Cooldown on Crit triggers

Right now, nearly every effect that, in VT1, had it’s own chance to trigger, is now tied to crit.
This makes it a lot easier to grasp, to calculate, and possibly even to implement.

However, I believe it also makes it harder to balance, as certain weapons are just more suited to hitting a lot of targets with crit, and every hit counts (if the effect can be stacked). The effect is amplified by certain classes.

Suggestion:

  • Give on-crit effects that can stack a cooldown.
  • While the cooldown is active, the effect still procs, but at a lower potency.
  • For a base of discussion, let’s take 0.5 seconds, and a 50% reduction in effect while the cooldown is active.

Anecdotal Evidence:
I’ve tried making the hp on crit talent work many times, and even if, through temporary buffs, I get close to 50% crit chance and hit multiple targets, it is plain worse than hp on kill. The only reliable way to crit a lot of targets at once is there being a lot of targets at once, and those frequently die when crit, so at best the effect is equal.
At the same time, the same critrate allows my Huntsman infinite ammo if as few as three enemies have the decency to line up.
Conversely, the cooldown/vent on crit traits are extremely powerful on Staves that hit a lot of targets, frequently, yet a lot less desirable on others.

Hypothetical effect of this change:
Let’s assume we go with the values from above;

  • A critical arrow would replenish 2 arrows on the first hit target, then one more from every extra target.
    Obviously, this would adversely effect non-penetrating rapid-fire weapons, but let’s leave that for later.
  • Vent on crit, used on a beam staff’s RMB, would vent 4 overheat on the first hit target, then on the others (I believe up to 9 more) it would vent two heat per hit; Similarly, it would drastically drop the venting when sweeping over a horde, but have only a minuscule effect when hitting a single target.
  • skill cooldown on crit with flamethrowers wouldn’t instantly refill half an active bar in a second, but it would still have a notable effect - though I believe it would be easier if this trait just recovered a % of remaining cooldown, as it originally read

Lastly, it would weaken the hitpoint on crit talent, which could in turn be buffed to bring it somewhat up to the level of hp on kill. 3/1 would probably stratify it, but I genuinely believe that talent needs help, so maybe a 4/1 split would make more sense.

As a closing word, I don’t want to randomly nerf working things, but I believe the option of having cooldowns and modifiers would allow a more fine-grained balancing that lessens the risk of specific traits being mandatory on specific weapons/classes. Same with Talents, obviously.

What you’re talking about is let’s nerf crit because it’s so prevalent, and then let make it’s performance less RNG for an RNG based stat. Things that pierce shoot slower, melee that’s faster is weaker w/ less reach. My fear in trying to level the performance of crit is that you’re going to make everything feel more flavorless, regardless of good intentions for balancing. Additionally the numbers refining you’re asking for would be such a pain to implement and tune, I can just see crit and traits breaking again. We still have instances of scrounger breaking being reported. So, I can’t say that this proposition is desirable from a balance programming standpoint: To try to implement a variation of diminishing returns on baseline crit. As far as tuning health on crit, easy: crits that kill should still yield health. Fixed. Scrounger/heatsync… there’s going to be a lot of sad people if a nerf comes there. I really don’t know how to fix that, but it is the ranged gold standard. So much of the community depends on it at this point, especially with the state of the AI director and when hosts seems to drop more specials than intended. EX when everything only comes in pairs, I feel like that has to be a bug.

I dunno, it’s kinda at the point with building that you either build entirely based on dps/crit (most classes) or you try to be a frontline/support unit with more defenses and/or dmg vrs ___ to try to break certain thresholds for increased effectiveness on certain weapons.

I don’t quite see the point here, given that shooting slower also uses less ammo/causes less overheat.
Krubers Longbow can recover it’s entire ammunition supply with around 3 shots into a horde, and I feel kinda dirty when doing so. How are traits supposed to be balanced for weapons that don’t reach such tremendous penetration values? Similarly, if every crit kills the target, or close enough to it, the best you can do is break even with the hp on kill talent. As such, the only times hp on crit is superior are when
A) the target won’t die that easily, like a boss
B) the weapon has very low damage - usually with aoe or an extremely high firerate - see flamethrowers.

I feel that if we just doubled the hitpoints gained on a crit, it would still be inferior in most cases, but then get utterly ridiculous in a few niches.
The divide between “full crit” and “no crit” that you mention is pretty much what I think is sad, though that is a more complicated problem - without changing how crit chance is calculated, that part really can’t be avoided, what with all those traits hanging on the mechanic. After all, we don’t have traits based on crit that reduce crit power, or anything along those lines. No reason for the player to stop halfway.

I’m not arguing with you, but yeah… the situations where you get the hoards in a straight head on line are not always the case, but I can see the concern. I also play huntsman kruber and I understand it does feels a bit cheese when you get those head on moments. I think that’s a big point you’re referring to. It’s just where he excels at the moment because of his absurd longbow penetration. I’d hate to see it capped to just 2 per shot though, in a way hoards are designed to give you increased resources to counter them with the right talents and traits ( temp hp and ammo regen). There have been plenty of times im running low on ammo and only have 5 arrows left looking for the opportunity to stack up on ammo off a hoard. Currently this is just the way scrounger affects piercing weapons. With current other problems I just don’t want to see any more nerfs before the overall experience becomes a bit more stable. I’ll admit that.

neither of the rapid crossbows have any problem piercing targets, hell even the swift bow does now that cleave resistances on legend have been neutered.

the idea of ammo on crit isn’t a bad thing, but being able to hit 5 enemies at once makes ammo completely redundant and no amount of ammo pool nerfs they implement will fix this. weapons were never meant to be piercing like this, based on when they attempted to fix power scaling previously and everyone threw a hissyfit.

i don’t really see a way to fix the HP one and kind of feel the same about rolling damage reduction traits. reduction vs AOE could become viable at a higher number just for gas rats, but the reduction on chaos/skaven would have to be boosted insanely high to make them worth taking over a flat health increase