Spiral Knights - Critical hits, and how they will fix all the weapon balancing issues

Critical hits, and how they will fix all the weapon balancing issues

16 replies [Last post]

Sun, 05/12/2013 - 08:35

Zeddy

I can see you rolling your eyes already, quit that.

Critical hits, as she goes

Functionally, it works like a status. Not every weapon will have critical hits, only weapons that have them will have them, just like with statuses. You can't UV crits, you can't put on armours that give crits (OR MAYBE YOU CAN?), it's just a thing weapons have. Crits come in two varieties:

-x chance of x critical

and

-Critical versus x

The chance for a crit will work like with other statuses (15%, 30% 45% for Slight, Fair and Good) and the strength of a critical determines how much defence is ignored when a crit inflicts. The rate for those are 50%, 80% and 100%. A weapon with Critical vs X ignores 100% defence for every hit, but only against that family.

In order to properly judge crits, you must know how much defence an enemy has. A simple way to find out is to look at the damage table for, say, Warmaster Rocket Hammer and compare weak damage vs neutral damage. At depth 24, base defence is about 65 and at depth 28 it's about 81. Neutral defence is twice of base defence (which is how much defence a wolver has versus piercing), and resistant defence is a ridiculously huge number that I haven't been able to measure yet. Somewhere in the area of 10x base defence, I assume.

What this means is that, at depth 24, a minor critical with a matching weapons would do about 33 extra damage, a moderate critical 52, and a strong critical the full 65 extra damage. For normal damage weapons, they'd be doing about 66, 85 and 131 extra damage on a critical hit. Vanaduke has 150 piercing defence, 200 normal defence so he's pretty easy to calculate crit bonuses for.

Where critical would be applied
When thinking about this, I did take into consideration which weapons are considered underpowered, but I also thought about which weapons would make sense to have crit bonuses. Luckily, these happened to coincide.

Swords:
- Cold Iron Vanquisher gets Damage High vs Undead replaced with Critical vs Undead. At depth 24, CIV will now do 307 damage vs undead on the first hit, and 381 with max bonus, versus the current values of 213 and 250. This fixes the problem of Leviathan Blade eventually doing more damage versus Undead than CIV if you only pile up enough damage bonus.
- Wild Hunting Blade gets Damage High vs Beast replaced with Critical vs Beast.
- Cautery Swords get blah blah you know the drill.
- Flameberge gets Fair Chance of Moderate Fire replaced with Good Chance of Moderate Critical. Entire line probably gets renamed or something.
Guns:
- Iron Slug gets Good Chance of Strong Critical.
- Plague Needle gets Slight Chance of Strong Poison replaced with Fair Chance of Strong Critical.
Bombs:
- Deconstructor line gets Critical vs Construct.
- Deadly Shard Bomb gets Fair Chance of Strong Critical, giving it a purpose over other shard bombs. It won't be as effective as having a full set of specialised shard bombs, but it'll be able to rack up a lot of damage against any enemy type.
- Deadly Crystal Bomb gets Critical vs Undead.
- Deadly Dark Matter Bomb gets Critical vs Gremlin.
- Deadly Splinter Bomb gets Critical vs Beast.
- Scintillating Sun Shards gets Damage VH vs Fiend replaced with Critical vs Fiend.
- Shocking Salt Bomb gets Damage VH vs Slime replaced with Critical vs Slime.

With the exception of Iron Slug, these are all multi-hit or fast-hitting weapons, which is where one expects crits to make sense. In the case of Slug, you kind of expect to be aimig for vitals or whatever with it, so I think it's thematic.

If you wish to look at how much damage a crit-hit weapon does, I refer you to this chart over weapons doing damage to an enemy with 0 defence.

Sun, 05/12/2013 - 10:13

Klipik

I think this could be simplified into only one type of critical, if the Family Bonus UVs are simply allowed to go beyond Maximum!. And I don't even want to consider the rage induced by random crits in PvP taking out someone in 2 hits instead of 4. Randomness is never good for competitive play...
+0

Sun, 05/12/2013 - 10:36

Little-Juances

Tell that to everyone that uses a status alchemer then. Isn't it random too?
The way I see it, critical hits wouldn't be too different than fire, except it's only one tick.

Sun, 05/12/2013 - 11:54

Zeddy

In addition to what Juances said (if a Hail Driver freezes you, you are dead), take note of the weapons capable of critting knights:

Flamberge
Iron Slug
Plague Needle
Deadly Shard Bomb

Sun, 05/12/2013 - 18:45

Klipik

"critical hits wouldn't be too different than fire"

Right, so we can take Flamberge off the list and just bump up the fire potency and/or chance of infliction, right?

My point is, you're creating a new system to buff only underpowered weapons, instead of actually fixing them.

