Critical hits, bad behavior & "end game" content

[Yaffy]

Using GK mobs at the entrance at as example, I find the difficulty the damage types dealt. Infiltrators deal poison and their crits are rough. Troopers deal 100% fire, and their crits are rough. The meditation buffs are nearly mandatory for troopers. Very few builds can really shake off these types of crits and the builds I see people talking about are masters at physical damage. I don’t want to get into the weeds of one build vs another, but I am overall in favor of physical damage crits. Without crits there would be solo players inside GK.

I believe Citan is looking at the player’s death part of the group’s experience. The rez timer, cost, and drop rate of greens makes this not fun. Since crits were added, the overall size what I pull into group has decreased—and this is good. Even though I sound pro-crit, I assume a level 70 with perfect lvl 60-gear’ed can be 1 shot via crits, and I’d agree that’s not fun. Crits less than 85% of the players health/armor or physical only crits I am in favor of. I think those conditions are good enough.

But how do you shut down people soloing, or duoing content meant for 6 people? The other night I had a party I had with 4 people and it was an absolute struggle but when we added 2 more people it became smooth sailing ride. Overwhelming DPS fixes a lot of things because a mob can die in the length of one stun. Instead of crits, what if some mobs rage-support? Examples could be a mez on the tank (please from 3 meters meters only!) until a cure disease, or even a rez on other elites , a self-30% base dmg boost or a temporary damage immunity.

Re Root: I think the root as CC is good. The way root works currently, it really allows for ice-magic tank builds to be very handy and it makes the CC added from ice magic to be a welcomed addition to most groups. Root as a CC makes the few rooting classes very strong. And with how much groups break mez, and how root still allows the mob to call for help, I’m cool with it staying as is.

Call me crazy if you want, but I would be all up for boosting elite HP by 50% to 100% over having crits. It would make soloing significantly more difficult, because usually people who can solo kill elites mobs rely heavily on burst damage and negating damage/stalling via CC effects. Increasing the enemy's health would make it harder for players to kill the enemy before they run out of nukes/CC effects. Even if a player could manage to build enough sustain to last their way through the whole fight, it would at least make it much slower and therefore difficult to advance through the dungeon and more worthwhile to get a group to speed things up. Plus, it'd encourage more people to build tank/healer and more sustainable damage rather than just burst.

That's not to say I would just want enemies to have more health and not the other stuff I suggested, but I think it'd be a better path for the game to go down. Tanking would need a bit better balance with this change, but it'd be significantly easier than the rebalancing tanks need with crits.