I’ve been thinking about the long-term balance direction of the game, especially as builds and itemization expand. Right now we have Crit Chance + Crit Damage, which creates a multiplicative scaling (like known from other Games).
Crit Chance × Crit Damage systems are fun in pure ARPG power fantasies. The more Crit Chance you have, the more valuable Crit Damage becomes — and vice versa.
We then usually get :
Exponential scaling
“One-shot nuke” builds
Top-Tier “easymode” meta
Harder balancing for devs
I’d like to propose considering the removal of scalable Crit Damage entirely.
Not removing crits — just simplifying them.
Benefits:
Easier & healthier balancing
When Crit Chance and Crit Damage multiply each other, small number changes can have massive effects. Removing Crit Damage as a scaling stat, reduces exponential stacking, makes tuning enemy health & damage easier and keeps builds closer together in power.
Fewer One-Shot Nuke Builds
Crit stacking almost always becomes the mathematically “best scaling” path.
By removing/adjusting the possibility for double scaling, the burst extremes get reduced and sustained damage builds stay competitive. Which (maybe) lead to combat pacing becomes more consistent.
This would fit Wicked’s more grounded, weighty combat direction.
Possible Methods
Fixed Global Crit Multiplier
All critical hits deal +x% damage (No further item bonus for Crit Damage)
You can still scale: Crit Chance, Base and Elemental damage, Status effects
This keeps crits meaningful but prevents massive scaling.
Fixed Multiplier per Weapon Category
Crit multiplier stays fixed per weapon type (like now)
No further Crit Damage Bonus (so only remove enhancement bonus, to reduce the max crit scale)
This keeps weapon identity intact and allows balancing through weapon tuning.
“Conditional” Crit Scaling
could go in combination to 1./2.
crit strength increases through enemy conditions, not through item stats
Examples
+x% Crit-dmg against staggered enemies
… against enemies on low life
… briefly after perfect dodge / parry (would love that, big motivation to get better at parry )
Crit power tied to some weapon mastery level (which seems to be part of the job system?)
This shifts crit scaling from: “Stack numbers on gear”
to: “Play well and create windows of opportunity”
Which (for me) would feel great with current gameplay.
My latest build is a crit build, and boy is it strong. All my armor uses crit chance, and with exalting, 60% empowerment gems, and a base 20% crit weapon, I’m at 100% crit. I think this is a bigger problem than crit damage scaling because even without it, lv 12 weapons are slapping. I was hoping there was more play around crit, like things that happen on crit, so it wasn’t just a way to stack damage. But yeah, it completely trivializes combat. Stacking armor pen to cap, crit to cap, physical damage % (or your infusion of choice) is VERY strong, so strong that I wonder if we should be allowed to reach 100% crit. Stacked with a crit damage weapon, I am always doing double damage. I hardly have to use any of the weapon moveset since things die in 1-2 hits. Bows finally feel powerful at least. Stacking armor pen and damage % increases feels fine and balanced, but once you add crit to it, it gets overpowered.
Players can easely reach 100% crit chance and deal way too much damage. It is also not well designed as all those crit enchantments are just flat bonuses, so that there is no thought process whether it will benefit your build/playstyle or not.
Furthermore, in the current version there are too many damage boosting enchantments that allow overkill damage. We have armor penetration, +damage type & + crit enchantments; and all of them can be placed on the same item as they do not share the same enchantment group.
Right now, the game has the most OP & the most boring gear it ever had.
This post misses forest for the trees a little bit. Issue is not that crit scales to the moon - while it is slightly better than damage increase or armor pen it’s still around 10% more damage per enchantment. As ShortCat correctly states stacking all these stats on the same item is the real problem, that leads to:
all builds gearing exactly the same offensive stats
each stat being a multiplier to other ones
all of them being affected by Enchantment Power gems leading to further scaling
Let me explain on simple example of a Double Dagger with Keen facet - 200% crit damage and 20% crit chance (with facet). You can go with it in two ways:
you invest all affixes into crit chance and double exalt each of them to get to 95%, obviously can reach 100% with one triple. But now you are left with no crit damage multipliers since all your enchants are just crit chance. This leaves you with average damage multiplier of 95%
you go for only 2 affixes for crit and 3 for crit damage putting you at 50% crit chance and 190% crit damage, which the same damage multiplier of 95%
If you invest same 4 affixes into Physical Damage increase enchantments, with same double exalt for total of 60% increase, on the same weapon with same base crit chance and facet, you get 92% damage multiplier. That’s literally perfect balance.
Now, if you do the same thing but include Black Pearl with it’s 100% Enchantment Power you can get to 80% crit chance and 380% crit damage instead, which is a 224% more damage, so more than double EP on it would suggest. Same Phys damage increases will now give 160% more damage only, making crit much better investment.
Add to it the fact you get 80% Armor Pen with no cost to crit chance, and increase to damage type also of 40 to 60% - now you are looking at multiplier hell that other ARPGs are also suffering from.
Reasonable (and quickest) solution would be to put crit enchantments on same category as Armor Pen, along with Damage increase and remove or vastly reduce numbers on Enchantment Power gems.
Removing crit damage or crit chance will result in lower power for sure, but it won’t actually increase versatiliy in build types or solve scaling problems in long term.
Edit: I should also add that we got all these offensive enchantments while enemies HP and resistances remained the same, so we are 2 or 3 times more powerful now than we were in Breach, before accounting for broken mechanics.
I have been thinking that introducing soft caps, and even hard caps for crit chance would solve a lot of the issue here. Soft caps could come online around 70% crit chance, reducing anything above that by an amount and then more penalties at 80 and so on. It would balance the black pearl low life builds as players would be incentivized to spec into other enchantments once their gear is passing the first or second level of soft cap penalties.
It would still be fun to have and small chance to get really high through perfect exalt outcomes. Let a rare set of RNG rolls make the odd 90 or even 100% crit chance. As it stands now, if you hit a couple of rolls on crit chance and have 3 instances of it combined with focus or low life enchants it is pretty easy to hit 100%.
Don’t think crit scaling is that OP compared to other sources, maybe the numbers just need to be squished so it’s more a choice instead of an instant take.
If it’s too weak with lower number give us a reason to crit apart from bigger damage, modifiers or traits that activate on crit or unique weapons that want to be critting more often.
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