Sun, 05/12/2013 - 19:17

Zeddy

Outright buffing Flamberge's fire would work, too, but there are important differences between crits and fire:

Crits are inherently stronger for neutral and resisted targets because there's more defence to reduce in those cases. What this means is that CIV would be stronger against undead than even Combuster while still being a normal-damage weapon.
You cannot set a target on fire twice, but multihit weapons would be able to inflict several crits in the same attack.
You won't find crit-themed enemies.

The important part is the first point here. The game currently has no incentive to use low-damage weapons because of the linear nature of defence. A weapon that inflict 2x200 damage does less damage than a weapon that inflict 1x400. With a crit system, low-damage weapons potentially become more damaging. I chose the weapons I did not just because they were underpowered, but because they were low-damage. Their underpoweredness is merely a byproduct of them being that.

It makes thematic sense: Shard bombs are erratic and unpredictable, so having them randomly hit vital spots makes sense. I chose Flamberge because aiming for vitals is what one does with a rapier, and Iron Slug for the same reason. I also chose Plague Needle because buffing its poison wouldn't cut it: Even if it had 100% chance of strong poison 1 Plague + 3 Blitz would still be weaker than 4 Blitz against anything. You would have to buff poison itself to change that.

Sun, 05/12/2013 - 20:05

Shidara

If this can help give otherwise overlooked weapons a chance to shine and find its place in a Knight's arsenal as a viable piece of equipment then I'm all for this.

Sun, 05/12/2013 - 20:59

Whitechocolatechip

-1/2

I have to agree heavily with Klipik. I've read your long explanations though, and they seem fun... but they also seem redundant at some points. Honestly if certain weapons just can't compete with competitors, maybe it should be buffed instead of radically re-thought, or even its competitor nerfed for rebalancing (BLITZ NEEDLE *cough*)

Unfortunately OOO seems hesitant to rebalance anything, but some points are in desperate need of rebalance.

Additionally, if 2x200 does less than 1x400, it seems to follow logic REALLY hard. Imagine you have a bullet proof vest. You are shot with 10 shots of 9mm. Chances are those individual hits carried too weak of stopping power to completely break through your... armor, and cause insane levels of damage generally associated with getting shot 10 times. You are then shot by a tank with a single 90mm shell, holy s**t. You're now a pile of gibs.

In essence: armor absorbs a certain portion of damage relative to the individual hits, unless you are doing both great damage with those individual hits and hitting the exact same point over and over, which are presumably not both true at the same time.

It's all about thresholds.

Sun, 05/12/2013 - 21:40

Zeddy

@Whitechocolatechip

Are you going to tell me that 9mm pistols are balanced with 90mm tank shells?

If not, why did you even bring that example up?

Sun, 05/12/2013 - 22:57

Klipik-Forum

@white: 90mm tank shells have a lot more power behind them than pistol rounds. They also have a tendency to explode.

@Zeddy: linear defense works the opposite way, too. 1x400 may do more damage than 2x200 against the same defense, but if you give them linear damage buffs, and 2x200 gains twice as much attack power. I'm not sure of the numbers on this, but given that neither Max+ bonuses or crits exist, we can make some up. Specifically, Max+ UVs could be made, in whatever way, to be just as strong as you propose crits to be, without creating a whole new unnecessary system to do it.

Mon, 05/13/2013 - 01:13

#10

Father-Frost

Zedd it is clear this game

Zedd it is clear this game needs fixing but this is not it...

Mon, 05/13/2013 - 02:25

#11

Onekone

Maybe have Flamberge do

Maybe have Flamberge do criticals when target on fire and so on with other status weapons? Kinda like Sun-on-a-Stick and Axtinguisher in TF2 which do crit when target on fire

Mon, 05/13/2013 - 06:13

#12

Shamanalah

my 2 cents

Zedd it is clear this game needs fixing but this is not it...

Yup... Zedd was on the right track with his armor rework though... just need to think about casual gamers a bit more, Zeddy seem to forget about them and only think about end-game player (which is not a bad thing, but if you would think about the casual gamers that are *end-gaming* then maybe your rework could be perfect and more welcomed >.<)

Of course if you change gears that has been untouched for 2 years some people will be upset... Someone could even call them mad ;)

Mon, 05/13/2013 - 07:03

#13

Aumir

-1

Why?

1 - RNGs are evil. They never work when they have to.
2 - It makes the game less skill based and more luck based, literally.
3 - Raw damage is always going to be chosen over potential damage in a game where you can't "miss" hits. Critical hits in RPG games tend to avoid evasion rolls.

I tend to like your suggestions, but well, this is the exception. Now that the chain combo string is broken, next one will most likely be good ;)

Mon, 05/13/2013 - 14:45

#14

Klipik

@onekone

That's called poison.

Tue, 05/14/2013 - 01:24

#15

Onekone

What Poison have to do with

What Poison have to do with it? Poison is just general defence debuff, and "Chance Crit when X" is something different

Tue, 05/14/2013 - 06:37

#16

Putkinen

Meh.

There's easier ways to balance gear than adding something like this.

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Critical hits, and how they will fix all the weapon balancing issues