It's all about balance. I read lots of comments about attacks, but how about the defences of the spellcasters? They have lower AC because they are limited in armour type, have limitations for using a shield and have fewer Hit Points because they use lower Hit Dice. That is where the balance is. So taking away their crit does not feel fair.
edit: changed wording
You know what the difference is between a D6 hit die and a D8 hit die? One HP per level. Caster AC is very comparable to martial AC, and far better once you start factoring in busted ass, low-resource spells like Shield. They're "limited in armor type", sure, but that armor type happens to be the best armor type.
Spellcasters are way too tanky in addition to being stronger both in and out of combat. It's not a tradeoff at all.
It's all about balance. I read lots of comments about attacks, but how about the defences of the spellcasters? They have lower AC because they are limited in armour type, have limitations for using a shield and have fewer Hit Points because they use lower Hit Dice. That is where the balance is. So taking away their crit does not feel fair.
edit: changed wording
You know what the difference is between a D6 hit die and a D8 hit die? One HP per level. Caster AC is very comparable to martial AC, and far better once you start factoring in busted ass, low-resource spells like Shield. They're "limited in armor type", sure, but that armor type happens to be the best armor type.
Spellcasters are way too tanky in addition to being stronger both in and out of combat. It's not a tradeoff at all.
It actually isn't so much about balance as it is encounter balance and burst. Crits change very little with how actual balance works, but can cause huge swings and variance especially with things like sneak attack, smites and spells that utilize multiple dice. With weapons you can expect to only roll 1 MAYBE 2 dice extra, so the variance is small. Doing a house rule of just adding the max die with the crit still would keep the swings smaller with the highest amount being +12 damage. This doesn't work for monsters because most monsters use unarmed attacks or those that use weapons use larger weapons, which means even more dice is added on a monster crit usually. This crit change isn't about average balance it is about variance and swinginess of an encounter.
You know what the difference is between a D6 hit die and a D8 hit die? One HP per level. Caster AC is very comparable to martial AC, and far better once you start factoring in busted ass, low-resource spells like Shield. They're "limited in armor type", sure, but that armor type happens to be the best armor type.
Perhaps you should compare a Barbarian and a Sorcerer. That is d12 vs d6.
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You know what the difference is between a D6 hit die and a D8 hit die? One HP per level. Caster AC is very comparable to martial AC, and far better once you start factoring in busted ass, low-resource spells like Shield. They're "limited in armor type", sure, but that armor type happens to be the best armor type.
Perhaps you should compare a Barbarian and a Sorcerer. That is d12 vs d6.
He was probably comparing it to d8 because most classes use a d8. 1 class uses a d12, 2 use a d6, 3 use a d10, 7 use a d8. A d8 is kinda the standard. Having a d10 means you have 1 more than the standard a d6 is 1 less and d12 is basically a class feature.
I've been essentially playing at a table with the new crit rules for a year. In the DMs version on a natural 20 he would add the maximum weapon die to the damage. So a shortsword with a d6 adds 6 damage. This is because critical hitting and rolling two 1's on the die just feels wrong.
Due to party comp and play style I end up casting attack spells more often than I think anyone else who has been at the table long term and something has been bothering me for a while regarding how much damage I'm doing. This UA has made it clear to me that I need to not deal double dice on a natural 20, so effective immediately I am applying that to myself. My goal is to increase the fun for all the players at the table, and this disparity just does not align itself with that philosophy.
The disparity between martials and spell casters, the disparity between attack roll spells and save spells, these are all things that should be addressed and some care needs to be given to the Warlock and Artificer (alchemist and artillerist) classes to make sure their reliance on attack roll cantrips isn't going to be a problem. But I, after seeing some inkling of this change on a long enough timeline, believe it is 100% for the best.
That does not mean I'm deaf to the concerns of others. I'd say as an Optional Rule having a Spell attack roll of a natural 20 or a spell save of a natural 1 maximize the damage of the spell might be a good middle road. The average of that and double dice should be about the same and the potential of rolling 3 6's on a level 1 guiding bolt exists regardless of whether a 20 was rolled or not, so there is no reason to believe that the result is unbalanced in any way. By applying to both ends of the spectrum you also remove the disparity of attack vs save spells.
I was thinking of something along the same lines...just max the damage on the attack roll spells if you crit and call it good. I'm currently playing a Warlock and the heavy reliance on eldritch blast for a lot of the early and mid-tiers levels highlight the issue you are bringing up. I could see Artificer and potentially some Clerics having the same problem.
Max damage on crit and no extra or doubled dice seems like a pretty good middle ground option to me for spells.
My two scents, I didn't read all the previous posts but I got through a few pages and couldn't see anyone looking at this really from a flavour and lore perspective rather than a metagaming mechanics and numbers perspective.
From a flavour and lore perspective, I don't think spells critting makes any sense, here's why: If you charge up X amount of magical power and you hit an enemy with X amount of magic, it doesn't make sense that it would be able to suddenly do the damage of twice that amount of power. Yes you could say the fire bolt hit someone in the face and therefore would do more damage, but we don't have a system for targeting specific body parts, or where you hit effecting damage (thank god), otherwise fire bolts to the face would just be an instant kill surely?
