About crit Avoidance and less bonus damage taken from crits

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1

I like the simplicity take of the mechanics in this game, I feel, compared to PoE many mechanics are still there, but in a much simpler form, still being efficient. So, I don’t understand why we should have two ways to defend against critical strikes. To me, crit avoidance should be converted into less bonus damage taken from crits. Here is my reasoning:

  1. Crit avoidance is an all or nothing effect, crits in this game are huge (2x damage), and going with 90% avoidance will not guarantee you will not get one-shotted, even if you skip crit nodes in monos.

  2. Less bonus damage taken from crits is much more flexible, much like current resistances, you can get away without the cap, and as resistances, you will want the cap at some point, or switch into full crit avoidance to liberate that weapon affix, but if you end with 90% would be fine, just like going with 67 necrotic res, you don’t need to switch gear to get that 100% or dismiss a really good weapon just because it falls a bit short on the stat.

  3. Crit avoidance is unfair for hardcore players, they are pretty much forced to cap it somehow before empowered. Even if you’re softcore, if you care about dying, Reign of Dragons blessing will be crit avoidance blessing, pretty much mandatory. I could run with 96% crit avoidance, but if I die I will not be sure if was pushing too hard the corruption, or that 4% happened, so I lose control on my defenses.

  4. Woven flesh before empowered is near mandatory for hardcore players, and they will wear it until they can manage to cap it through affixes + blessing. As hardcore you will not risk going out there with 90% crit avoidance in empowered, and the alternative to woven flesh will cost you initially 3 well rolled T5 suffixes in gear without the blessing. With a good T2 Blessing roll and a good T5 roll on an affix you can finally get that mandatory 100% crit avoidance, but will take time and dedication. Woven flesh is fine at the beginning, but chests also have very powerful affixes, both for damage and health, and +skills, so unless you get a L2-3 Woven flesh with great affixes, you will eventually want to get rid of it.

  5. If there’s only one stat and is about crit damage reduction, you can safely add crit multiplier mixed in with damage, crit and base crit for monsters in their pool of node affixes. Making it harder for those who want to get away with low investment in less bonus damage taken.

Also on a side note, the name of the affix could be simplified and further explained in expanded tooltips, as you will only one affix to care about for crits, could be named “Critical Damage Mitigation” or even a re-purposed “Critical Damage Avoidance” instead that weird less bonus damage taken from crits, that at first glance could be confused with a negative effect.

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  1. But that’s the interesting thing about this, gearing around both stats is very different.
    Also both stats have one major difference: one will allow you to still get crit, the other one completely negates the ability of being critted.
    Right now it’s merely a novelty, because there is one one Item in the game that has a conditional trigger, that requires you to get critted.
    But this could be expanded in the future.

  2. it’s very hard compare these stats, because less bonus damage taken from crits is only available on 2H Melee Weapons.
    But generally speaking the opportunity cost of it on a weapon is a bit higher, since CSA is very flexible on which slots you get it.

3.+4. I disagree, a good hardcore build will have enough buffer to survive incoming crits and if you don’t go crazy and give mobs insane amounts of Crit chance via echo modifiers it’s fine.
It’s all in player’s control.

At some point you want the 100% CSA, but it’s not that mandatory that early.
You can definitely get away without 100% CSA into empowered Timelines.

5.That’s a valid point, not sure if the devs plan to add this, but that would definitely be a good reason, otherwise the Stat budget needs to be reworked, because less bonus damage taken from crits would become significantly worse.

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I personally don’t see anything interesting in this kind of complexity, in my POV is unneeded, more so if you plan to add systems and new affixes with the cycle (league) system. The cleaner and simpler you get your release, the easier will be to introduce new mechanics and affixes, unless you want to end up with a bloated mess like PoE.

Look at resistances: here you have flexibility. You can opt for more HP at the cost of resistances, it allows you an easier time introducing gear upgrades, and you can optionally fix them with idols. Some people go for max HP and leave the resistances for later, if you get 3.5k HP you can get away with some 50 and 60 range resistances, with the hope to fix those later, that while still pushing high corruption.

You miss having max resistances as pretty much mandatory and expected by mid to endgame? Or having to overcap resistances to compensate for resistance reduction like in Grim Dawn? You mis that “+3 max cold resistance” affix? or PoE’s “spell suppression”?

Yes, you can “skip” critical avoidance in hardcore, but the price to pay is 2x your estimated HP with 2x your estimated health recovery.

Maybe my comments are more towards solo-self found, keeping in mind this game will have cycles (leagues), and this is something that will hit new players as well.

If you are in your fifth character, you can fit in a nice torso with vit + hp percent and some boots with exactly hybrid health, move speed, health and vit to get that HP, but if you are in your first character, or starting a cycle, just get woven flesh and keep going, and fix with blessing later.

While not really “mandatory” per se, is by far the best option available, both Woven Flesh and the crit avoidance blessing.

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makes me think that crit avoidance should just be replaced with the less bonus damage across the board.

