Guild Wars 2

Before i start i have to point out that i wont be talking about specific profession or build but about all professions and possible builds in general as this is the issue with all of them. So don’t disregard my post as me whining and calling for a nerf for x profession, or something

As the title points out the issue is spam of criticals hits and over the top critical damage bonus.

Critical chance

Now, in older mmorpg games or even just single player rpg games critical hit was something of a rarity, % chance were low and even if it was just +5 or +10 bonus to chance people would still jump from joy to get that small increase. You know, critical was something that happened from time to time but still was valid bonus, something that you looked out for, but it never raised to over the top numbers.

However, in recent new games, especially in Guild Wars 2, critical chance can be raised to values where criticals are so common that it can be considered as standard or baseline for attacks to crit, to be honest, there are builds that need to be extremely lucky(or unlucky) to get a none-critical attack, hell some players can even make builds that have 105+ % of critical chance.
When % chance rise to numbers like 95 or 100 it can’t be called a “chance” anymore its basically guaranteed critical, this is no longer a matter of “from time to time” or “sometimes” but a critical attack spam, no longer a luck based effect, the term “critical chance” lose it’s meaning.

I think that critical chance should be caped at 50% so that critical wont be too constant but still something that you can see often. It could be something like, you can rise it to 30% by stats alone and then to rise it to 50 you would need Fury boon.
This is just a example how it could be made, but in general it should be caped at around 50.

Critical Damage

Now, i wont be only talking about overkill bonus damage on critical but also about the fact that you can have both huge % chance for critical along side that overkill critical damage bonus.
While the bonus damage on critical was recently lowered by around 8% its still on level where you can or almost kill in one hit some of the low HP professions, my own Warrior is specced to do it in wvw, and its rather normal for my targets to die in 1 or sometimes in 2 hits, while i like it, i do feel its too much.
(i used Warrior as a example since it’s the only power based alt i have, my Thief could also do it too but i deleted him sometime ago, but my Engineer, Ranger or basically any other profession can achieve high numbers in both of this stats as well).
With current critical damage that you can achieve, armor and vitality lose any value, since they wont protect you if you get hit by damage that starts at 8k and can even rise up to 11k-13k.

Now, i don’t know by how much it should be reduced to be more balanced, but it need to be much lower that currently is, *also for this nerf to not affect speed clearing dungeon groups, HP of mobs and bosses in dungeons should be lowered accordingly, i think it would also help balancing condition damage.

Regarding the issue of having both high chance of critical and bonus critical damage, In my opinion they should mutually exclusive, if you have high critical chance then you can’t have high critical damage and vice versa, I’m not a developer of games but i think that’s how they are usually balanced.

If you have your own opinion then post it, but please this is not about specific profession or build so don’t derail this thread with complains about that X profession or build, also try to use reasonable arguments, this is a general discussion about changes that affect everyone, so don’t use your own “likes” as a argument, think of everyone that would be affected.

It would also be nice if some dev’s could jump in and state their own opinion about the matter

P.S.
Before anyone ask or try to use it as an argument, yes, i also think that condition duration both increase and reduction are over the top and they also should be caped at some reasonable numbers, but this is a matter for a different topic and discussion that you can start and make a point there, but not here, no derailing.