Critical hits, bad behavior & "end game" content

[ErDrick]

To answer your points and questions Golliathe.

About those rage attack ideas being super shitty play :
Citan said his goal was to make combat more challenging because it can be a snoozefest ( and I'm glad he posted, because understanding his intent helps a lot here). The thing is, what he did was give them the ability to critical hit and current rage attacks that "do damage" now have to a chance to instantly kill you from full health and armor. The point is to get away from stuff instantly killing you but maintain a challenge. ( we are mostly talking about elites here btw, aka group content). For non-elites ( especially bears) rage criticals have to go or be severely toned down, period. Being instantly killed really isn't preventable and has no counterplay for most people. Personally I think they are okay ideas, but could be better ( they are all better then HaHa you are instantly dead, though).. the biggest problem I'd think would be coding all of that shit, which stops development on other stuff while he is working on it, so optimally I'd rather see criticals get a severe rework, but felt like I'd at least try to offer another approach, because he has a point about regular encounters being on the easy side ( when you aren't getting swarmed by 5-10 things, anyways). If people have other ideas how to fix this that is great, I never said any of my ideas need to happen, they are just ideas for discussion( but "something" def needs to happen).

Durability on stuff does indeed suck, I would hate it. After rethinking that line of reasoning I added another short post with another idea of how to make armor worth something( but I did that long before you posted your reply, it was there and readable). 60% base mitigation from armor on a tank would be completely insane though, nothing would scratch you ever( except prask rage-critical). Also that would require a total rework of monster armor because how would that work for them? Also armor heals in that case would be extremely overpowered, a heal for 300 is a heal for 300, an armor heal for 300 if you had 60% mitigation would give you MUCH more then 300 effective more health.

Crafted cloth chest and legs actually gives you 20 pockets per for 40 total by the way. I do agree the base armor values may be off though, especially for snail and the stuff that's supposed to be tanky (plate). The issue isn't that it's so much better, it's that armor value in general really means almost nothing for players. If you had 2,000 armor prask would still critical rage on you for 1320 damage, instead of his base damage of 1400, considering players cant even get 2,000 armor ( and if they could it wouldn't matter anyways really). So if armor doesn't really do anything their is really no downside to losing a few hundred of it for 40 more inventory. Now, if armor wasn't part of your health, but was just armor by itself ( and you kept it except for when specific attacks lowered it) then it would always be meaningful. Always having 40 mitigation means something, having 40 mitigation for the first hit, 20 for the second hit, and zero for the rest of the fight.. is why it's nearly worthless.

I think in that light it would sort of still make sense for certain monsters or abilities to lower your armor and thus overall mitigation (if it was changed the 2nd way I suggested that is) and for you to be able to do the same thing to them via acid and stuff. The part I didn't add because I thought it was obvious, is that modifiers for healing armor would all be changed to health instead , with a longer base health bar representing what we would lose from losing the armor bar as part of our health ( the way it works now). And the reason I suggested the health increase is because it would require less rebalancing of mob damage ( I mean if we just lost the armor bar completely with no extra health added, just about everything would 1-3 hit kill you with it's regular attacks). The only ability that would actually "heal" armor damage in that case would be armor patching. To be more clear I also meant that as in it would apply to both players AND monsters, and the simplest way to do it would be to double everything's health pool ( including ours) and leave armor at it's current value, but just make it untouchable except to certain skills that specifically destroy armor.

For your other point about armor reducing attacks being rare / having your cake and eating it too...we are talking about something that AT MOST is giving the best geared players 50 damage mitigation ( assuming they get to 1250 armor, which no one I've ever seen has), not 50% but -50 damage per hit when some stuff can rage on you for 1200-1400 at the point when you actually have armor values between 600-1,000. And it would definitely stop me from soloing high level elites, if a GK mob had 20k health and every attack I did on it was reduced by 240 damage per hit due to them having 6,000 armor, I would either run out of power or just die from running out of ways to heal myself before they did.

As far as battlechem, yes I would like to see higher tiers of mitigation abilities all be percentile based instead of flat number based, what I meant specifically though is that there are 2 mods for "reduces slashing damage by xx" and 2 more for "reduces piercing damage by xx" but Nothing for crushing and instead we inexplicably have that worthless heal per 20 seconds.

As for rahu Onkara debilitators, I am using top tier food, (and sometimes battlechem's thick skin, they deal piercing damage which I have 2 mods for that reduces it on top of the base amount). What I am seeing is that I can be fighting 2-3 mobs there and I'm able to keep up with the damage I'm taking easily.. well I shouldn't say easily, compared to how it used to be it's definitely not easy , but as soon as a debilitator sees me fighting and comes to help his friends in that scenario, I die almost instantly and nothing I can seem to do stops it from happening. A debilitator as far as I can tell, hits for about 60 damage and 100ish rage.. (or maybe that's 200 and i was seeing 100 to health and 100 to armor, but either way that's not explaining why I'm dropping from it) and a damage over time effect for 9 points which can stack up to 3x, but rarely does. I think something is going on under the hood with those guys that doesn't show up in your buff window..I'm not sure what it is but it could be something like a healing debuff, something that would explain why a guy that can barely harm me suddenly spells death when other mobs are involved. I still have no clue though what they are doing.

I am glad you made these points though because it gave me a chance to explain myself better, and even if you still disagree it's fine, it's just food for thought for both players and devs to think about or add better suggestions to.