The same with smites, you get to add a certain amount of divine magical damage to your attack, just because your sword attack hit harder than expected why would that change the amount of magical holy damage you have empowered your weapon with? It shouldn't IMO.
Sneak attack is the same, you get extra damage for exploiting a foes distraction and targeting a vulnerable area - the area doesn't get more vulnerable because you stabbed it slightly harder.
Personally, I'm happy the dice on all of these things will no longer be doubled. PCs can deal enough damage without the extra crit dice on these things.
You know what the difference is between a D6 hit die and a D8 hit die? One HP per level. Caster AC is very comparable to martial AC, and far better once you start factoring in busted ass, low-resource spells like Shield. They're "limited in armor type", sure, but that armor type happens to be the best armor type.
Perhaps you should compare a Barbarian and a Sorcerer. That is d12 vs d6.
He was probably comparing it to d8 because most classes use a d8. 1 class uses a d12, 2 use a d6, 3 use a d10, 7 use a d8. A d8 is kinda the standard. Having a d10 means you have 1 more than the standard a d6 is 1 less and d12 is basically a class feature.
Maybe but in the d8 list I'd only call the rogues and monks a martial, and in both cases they are skirmishers. The ones normally considered a martial d10 is the standard. Though some full casters are d8 and have good armor which is where a argument could be made. This yeah you don't have any armor and d6 but that's not really a limitation line doesn't fly the actually play the game test. Sure optimizers can find ways around it, but that's finding ways around a serious limitation not there not being one. If people want to argue about the power imbalance between casters and martials that is fine, as there is one but don't exaggerate it to absurdity. And when it comes to this topic, this "fix" with crits does mechanically nothing to change that. Its just a I want to shit on someone else's fun change. Give martials a real boost out of combat, they are fairly balanced in combat though I'd boost them there so they have a actual edge to account for spell castings versatility.
It will be interesting to see which spells become the caster's favourite damaging spells, since the to-hit spells will no longer benefit from criticals, and the saving-throw spells will remain at their current damage level.
It will be interesting to see which spells become the caster's favourite damaging spells, since the to-hit spells will no longer benefit from criticals, and the saving-throw spells will remain at their current damage level.
I don't think anyone factors that in, 5% of the time has just to small of an effect on your DPR. But, currently with how monsters are designed depending on level, to hit either hits more often or less often than save based spells, yeah each monster is different but overall its more a tier thing, at some points its better to go with an attack roll at other points the save. Basically the crit is meaningless just haw often does the spell land. I'm forgetting off hand which way it goes if saves are better at low levels vs high levels but that is how people will continue to look at it.
It will be interesting to see which spells become the caster's favourite damaging spells, since the to-hit spells will no longer benefit from criticals, and the saving-throw spells will remain at their current damage level.
To be honest, it won't change anything for me. 0.5ish damage per round is not worth factoring in. If I'm goin to an attack roll spell, it's because, with the resources I have, it's the best choice. If I'm going for a spell save, then it's because that's the best choice. An average of 0.5 damage isn't going to move the needle on that equation.
Which is what my point earlier was about in regards to people celebrating the "nerf" to casters - it's not really anything impactful, all it does is reduce the emotional reaction to getting a nat20, and that's not a positive thing.
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My two scents, I didn't read all the previous posts but I got through a few pages and couldn't see anyone looking at this really from a flavour and lore perspective rather than a metagaming mechanics and numbers perspective.
From a flavour and lore perspective, I don't think spells critting makes any sense, here's why: If you charge up X amount of magical power and you hit an enemy with X amount of magic, it doesn't make sense that it would be able to suddenly do the damage of twice that amount of power. Yes you could say the fire bolt hit someone in the face and therefore would do more damage, but we don't have a system for targeting specific body parts, or where you hit effecting damage (thank god), otherwise fire bolts to the face would just be an instant kill surely?
The same with smites, you get to add a certain amount of divine magical damage to your attack, just because your sword attack hit harder than expected why would that change the amount of magical holy damage you have empowered your weapon with? It shouldn't IMO.
Sneak attack is the same, you get extra damage for exploiting a foes distraction and targeting a vulnerable area - the area doesn't get more vulnerable because you stabbed it slightly harder.
Personally, I'm happy the dice on all of these things will no longer be doubled. PCs can deal enough damage without the extra crit dice on these things.Yo
Hmm. I get what you mean but it would depend on the magical class for how energy works. It's hard to describe crits by class, since so much of it depends on the subclass/individual character. Here's a few example's I could think of the top of my head of how you might describe crits by class though:
Cleric/paladin: As you channel your divine power, you feel your god aiding you. "I am here with you," says I voice in your head, "Let me guide your strike."
Sorcerer: As your innate energy pours out of you, you feel more and more of your innate magic exiting and racing towards your enemies body. As it strikes, your enemy is devasted by the sheer volume of your sorcerous energy.
Warlock: As your bolts of eldritch power flows through the air,you feel your patron, amplifying your powers and strengthening your strikes.
Wizard: You had calculated, pushed out your targeted magical energy, but something more came out instead. There are always variables in every magical attack, but for this one, all those variables turned out perfectly, and you know you have critically injured your foe.
