Hi everyone,
(Warning this is a big read)
With the changes made to critical damage I thought that I would give my input on the changes. This is by no means a rant, but simply here to discuss and see what others think and share my thought’s on what’s good, bad about it and also give constructive feedback and so forth.
So anyway, the idea behind changing the system for it and the reason’s why this change was implemented, I feel that these were more than valid and reasonable. They wanted the player base to move away from this whole Zerker meta and have a more diversified set of builds.
But for me, that’s about where it all end’s as being positive. The reasons were sound, but I feel the implementation could have been a bit better. Of course in saying this I came up with an idea on what could’ve been a better way of implementing the Ferocity stat to increase critical damage (this idea is based solely on my opinion so whether it is or not, is up for discussion and I’ll of course let you guys decide). I will go on to this a bit later, but will explain why I feel this way first.
Now “why do I feel the implementation could do with a bit of work”. The simple reason is based on the way I play the game. I was never one of those players that followed this whole “Zerker is best!” meta. My builds for most of my characters revolved around Balance. So to achieve balance, this meant looking at the character, looking at what it need’s and then combining different pieces from different sets into one until the desired stats were achieved. As such all of my characters had this nice balance of Defense combined with a nicely rounded Offense. Most of the time to achieve this nicely rounded Offense, it meant that I needed to invest to a degree into critical damage.
Now with the changes to the critical damage stat and the introduction of Ferocity, I felt that the full DPS Zerker builds felt the hurt by the changes a bit less, than by a player who only invested in critical based stats to achieve this well rounded, balanced build. These players such as myself I feel have been hit harder, simply because now to achieve these well rounded stats, requires a much more substantial investment into the ferocity stat, therefore meaning we need to give up a lot to achieve the desired stats, or we either live with the losses.
Now before the patch went through, my Main being a warrior sat on a lovely 50% bonus critical damage, placing them at 200% critical damage. After the patch went through I had found I lost around 15% critical damage. Now that may not seem like much to others, but to put it into perspective, I’ve now had to swap out all of my armor and 3 trinkets (which were all Ascended items, which I’d only just recently finished off) so that works out to being about half of my gear being wasted and needing to be removed from the setup. Now I knew that these changes would mean I would need to swap parts out for new gear to achieve the stats I desired, however I was not expecting it to be to this degree, where I needed to pretty much select all new equipment for half of gear. I thought it might be something like 2-5 pieces of gear (instead it works out to being a total of 9).
As such I felt this was a little excessive and thought up my own idea which would promote players to have diversified builds, rather than investing heavily into Critical Damage/ Ferocity.
Now my idea is simple, however I do suspect that it would require a fair bit of work on the developers part. The idea is to apply coding to the Ferocity stat, and the Ferocity stat ONLY, whereby as you invest more heavily into Ferocity, you receive diminishing returns at certain thresholds. So as it increases the less it returns. Now this isn’t as bad as it sounds, as if it is set up correctly, you would end up with similar stats to a current full DPS Zerker. The reason I say similar is because I do feel that the reduction to critical Damage was a little much and would like to see it gain about 5% critical damage back. I feel that this is not a huge increase and is reasonably fair for those that invest heavily into Ferocity. Now to go into more detail on my idea so as to help others better understand it.
Now the diminishing returns players would receive on Critical Damage would not occur right away the first 25% bonus critical damage would be completely unaffected by diminishing returns, and the investment required to achieve this bonus 25% would be equal to that of a zerker build before 15th of April. Now after the first 25% bonus critical damage is achieved, the player would begin to receive diminished returns on ferocity. As certain thresholds are achieved the less they receive back, eventually leading it to achieving roughly identical critical damage as a current full DPS zerker build.