods in half while doubling the base damage would result in a moderately higher average for nukes, but this would be mostly offset by the decrease in proc damage since procs are really only modded by crits.


    Keep in mind these are only ballpark figures. My point being it's just math, and not really that hard of math.
  10. Dahaman Augur


    A good way to implement this might be to roll Beimeth's adjustment into the next spell crit AA upgrade.

    Spell Crit AA Upgrade: Any spell that does not fully crit (for 350% or whatever today's multiplier is) will partially crit (150% damage, effectively increasing the "min" a spell does).

    They can then continue adjusting the future spell crit AA upgrades to adjust the max and min crit values to bring this back into better overall alignment. That should be a relatively easy implementation going forward (from level 100, or level 110, or some other level) without having to go back and adjust all spells' damage values.
  11. Mookus Augur

    I really think they are painting themselves into a corner the way crits are going.


    I like dahaman’s idea to fix things if indeed they wouldn’t want to rework this like Beimeth suggested.

    I am expecting that the days of willful neglect towards caster dps will end with the next expansion. But I don’t want want to see a nuker dps increase come in such a way that when we are not critting... that our nukes are more and more ineffective. Which is where we are imo.
  12. kizant Augur

    They are going to do anything about this because this is a non-issue.
  13. Cicelee Augur

    I think you are missing an important word in that sentence...

    Forum Quest grade: D+
  14. kizant Augur

    Good point. It's been an annoying day and I'm bad at typing.
    Cicelee likes this.