It will be interesting to see which spells become the caster's favourite damaging spells, since the to-hit spells will no longer benefit from criticals, and the saving-throw spells will remain at their current damage level.
If removing crits from spells is an attempt to balance spells & spellcasters, then it's a complete failure to do so. Crits are so rare, so they don't make a massive difference in things, but I think you may be right in the regard that it will make a small difference in how saving throw VS. attack rolls spells add up.
But yeah, this is a pretty pathetic attempt to balance things by WotC. (I think it's an attempt to balance things at least.) This change merely serves to remove a massively fun but rare element from the game and doesn't do that much in solving the problem of power level disparities between martials and casters, as I've explained perviously on this thread in posts like this.
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My two scents, I didn't read all the previous posts but I got through a few pages and couldn't see anyone looking at this really from a flavour and lore perspective rather than a metagaming mechanics and numbers perspective.
From a flavour and lore perspective, I don't think spells critting makes any sense, here's why: If you charge up X amount of magical power and you hit an enemy with X amount of magic, it doesn't make sense that it would be able to suddenly do the damage of twice that amount of power. Yes you could say the fire bolt hit someone in the face and therefore would do more damage, but we don't have a system for targeting specific body parts, or where you hit effecting damage (thank god), otherwise fire bolts to the face would just be an instant kill surely?
The same with smites, you get to add a certain amount of divine magical damage to your attack, just because your sword attack hit harder than expected why would that change the amount of magical holy damage you have empowered your weapon with? It shouldn't IMO.
Sneak attack is the same, you get extra damage for exploiting a foes distraction and targeting a vulnerable area - the area doesn't get more vulnerable because you stabbed it slightly harder.
Personally, I'm happy the dice on all of these things will no longer be doubled. PCs can deal enough damage without the extra crit dice on these things.Yo
Hmm. I get what you mean but it would depend on the magical class for how energy works. It's hard to describe crits by class, since so much of it depends on the subclass/individual character. Here's a few example's I could think of the top of my head of how you might describe crits by class though:
Cleric/paladin: As you channel your divine power, you feel your god aiding you. "I am here with you," says I voice in your head, "Let me guide your strike."
Sorcerer: As your innate energy pours out of you, you feel more and more of your innate magic exiting and racing towards your enemies body. As it strikes, your enemy is devasted by the sheer volume of your sorcerous energy.
Warlock: As your bolts of eldritch power flows through the air,you feel your patron, amplifying your powers and strengthening your strikes.
Wizard: You had calculated, pushed out your targeted magical energy, but something more came out instead. There are always variables in every magical attack, but for this one, all those variables turned out perfectly, and you know you have critically injured your foe.
It will be interesting to see which spells become the caster's favourite damaging spells, since the to-hit spells will no longer benefit from criticals, and the saving-throw spells will remain at their current damage level.
If removing crits from spells is an attempt to balance spells & spellcasters, then it's a complete failure to do so. Crits are so rare, so they don't make a massive difference in things, but I think you may be right in the regard that it will make a small difference in how saving throw VS. attack rolls spells add up.
But yeah, this is a pretty pathetic attempt to balance things by WotC. (I think it's an attempt to balance things at least.) This change merely serves to remove a massively fun but rare element from the game and doesn't do that much in solving the problem of power level disparities between martials and casters, as I've explained perviously on this thread in posts like this.
There is this fallacy that Crits are rare, they really are not in the grand scheme of things. Most players find ways to get advantage on rolls (spell casters admittedly only have Inspiration to do this with spells but given how much easier that is to get now then it becomes a bit more likely)
At Advantage a crit has a 10% chance of being rolled.
But let's look across the dice rolled in a session. After just 24 dice rolls (a party of 4 making 6 rolls each for anything) the chance of 1 Nat 20 is 80%. So on average in any 6 round combat you should get at least 1 nat 20 most of the time within the party and thats ignoring players getting advantage for themselves.
Across a whole game session you should see several nat 20's every session, and you do, nat 20's happen a lot, it's just that we only remember the ones that are meaningful, now you might say, statistically then that wizard should be allowed a moment. I would turn this around and say that we should remove the randomness and just make sure the wizard, and every other class, can be awesome all the time and not have to rely on a random moment of chance that me, as DM, have to take into account when planning out my encounter.
I have tested the new rule with multiple combat situations and different classes at various levels. Removing the spikiness of a big magic, smite of sneak attack damage makes it far easier to create challenging encounters within the general rules of the game. it isn't perfect, removing the crit of monsters shows how much DM's rely on that nat 20 to allow for the high AC stopping a large % of hits getting through. I would much rather monsters and player characters be designed better and not need the randomness of a critical hit to make combat more interesting.
I think that spells should definitely be able to crit. When you roll the d20, you are basicaly seeing how well you aimed your attack, rolling a 20 means it is literaly imposible for you to have aimed any better, so you hit the creature in a more vunerable place, such as the head or the neck, resulting in a critical hit. So why does a hit to the face with an arrow hurt more, when a hit to the face with a fire bolt does not? This, in my opinion, makes no sense.
