Devestating Critical

[Furax]

As someone who uses a build entirely based around dev crit, (fighter/wm with scimitars) there's more balance to be done to fix the gap between melee characters as casters with gear than fixing one feat. Also to the guy who said elder wyrm can be dev crit I challance you to prove it, let alone before he vorpal or dev crits you. I'll elaborate when I'm not on my phone.

[Xillie]

Making epic fighters, with what usefull feats there are, is a definite plan for me......somewhere in the future.....if devastating critical still exists .

I would like to have devastating critical with it as it has always been and as I have always wanted.....then take that character whenever I want or take another character whenever I dont want to take my devcritter out.
If I would consider the feat nerfed (possibly rather quickly), I would never make that fighter, with it diminishing the realm of possibilities in Nordock for me.

Considering the proposals, I must be misunderstanding something here, which is possible of course.

In my mind, two natural twenties means chance 1/400 and three natural twenties means chance 1/8000.
I think I must be missing something here, right?

I think even Galdors vorpal blade would work better were I not wrong, but I could be wrong here as well.

We're talking about the devcrit DC calculation vs. target fortitude right? Could be wrong there though.


greets,

Xillie

ps. Who will show us the DC calculation and reveal the elder wyrm's fortitude?

[Valikar]

As someone who uses a build entirely based around dev crit, (fighter/wm with scimitars) there's more balance to be done to fix the gap between melee characters as casters with gear than fixing one feat. Also to the guy who said elder wyrm can be dev crit I challance you to prove it, let alone before he vorpal or dev crits you. I'll elaborate when I'm not on my phone.

If you want to compare spell casters against melee in this regard then lets see what we can come up with. Dev crit has what, 14-20 critical range (probably even lower if you are wm). That means 7 in 10 attacks are rolling a DC30-40+ attack that bypasses death immunity. Fighters with decent levels are attacking perhaps 5 times a round, maybe 6? Math aside, that's simply illogical to assume that dev crit is not completely broken as compared to a caster who, has limited resources and a cast time for all spells and does not bypass immunity. Now compound that with the creatures in the epic module having almost no protection against this ability and how it trivializes even the most well thought out encounters.

[Valikar]

In order to combat dev crit from a developers point of view I would have to grant critical strike immunity to three times as many creatures and/or triple their fort saves. By doing this I'm punishing other classes and builds who rely on critical strikes or attacks and spells that require fort saves who are at more reasonable spell DCs. All bosses or creatures meant to be 'difficult' would be have to be changed in this way. Look at the Elder Wyrm, it is the perfect example. You can kill it theoretically in one strike, but in order to stop this it has the ability to one shot you in return. How is this fair for classes who can't simply one shot the wyrm?

[Xillie]

Can we reduce the argument to things like:

Is the DC too high?
Are fortitudes too low?
Should the same calculation apply to both high and low roll (threatroll hitting) criticals? (as it is now).

So here it is then (nwnwiki): The difficulty class of the save is 10 + ½ character level + strength modifier.

Maybe if we look at it long enough we find if or what is getting too high?
Maybe we should compare it to how most other combat feats are calculated?

I could be wrong though, please someone tell me if I'm wrong.

greets,

Xillie

[Valikar]

It really comes down to instant kill moves. Having them just isn't meant for melee. I've already proposed a damage increase instead of an instant kill ability which i find much more satisfying.

[Beard]

retooling Dev crit to increase damage immensely as opposed to instant death would likely be the best bet, my 40 sorc has so many casts per day, that's just the simple part of it, I can't run around wail of the banshee 5 or more times per round, max 2casts hasted per round, and only 10 casts per day. My DC is MUCH lower than a str built dev crit fighter or powerbuilt dev crit user.

2 things need to happen, remove the insta kill and replace with massive damage, or somehow build a cooldown on Dev Crit so only regular crits occur until cooldown is removed?

Xillie making the point of looking at how the DC is calculated gives insight to why it's so OP, the DC SHOULD be high, you're an Epic character, but, it's too high for how often it comes up with crit ranges like they are. Fort saves are where they need to be to balance for every other class, so fort saves aren't going to change.

I'd rather NOT do cooldowns as it's just more lag for the server, and the more Dev crit users online the worse that will be.

[BlackmageMaster]

This might end up being seen and/or viewed as a rash option, but why not just disable the feat entirely? It's existence had always been contrived to a balance issue. Yes, I don't use it, or play a character that can use it, but even if I could, I still wouldn't use it.

[Xillie]

Hey there.

Why not that option? Because (as with many rash changes) it would just remove possibilities from the game (for people who have epic fighter plans) and "ruin" characters of people that made "builds" around the feat, commonly called nerf and generally seen as pure and only loss and defeat.

More holistic, from the perspective of classic becoming epic, the fighter class is the class that benefits from epic levels the most (fair).....I think.
In my experience on classics, fighter classes were very underpowered compared to level 20 casters, especially fighters with average gear (high AB/damage, low AC/resistance/saves/imm).

I find epic bringing more power to fighter classes one of the main positive progressions, if you want, that epic brings.

I understand that the feat forms the pinnacle of fighter attack power and its a very steep difference, going from not having the feat to having the feat, I still think though that devcritters with average gear (not all immunities) still visit fugue often enough. To me, how hard one can be killed contributes way more to "power" than the ability to kill enemies at increased temporal rate.
The steepness in attack power may be a bad thing, but it shows that totally removing the feat, also even modifying it into "just another dubious fighter feat ability", can be quickly considered by many as a total ruin of the whole fighter class in an epic environment.

At some time, prerequisites were added for the feat that forced taking more fighter levels than many multiclass builds used to, if I am not mistaken.
To me it looks like that change respected the (pure/ish) fighter class; I hope that philosophy still rings.

I would have less problems with a levelcap low enough to remove the feat from the game over nerfing the feat out of an "epic" environment.

I think it is a very difficult "problem" to "fix", that is why I use so many quotes . Not even totally sure if it really is a problem, from modular point of view. I understand that for DMs that want to balance "event" challenges it can be problematic.

greets,

Xillie


ps addendum
Maybe we could have a gentlemans agreement that people should treat a devcritter uniquely, considerate and mostly modest. That is, consider your devcrit character a bad dog that you take out when the streets are clear. You keep it away from DM events (in fact any level30+ character), for which you have other characters that you know can be challenged by DMs. This would be not a choice for those who prefer playing one character though.

[Beard]

Level cap is an alternative solution, putting a cooldown on the proc for Dev Crit for once per round not per attack roll might work aswell, there's alot of possible solutions, it's just finding the best one and implimenting it.