ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Riposte's secondary benefit of massively increasing crit chance of counterstrikes is great and all, but the heavy hitter of the shield assault line gets nothing out of it. Assault's automatic critical chance means Lv4 Riposte's only good for ensuring all 3 attacks are double strength; the crit chance is wasted.

Bulwarks in particular have no other attack to really get value out of Counterstrikes, so why not change one of Riposte or Assault's crit chances bonuses to a crit power bonus? This way, the two talents work much better together. As a secondary benefit, if the change is done to Assault, it loses the effectiveness drop that occurs as the player's crit chance increases over the course of the game.

Tryble wrote:Riposte's secondary benefit of massively increasing crit chance of counterstrikes is great and all, but the heavy hitter of the shield assault line gets nothing out of it. Assault's automatic critical chance means Lv4 Riposte's only good for ensuring all 3 attacks are double strength; the crit chance is wasted.

Bulwarks in particular have no other attack to really get value out of Counterstrikes, so why not change one of Riposte or Assault's crit chances bonuses to a crit power bonus? This way, the two talents work much better together. As a secondary benefit, if the change is done to Assault, it loses the effectiveness drop that occurs as the player's crit chance increases over the course of the game.

+1

took me a while to understand what you are talking about...

well, at 100 dex, (which you probably wont get) and ETL 6.5, you get 35 crit chance. decent, but its not a sole deciding factor of wining the game. if you have 20% base chance, that makes you 55%.

now looking at how poewrfull assoult actually is...

at 4 points (and 1.3 mastery) an attack does 150%, base crit damage is 150%, and then you double it with shield... and there are 2 of those hits.
that's 900% damage.
at 5 points (and 1.3 mastery) an attack does 7% more... times 4, and 1.5 that's another 42%, so without even adding any crit multiplier, you are doing 942% weapon damage in a single turn.

does it really need that synergy?

ok, lets do something about it. how about it getting extra crit multiplier equal to the crit chance... now you have, with 20 base and 35 from riposte, 205% crit multiplier.

157%*205%*2*2
...
calculator says 1287.4%

ok, that's not happening. there is no way anyone would make it happen.
so now someone is going to say that assault is way too strong.

assault just doesn't need that extra the way it is right now.

...
after thoughts
if you had scoundrels strategies to add even further bleed damage on top of the 942%...
even 40% bleed would grow to like 389% or something. daaaaaaamn

How about making riposte's scaling benefit a straight Addition to base critical multiplier, and changes counterstrike so that it causes counterstrike to use the players Charsheet crit multiplier value +100% rather than the base 200% This would make counterstrikes progressively more powerful with talent point investment, and will continue to be useful even if the player nears or hits the crit cap.

i am not entirely sure if i understand it, probably don't, but i will comment anyway, in case i am in fact getting it right.

"base" crit multiplier is 150%. if you add 100% to it, it will go to 250%, which is a bit bigger than 200%. by a quarter.

i think you are mistaking "crit multiplier" with "crit chance" somewhere.
but if you meant "base crit chance + 100%", that would be... quite a nerf actually, as reaching 100% on crit chance is not easy.

sooo that would make...
"+xx% crit chance against vulnerable targets" into "+xx% crit damage against vulnerable targets"
and
"next y attacks against this target will be 200% as powerful" into "next y attacks against this target will be [crit chance+100]% as powerful"
that if anything, would be a minor nerf to riposte+assault combo, and a major nerf to riposte in general.

Coming back to my previous example.
20% base C-chance+35%counterstriking bonus. now it go tot he mulipliers.
counter striking used to be 200%, now is 100%+chance

assault (weapon, crit, counter)
before, 150*150*200
after, 150*185*120

normal hit
before, 200%, with 55% chance to go up to 300%. (average crit bonus 55% weapon damage) that's 255% on average
after, 120% with 20% chance to go up to 222%. (average crit bonus 40.4% weapon damage) that's 160.4% on average

Can't you just shield pummel into assault? Then you get the full benefit of all the crits
You can also use it on shield slam... then the other two.

I was being unclear perhaps
My suggestion is to remove the critical chance bonus to counterstrike from riposte entirely.
Instead you get a increased Critical multiplier for the same %age. Which applies to all attacks and encourages greater investment in the talent.
Making the counterstrike de-buff scale with Crit multiplier makes the act of inflicting counterstrike scale with investment and gear upgrades and prevents the possibility of wasted crit chance at higher character levels


The initial Bonus of raw Crit multiplier +100% (250% base) is 25% better than raw bonus, but this seems appropriate given that you have specialised in deadly counterstrikes, they should cause more lethal vulnerabilities than a random anorithil hiding behind his shield for a turn. Of course the numbers can be adjusted, Crit mult + 50% for 200% + the talents contribution to crit mult would be a less extreme initial bonus

The system also has the advantage of much greater reliability early game, as a consistently more potent counterstrike is more dependable than unlikely crits.

you DID mean multiplier?

well...
150% base+35% from vulnerability, that's 185% crit multiplier.
then you add 100%, and assault ALWAYS crits...

(base, crit, vulnerable)
150*185*285*... i am even scare to bring a calculator to this one...
7.9 on 1 hit, 15.8 on both hits. a single turn... doing almost 16 times the damage. up from 9 times.

if i made an error in the math, pls point it out, because i DON'T want this to be real.