At Advantage a crit has a 10% chance of being rolled.
But let's look across the dice rolled in a session. After just 24 dice rolls (a party of 4 making 6 rolls each for anything) the chance of 1 Nat 20 is 80%. So on average in any 6 round combat you should get at least 1 nat 20 most of the time within the party and thats ignoring players getting advantage for themselves.
Please contact a math teacher and redo your statistics lessons. The change of rolling a 20 is 1/20=5%. this means out of 100 rolls 5 are likely to be a 20.
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"Semper in faecibus sumus, solum profundum variat" playing since 1986
Crits aren't a big thing for casters in terms of power output, at all. It's around 0.5 damage per round doing tier 1 cantrips, assuming that every round you're doing attack roll cantrips. How often you're casting attack roll spells depends on your class, but it's not every turn. The practical effect of the changes on casters is minimal to negligible. It's only really removing the joy of being able to roll more clickety-clacks on rolling a 20.
Ironically, there are martial classes that get hurt more by this than casters. Specifically, Paladins no longer get to double their Smite damage. There are other martial-specific-drawbacks too - they're more likely to have weapons that have additional effect-based damage, like Sun Blade, that no longer gets doubled and so has reduced damage. Since martials are likely to have these weapons beyond the first few levels, crit far more often than casters (at least twice as many attempts after L5) and sometimes have increased crit ranges (the Champion has 10% crit chance versus the normal 5% and ends up with 15% if you play high level, leading to roughly 50% chance of critting per round), this could be a substantial change in DPR. I don't have usage data for magic weapons and so forth so K can't number crunch this, but it really wouldn't surprise if this change nerfed martials more than casters.
That this somehow works towards balancing the spellcasters with martials just doesn't hold water. The only thing this does do positively in that regard is to possibly make spellcasters less attractive to use compared to martials, which I'm dubious about (I certainly never chose a caster based on crits, but we'll run with it). Here's the rankings of the classes by popularity according to the famous usage statistics:
Fighter.
Rogue.
Barbarian.
Cleric.
Paladin.
Ranger.
Sorceror.
Wizard.
Monk.
Druid.
Bard.
Warlock.
Did you notice something? Martials are actually more popular than casters in general. Top 3 are all martials. Only one martial in the bottom 50% and only one pure caster in the top 50%. Martials don't need to be any more popular relative to casters. Like, at all. If anything, we need it the other way around.
As Scatterbrained said, martials have problems...none of which are addressed by the new crit system.
So far as I can tell, there is only one reason for the nerf, and it's nothing to do with martials v casters. They wanted to add inspiration, so to balance it, they nerfed damage. The question is, is the inspiration a better choice for the game than the damage dealt by the old rules? There's no right answer to that question, it's a matter of preference.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
My two scents, I didn't read all the previous posts but I got through a few pages and couldn't see anyone looking at this really from a flavour and lore perspective rather than a metagaming mechanics and numbers perspective.
From a flavour and lore perspective, I don't think spells critting makes any sense, here's why: If you charge up X amount of magical power and you hit an enemy with X amount of magic, it doesn't make sense that it would be able to suddenly do the damage of twice that amount of power. Yes you could say the fire bolt hit someone in the face and therefore would do more damage, but we don't have a system for targeting specific body parts, or where you hit effecting damage (thank god), otherwise fire bolts to the face would just be an instant kill surely?
The same with smites, you get to add a certain amount of divine magical damage to your attack, just because your sword attack hit harder than expected why would that change the amount of magical holy damage you have empowered your weapon with? It shouldn't IMO.
Sneak attack is the same, you get extra damage for exploiting a foes distraction and targeting a vulnerable area - the area doesn't get more vulnerable because you stabbed it slightly harder.
Personally, I'm happy the dice on all of these things will no longer be doubled. PCs can deal enough damage without the extra crit dice on these things.Yo
Hmm. I get what you mean but it would depend on the magical class for how energy works. It's hard to describe crits by class, since so much of it depends on the subclass/individual character. Here's a few example's I could think of the top of my head of how you might describe crits by class though:
Cleric/paladin: As you channel your divine power, you feel your god aiding you. "I am here with you," says I voice in your head, "Let me guide your strike."
Sorcerer: As your innate energy pours out of you, you feel more and more of your innate magic exiting and racing towards your enemies body. As it strikes, your enemy is devasted by the sheer volume of your sorcerous energy.
Warlock: As your bolts of eldritch power flows through the air,you feel your patron, amplifying your powers and strengthening your strikes.
Wizard: You had calculated, pushed out your targeted magical energy, but something more came out instead. There are always variables in every magical attack, but for this one, all those variables turned out perfectly, and you know you have critically injured your foe.
It will be interesting to see which spells become the caster's favourite damaging spells, since the to-hit spells will no longer benefit from criticals, and the saving-throw spells will remain at their current damage level.
If removing crits from spells is an attempt to balance spells & spellcasters, then it's a complete failure to do so. Crits are so rare, so they don't make a massive difference in things, but I think you may be right in the regard that it will make a small difference in how saving throw VS. attack rolls spells add up.