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They aren’t mandatory in LE like they are in other games (GD & PoE) since you are penalised less harshly for not capping your resists (in PoE if you’re at 74% resist compared to 75% you take 4% more damage than you would at 75%).

You can/should overcap your resists a bit to compensate for shred in LE. You don’t have to though.

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Yeah, that’s precisely my point. Maybe the way I put it was a little confusing. I don’t expect you miss those elements.

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I think what is really hard to perceive is that 90% critical avoidance is in reality an extremely big damage mitigation in the long run but we as players don’t see it that way. When we think of critical strike avoidance, we want to protect for that off chance we get that random 1 huge hit that can potentially kill us and if we don’t have 100% critical avoidance, we don’t really feel protected. Then when we die with 99% critical avoidance, it’s easy to blame that 1% for why we died (I know I would haha). When I play hardcore, I also struggle with this perception, it is hard for me to switch over all my high HP gear or off of Wolven flesh unless I can fully switch over to 100% critical avoidance to fully compensate, even knowing how it works fully.

Critical strike avoidance is a strong stat, and I agree for hardcore, it’s a strong primary defensive stat to go for as an endgame additional defensive layer. I don’t find that particular a bad thing or that qualifies it as “unfair”; it’s just like capping resists and armor or dodge to build other defensive layers. There are also many ways now to cap this defensive stat that allow it to not be so gear taxing from blessings, exalted mods, legendaries and sealed affixes which provide a fair amount of gear flexibility.

“Critical Damage Mitigation”, I do like this better than Critical Strike Avoidance. Critical Strike Avoidance can be misleading, it sounds more like a dodge when you are with 100% Critical Strike Avoidance just removing all the bonus damage taken from the critical strike reducing it back to a normal hit.

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First of all thanks for the consideration, if you put this issue on the dev discussion table, even if it is finally discarded, is just as much as I can ask for.

I see dodge as primary role is to alleviate pressure from lots of small attacks, also you have less chances to get stunned in combat, like uncapped crit avoidance, you cannot rely on this defensive layer to avoid one-shots, works fine as an additional defensive layer as long as you don’t sacrifice other layers to get this one really pumped.

Resists and Armor have the main difference that they are not “all or nothing”, so you can cut some armor/resists if you compensate with / have the health to back it up, for example, while introducing more powerful gear and re-arranging your defenses doing so.

With crit avoidance, compensating with health is 2x the estimated health to avoid one-shots for the content you’re doing (aside the big telegraphed attacks and are not meant to be tanked), all the flexibility in gearing you get from resists/dodge armor is loss here.

Example: 67% Blessing for crit avoidance? you better be sure you get the other 33% in a well rolled T5 avoidance, if you happen to get a crazy piece with 31% crit avoidance and no crafting potential left, you can’t equip it until you get a 69/70 on the blessing, or you need to wear a second piece with avoidance, and that sucks.

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9

I remember one day, I was upgrading a char. I brought it to 99% crit avoidance. Just for fun, I wrote in chat something like “just reached 99%, is it OK?”
I got tons of responses saying “no, gor for 100%, if not 100% it’s worth zero”.

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On one side of me, I love math and want to keep both stats to be able to build around them. On the other hand, crit avoidance is practically always going to be one of those get 100% or it feels punishing scenarios to players, in its current “dodge-like” form.

Another idea would be to mesh both of these together into “Critical Damage Mitigation” and give it both effects. 50% Critical Damage Mitigation would give you a 50% chance to turn a crit into a normal hit, or if you take the crit the stat reduces the extra critical damage down 50%, so you take 150% damage instead of 200%. This way 100% crit mitigation is still desirable, but you don’t feel punished for not reaching 100% perfectly.

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11

Hi Kissing – glad to see you weighing in on this topic.

So EHG took the standard formula for Block from Diablo and Path of Exile, and made it better.

In Diablo & POE, Block is all or nothing. In Last Epoch, Block comes with the sliding scale of Block Effect.

In Diablo & POE, Resistances are based on enemies having 0% penetration by default, which means that player is paying a very heavy fine if they do not cap their resistances. In LE on the other hand, Resistances are balanced around enemies having 75% penetration by default ( I love this, by the way.) Which means that in LE, even in Hardcore, it’s not unthinkable to have uncapped resistances.

So my point:

In LE, Crit Avoid is an “all or nothing” stat. I call it a “Binary Stat”. Either you have it, or you don’t. Crit Avoid in LE is currently reminiscent of the various layered binary defenses of Path of Exile, which feels like a step in the wrong direction.

The alternative is that all Crit Avoid in LE is replaced with “Reduced bonus dmg taken from crits.” A player can have 90% RBDtfCrits in their build, feel rewarded for that, and also still want more. This is in stark contrast to the current system.

The mitigating factor in favor of the current system is that monsters don’t really get Crit Multi, like they do in Path of Exile. Still, I would be in favor of a RBDtfCrits system. Just please, come up with better acronym than I have.

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12

Check Out the crit mitigation idea from SirFreckle in the previous post. It’s pretty good.

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Yeah, totally agree with your exposition, not to mention crit damage is huge in this game, 2x damage to start with, that makes it even more of an issue.

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