On a Forge Guard, I found smelter’s wrath was landing a critical strike on every hit regardless of charge level. I then made sure to trigger criticals with other skills first to globally halve crit chance via gambler’s fallacy (on the grounds that I had prior seen it allow skills with guaranteed criticals to score normal hits), only to find that it was still a critical strike on every uncharged strike, indicating a roughly 200% internal critical hit rate for the skill. When I closed to character select and returned to the game, the issue was no longer occurring, suggesting that the change was localized to the session. Additionally, the issue seemed to only occur after I had taken the Brightsmith node, but it could have stemmed from a different change in the last patch instead.
Potentially relevant skill nodes taken:
Stinging Steel
Vulcanic Mastery
Brightsmith
Righteous Flurry (in the smite tree, assuming brightsmith interaction was the cause)
Potential item interaction: gambler’s fallacy
Theorized interaction 1:
Either a portion of the base crit added by Stinging steel or the increased crit added by brightsmith upon an attack speed buff such as righteous flurry is not properly being reset, leading to the skill’s crit chance stacking over a session.
Theorized interaction 2:
Gambler’s fallacy is triggered by a different attack, smelter’s wrath is charged. While charging, the flat crit from stinging steel is added. Gambler’s fallacy resets before the attack is released, inadvertently doubling the flat crit gained by stinging steel. After releasing the attack, stinging steel subtracts the added base crit, but this does not account for the change due to GF, leading to a net change in the skill’s base crit. This compounds over a session until the skill has >100% base crit at all charge levels.
Thank you for all your time and effort!
Figured i’d post that its the interaction 1 to make it easier for the devs to reproduce.