But yeah, this is a pretty pathetic attempt to balance things by WotC. (I think it's an attempt to balance things at least.) This change merely serves to remove a massively fun but rare element from the game and doesn't do that much in solving the problem of power level disparities between martials and casters, as I've explained perviously on this thread in posts like this.
There is this fallacy that Crits are rare, they really are not in the grand scheme of things. Most players find ways to get advantage on rolls (spell casters admittedly only have Inspiration to do this with spells but given how much easier that is to get now then it becomes a bit more likely)
At Advantage a crit has a 10% chance of being rolled.
But let's look across the dice rolled in a session. After just 24 dice rolls (a party of 4 making 6 rolls each for anything) the chance of 1 Nat 20 is 80%. So on average in any 6 round combat you should get at least 1 nat 20 most of the time within the party and thats ignoring players getting advantage for themselves.
Across a whole game session you should see several nat 20's every session, and you do, nat 20's happen a lot, it's just that we only remember the ones that are meaningful, now you might say, statistically then that wizard should be allowed a moment. I would turn this around and say that we should remove the randomness and just make sure the wizard, and every other class, can be awesome all the time and not have to rely on a random moment of chance that me, as DM, have to take into account when planning out my encounter.
I have tested the new rule with multiple combat situations and different classes at various levels. Removing the spikiness of a big magic, smite of sneak attack damage makes it far easier to create challenging encounters within the general rules of the game. it isn't perfect, removing the crit of monsters shows how much DM's rely on that nat 20 to allow for the high AC stopping a large % of hits getting through. I would much rather monsters and player characters be designed better and not need the randomness of a critical hit to make combat more interesting.
You're missing his point. A crit for a spell caster is pretty rare. They get one attempt per round at most. Most of the time, their spells are saves, so could never crit on those anyway. So let's say, they can "attempt" to crit once in three rounds, the other two are spell saves or other Actions. Even if every attempt is at Advantage, that's roughly once every 30 rounds of combat...which is once every 7 or 8 encounters, so probably once every other session or so. That's pretty damn rare.
You're right, crits at a table aren't all that rare. But we're not comparing tables, were comparing casters v martials in a combat situation. Those are pretty rare for an individual - at least for casters. Martials have them more often and Champions swim in them.
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If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Crits aren't a big thing for casters in terms of power output, at all. It's around 0.5 damage per round doing tier 1 cantrips, assuming that every round you're doing attack roll cantrips. How often you're casting attack roll spells depends on your class, but it's not every turn. The practical effect of the changes on casters is minimal to negligible. It's only really removing the joy of being able to roll more clickety-clacks on rolling a 20.
Ironically, there are martial classes that get hurt more by this than casters. Specifically, Paladins no longer get to double their Smite damage. There are other martial-specific-drawbacks too - they're more likely to have weapons that have additional effect-based damage, like Sun Blade, that no longer gets doubled and so has reduced damage. Since martials are likely to have these weapons beyond the first few levels, crit far more often than casters (at least twice as many attempts after L5) and sometimes have increased crit ranges (the Champion has 10% crit chance versus the normal 5% and ends up with 15% if you play high level, leading to roughly 50% chance of critting per round), this could be a substantial change in DPR. I don't have usage data for magic weapons and so forth so K can't number crunch this, but it really wouldn't surprise if this change nerfed martials more than casters.
That this somehow works towards balancing the spellcasters with martials just doesn't hold water. The only thing this does do positively in that regard is to possibly make spellcasters less attractive to use compared to martials, which I'm dubious about (I certainly never chose a caster based on crits, but we'll run with it). Here's the rankings of the classes by popularity according to the famous usage statistics:
Fighter.
Rogue.
Barbarian.
Cleric.
Paladin.
Ranger.
Sorceror.
Wizard.
Monk.
Druid.
Bard.
Warlock.
Did you notice something? Martials are actually more popular than casters in general. Top 3 are all martials. Only one martial in the bottom 50% and only one pure caster in the top 50%. Martials don't need to be any more popular relative to casters. Like, at all. If anything, we need it the other way around.
As Scatterbrained said, martials have problems...none of which are addressed by the new crit system.
So far as I can tell, there is only one reason for the nerf, and it's nothing to do with martials v casters. They wanted to add inspiration, so to balance it, they nerfed damage. The question is, is the inspiration a better choice for the game than the damage dealt by the old rules? There's no right answer to that question, it's a matter of preference.
Again, this is really, really, really easy to understand. This has NOTHING to do with balance, or perceived balance, or giving martials a leg up over casters or any of that. There is one reason for crit change and that is individual encounter balance. They want fights to be less swingy. Enemies critting can be huge, and at lower levels can be unintentionally life threatening. Player smite, sneak attack and Spell crits add A LOT more than weapon crits typically do and can practically drop the boss enemy at the middle levels with just a single crit. It isn't about the average balance it is about what happens when the spike happens and controlling the size of the spike.
I posted this elsewhere, and I admit I'm not going to read 4 pages of replies to see if something similar has been mentioned before.
My two cents on this change: If the designers want to reign in the optimizability of martials, toning down crit fishing is one obvious way (the other being adjusting the flat damage feats). In the case that they do want to do that, then this is a fix that allows crits to still exist on martial characters. It is clear from that perspective that only the weapon damage should be affected, no other features.
Obviously this change doesn't work the same on spell casters, since spells get a wide variety of dice and often many more than weapons. But spell casters (while being weaker at damage) are generally regarded as more powerful anyway, due to their increased versatility and the strength of spells. This change has little effect on them while signaling significant realignment of damage from martials. Spells must not crit if a rule similar to this is implemented.
I think this change is a sign that the devs are interested in balancing the game so an optimized crit-fishing build doesn't just completely overshadow a non-optimized character. Unfortunately, since they didn't give us an entire vertical slice of the game, it's still tough to tell. We don't know what they'll do with the flat damage feats or the bonus action attacks feats or class features to know for sure.
I think that spells should definitely be able to crit. When you roll the d20, you are basicaly seeing how well you aimed your attack, rolling a 20 means it is literaly imposible for you to have aimed any better, so you hit the creature in a more vunerable place, such as the head or the neck, resulting in a critical hit. So why does a hit to the face with an arrow hurt more, when a hit to the face with a fire bolt does not? This, in my opinion, makes no sense.
Makes sense to me as well. However I think the issue is that certain spells when you crit can be pretty powerful (inflict wounds for instance). I can totally see the crit being a touch to the head and all that necrotic energy doing massive damage.
At Advantage a crit has a 10% chance of being rolled.
But let's look across the dice rolled in a session. After just 24 dice rolls (a party of 4 making 6 rolls each for anything) the chance of 1 Nat 20 is 80%. So on average in any 6 round combat you should get at least 1 nat 20 most of the time within the party and thats ignoring players getting advantage for themselves.
Please contact a math teacher and redo your statistics lessons. The change of rolling a 20 is 1/20=5%. this means out of 100 rolls 5 are likely to be a 20.
His math is wrong but he was saying when you have advantage its 10%. But two 5% chances do not give you a 10% chance any more than 20 5% chances give you a 100% chance. And in all the years of play I don;t think anywhere near close to 1/2 the rolls were at advantage. So the they will have advantage a lot argument falls flat for me, but lets add in semi-frequent advantage and call it 7% of the time. That is still no mechanically significant difference in damage per round. This rule is not about balancing the classes and if it is it fails miserably at doing so. On that score it just makes certain features less fun, that is all it does.
The goal at best is to make things less swingy, but that is a dumb goal. Predictable is boring, swingy is fun. If I can map out how a fight will play out consistently, why are we rolling at all, I can just say hey there was a fight, you looked cool and won.
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You know what the difference is between a D6 hit die and a D8 hit die? One HP per level. Caster AC is very comparable to martial AC, and far better once you start factoring in busted ass, low-resource spells like Shield. They're "limited in armor type", sure, but that armor type happens to be the best armor type.
Spellcasters are way too tanky in addition to being stronger both in and out of combat. It's not a tradeoff at all.
It actually isn't so much about balance as it is encounter balance and burst. Crits change very little with how actual balance works, but can cause huge swings and variance especially with things like sneak attack, smites and spells that utilize multiple dice. With weapons you can expect to only roll 1 MAYBE 2 dice extra, so the variance is small. Doing a house rule of just adding the max die with the crit still would keep the swings smaller with the highest amount being +12 damage. This doesn't work for monsters because most monsters use unarmed attacks or those that use weapons use larger weapons, which means even more dice is added on a monster crit usually. This crit change isn't about average balance it is about variance and swinginess of an encounter.
Perhaps you should compare a Barbarian and a Sorcerer. That is d12 vs d6.
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He was probably comparing it to d8 because most classes use a d8. 1 class uses a d12, 2 use a d6, 3 use a d10, 7 use a d8. A d8 is kinda the standard. Having a d10 means you have 1 more than the standard a d6 is 1 less and d12 is basically a class feature.
I was thinking of something along the same lines...just max the damage on the attack roll spells if you crit and call it good. I'm currently playing a Warlock and the heavy reliance on eldritch blast for a lot of the early and mid-tiers levels highlight the issue you are bringing up. I could see Artificer and potentially some Clerics having the same problem.
Max damage on crit and no extra or doubled dice seems like a pretty good middle ground option to me for spells.
My two scents, I didn't read all the previous posts but I got through a few pages and couldn't see anyone looking at this really from a flavour and lore perspective rather than a metagaming mechanics and numbers perspective.
From a flavour and lore perspective, I don't think spells critting makes any sense, here's why:
If you charge up X amount of magical power and you hit an enemy with X amount of magic, it doesn't make sense that it would be able to suddenly do the damage of twice that amount of power.
Yes you could say the fire bolt hit someone in the face and therefore would do more damage, but we don't have a system for targeting specific body parts, or where you hit effecting damage (thank god), otherwise fire bolts to the face would just be an instant kill surely?
The same with smites, you get to add a certain amount of divine magical damage to your attack, just because your sword attack hit harder than expected why would that change the amount of magical holy damage you have empowered your weapon with? It shouldn't IMO.
Sneak attack is the same, you get extra damage for exploiting a foes distraction and targeting a vulnerable area - the area doesn't get more vulnerable because you stabbed it slightly harder.
Personally, I'm happy the dice on all of these things will no longer be doubled. PCs can deal enough damage without the extra crit dice on these things.
Maybe but in the d8 list I'd only call the rogues and monks a martial, and in both cases they are skirmishers. The ones normally considered a martial d10 is the standard. Though some full casters are d8 and have good armor which is where a argument could be made. This yeah you don't have any armor and d6 but that's not really a limitation line doesn't fly the actually play the game test. Sure optimizers can find ways around it, but that's finding ways around a serious limitation not there not being one. If people want to argue about the power imbalance between casters and martials that is fine, as there is one but don't exaggerate it to absurdity. And when it comes to this topic, this "fix" with crits does mechanically nothing to change that. Its just a I want to shit on someone else's fun change. Give martials a real boost out of combat, they are fairly balanced in combat though I'd boost them there so they have a actual edge to account for spell castings versatility.
It will be interesting to see which spells become the caster's favourite damaging spells, since the to-hit spells will no longer benefit from criticals, and the saving-throw spells will remain at their current damage level.
I don't think anyone factors that in, 5% of the time has just to small of an effect on your DPR. But, currently with how monsters are designed depending on level, to hit either hits more often or less often than save based spells, yeah each monster is different but overall its more a tier thing, at some points its better to go with an attack roll at other points the save. Basically the crit is meaningless just haw often does the spell land. I'm forgetting off hand which way it goes if saves are better at low levels vs high levels but that is how people will continue to look at it.
To be honest, it won't change anything for me. 0.5ish damage per round is not worth factoring in. If I'm goin to an attack roll spell, it's because, with the resources I have, it's the best choice. If I'm going for a spell save, then it's because that's the best choice. An average of 0.5 damage isn't going to move the needle on that equation.
Which is what my point earlier was about in regards to people celebrating the "nerf" to casters - it's not really anything impactful, all it does is reduce the emotional reaction to getting a nat20, and that's not a positive thing.
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Hmm. I get what you mean but it would depend on the magical class for how energy works. It's hard to describe crits by class, since so much of it depends on the subclass/individual character. Here's a few example's I could think of the top of my head of how you might describe crits by class though:
Cleric/paladin: As you channel your divine power, you feel your god aiding you. "I am here with you," says I voice in your head, "Let me guide your strike."
Sorcerer: As your innate energy pours out of you, you feel more and more of your innate magic exiting and racing towards your enemies body. As it strikes, your enemy is devasted by the sheer volume of your sorcerous energy.
Warlock: As your bolts of eldritch power flows through the air, you feel your patron, amplifying your powers and strengthening your strikes.
Wizard: You had calculated, pushed out your targeted magical energy, but something more came out instead. There are always variables in every magical attack, but for this one, all those variables turned out perfectly, and you know you have critically injured your foe.
If removing crits from spells is an attempt to balance spells & spellcasters, then it's a complete failure to do so. Crits are so rare, so they don't make a massive difference in things, but I think you may be right in the regard that it will make a small difference in how saving throw VS. attack rolls spells add up.
But yeah, this is a pretty pathetic attempt to balance things by WotC. (I think it's an attempt to balance things at least.) This change merely serves to remove a massively fun but rare element from the game and doesn't do that much in solving the problem of power level disparities between martials and casters, as I've explained perviously on this thread in posts like this.
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HERE.There is this fallacy that Crits are rare, they really are not in the grand scheme of things. Most players find ways to get advantage on rolls (spell casters admittedly only have Inspiration to do this with spells but given how much easier that is to get now then it becomes a bit more likely)
At Advantage a crit has a 10% chance of being rolled.
But let's look across the dice rolled in a session. After just 24 dice rolls (a party of 4 making 6 rolls each for anything) the chance of 1 Nat 20 is 80%. So on average in any 6 round combat you should get at least 1 nat 20 most of the time within the party and thats ignoring players getting advantage for themselves.
Across a whole game session you should see several nat 20's every session, and you do, nat 20's happen a lot, it's just that we only remember the ones that are meaningful, now you might say, statistically then that wizard should be allowed a moment. I would turn this around and say that we should remove the randomness and just make sure the wizard, and every other class, can be awesome all the time and not have to rely on a random moment of chance that me, as DM, have to take into account when planning out my encounter.
I have tested the new rule with multiple combat situations and different classes at various levels. Removing the spikiness of a big magic, smite of sneak attack damage makes it far easier to create challenging encounters within the general rules of the game. it isn't perfect, removing the crit of monsters shows how much DM's rely on that nat 20 to allow for the high AC stopping a large % of hits getting through. I would much rather monsters and player characters be designed better and not need the randomness of a critical hit to make combat more interesting.
I think that spells should definitely be able to crit. When you roll the d20, you are basicaly seeing how well you aimed your attack, rolling a 20 means it is literaly imposible for you to have aimed any better, so you hit the creature in a more vunerable place, such as the head or the neck, resulting in a critical hit. So why does a hit to the face with an arrow hurt more, when a hit to the face with a fire bolt does not? This, in my opinion, makes no sense.
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Please contact a math teacher and redo your statistics lessons. The change of rolling a 20 is 1/20=5%. this means out of 100 rolls 5 are likely to be a 20.
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Crits aren't a big thing for casters in terms of power output, at all. It's around 0.5 damage per round doing tier 1 cantrips, assuming that every round you're doing attack roll cantrips. How often you're casting attack roll spells depends on your class, but it's not every turn. The practical effect of the changes on casters is minimal to negligible. It's only really removing the joy of being able to roll more clickety-clacks on rolling a 20.
Ironically, there are martial classes that get hurt more by this than casters. Specifically, Paladins no longer get to double their Smite damage. There are other martial-specific-drawbacks too - they're more likely to have weapons that have additional effect-based damage, like Sun Blade, that no longer gets doubled and so has reduced damage. Since martials are likely to have these weapons beyond the first few levels, crit far more often than casters (at least twice as many attempts after L5) and sometimes have increased crit ranges (the Champion has 10% crit chance versus the normal 5% and ends up with 15% if you play high level, leading to roughly 50% chance of critting per round), this could be a substantial change in DPR. I don't have usage data for magic weapons and so forth so K can't number crunch this, but it really wouldn't surprise if this change nerfed martials more than casters.
That this somehow works towards balancing the spellcasters with martials just doesn't hold water. The only thing this does do positively in that regard is to possibly make spellcasters less attractive to use compared to martials, which I'm dubious about (I certainly never chose a caster based on crits, but we'll run with it). Here's the rankings of the classes by popularity according to the famous usage statistics:
Did you notice something? Martials are actually more popular than casters in general. Top 3 are all martials. Only one martial in the bottom 50% and only one pure caster in the top 50%. Martials don't need to be any more popular relative to casters. Like, at all. If anything, we need it the other way around.
As Scatterbrained said, martials have problems...none of which are addressed by the new crit system.
So far as I can tell, there is only one reason for the nerf, and it's nothing to do with martials v casters. They wanted to add inspiration, so to balance it, they nerfed damage. The question is, is the inspiration a better choice for the game than the damage dealt by the old rules? There's no right answer to that question, it's a matter of preference.
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You're missing his point. A crit for a spell caster is pretty rare. They get one attempt per round at most. Most of the time, their spells are saves, so could never crit on those anyway. So let's say, they can "attempt" to crit once in three rounds, the other two are spell saves or other Actions. Even if every attempt is at Advantage, that's roughly once every 30 rounds of combat...which is once every 7 or 8 encounters, so probably once every other session or so. That's pretty damn rare.
You're right, crits at a table aren't all that rare. But we're not comparing tables, were comparing casters v martials in a combat situation. Those are pretty rare for an individual - at least for casters. Martials have them more often and Champions swim in them.
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Again, this is really, really, really easy to understand. This has NOTHING to do with balance, or perceived balance, or giving martials a leg up over casters or any of that. There is one reason for crit change and that is individual encounter balance. They want fights to be less swingy. Enemies critting can be huge, and at lower levels can be unintentionally life threatening. Player smite, sneak attack and Spell crits add A LOT more than weapon crits typically do and can practically drop the boss enemy at the middle levels with just a single crit. It isn't about the average balance it is about what happens when the spike happens and controlling the size of the spike.
I posted this elsewhere, and I admit I'm not going to read 4 pages of replies to see if something similar has been mentioned before.
My two cents on this change: If the designers want to reign in the optimizability of martials, toning down crit fishing is one obvious way (the other being adjusting the flat damage feats). In the case that they do want to do that, then this is a fix that allows crits to still exist on martial characters. It is clear from that perspective that only the weapon damage should be affected, no other features.
Obviously this change doesn't work the same on spell casters, since spells get a wide variety of dice and often many more than weapons. But spell casters (while being weaker at damage) are generally regarded as more powerful anyway, due to their increased versatility and the strength of spells. This change has little effect on them while signaling significant realignment of damage from martials. Spells must not crit if a rule similar to this is implemented.
I think this change is a sign that the devs are interested in balancing the game so an optimized crit-fishing build doesn't just completely overshadow a non-optimized character. Unfortunately, since they didn't give us an entire vertical slice of the game, it's still tough to tell. We don't know what they'll do with the flat damage feats or the bonus action attacks feats or class features to know for sure.
Makes sense to me as well. However I think the issue is that certain spells when you crit can be pretty powerful (inflict wounds for instance). I can totally see the crit being a touch to the head and all that necrotic energy doing massive damage.
His math is wrong but he was saying when you have advantage its 10%. But two 5% chances do not give you a 10% chance any more than 20 5% chances give you a 100% chance. And in all the years of play I don;t think anywhere near close to 1/2 the rolls were at advantage. So the they will have advantage a lot argument falls flat for me, but lets add in semi-frequent advantage and call it 7% of the time. That is still no mechanically significant difference in damage per round. This rule is not about balancing the classes and if it is it fails miserably at doing so. On that score it just makes certain features less fun, that is all it does.
The goal at best is to make things less swingy, but that is a dumb goal. Predictable is boring, swingy is fun. If I can map out how a fight will play out consistently, why are we rolling at all, I can just say hey there was a fight, you looked cool and won.