Characters Building critless sucks the joy out of maxing a skill tree.

[Brew]

Please rework either Painwheel's Tainted Blood Marquee or how the Skill Tree nodes work.

Tainted Blood being so prolific and necessitating a critless build prevents people from interacting with their fighter's Marquee mechanic both in terms of actual play and as an RPG mechanic. It also devalues skill tree nodes perceived as weaker because you no longer need to get them. While it's popular to pair Tainted Blood with Don't Poke the Buer, I dont think the catalyst is the problem.

Thanks.

 

[Brew]

Also I dont think the anti-crit Marquee No Time To Die is a problem. It offers counterplay in the form of buff control, similar to how certain variants are good for Don't Poke the Buer. Neither require you to skip your Skill Tree.

Would have edited this into the original post but the forum thinks I'm a spambot and wont allow me to...

 

[evilgordo]

a critless build prevents people from interacting with their fighter's Marquee mechanic both in terms of actual play and as an RPG mechanic

I disagree. Being able to 'build' your fighter with or without Crit (or any other skill node) is VERY RPG-like. This is more or less an 'advanced' strategy and very situational since only 2 MAs (ATM) care about an opponent landing a critical hit (and to a lesser extent, 2 SAs).

The majority of players are building 'crit-less' fighters as their 2nd or 3rd dupe to deal with crit-punishing opponents. I mean Tainted is 'free' damage against a majority of opponents, who wouldn't choose that MA? So, if you don't want your fighter to die to Tainted...don't land crits...and you can't land [as many] crits if you have 0% 5% (thanks ZeoW) chance to do so.

Players are not being forced to build crit-less, it is a choice, a choice that makes that fighter a very specific answer to a very specific problem and so yes, they are not going to unlock MA and also not equip/level up certain moves, but that's the trade off and why in most cases these are dupe fighters in a players collection.

In SGM your collection is pretty much your 'party' in RPG terms, and you level up/build party members for specific roles; healer, tank, magic attack, melee attack, etc. and each of those specifications usually come at a cost; low health, low damage, lack of versatility attacks/spells. You size up the Boss and send in the appropriate team to ensure victory, IMHO, SGM is no different.

 

[ZeoW]

The majority of players are building 'crit-less' fighters as their 2nd or 3rd dupe to deal with crit-punishing opponents. I mean Tainted is 'free' damage against a majority of opponents, who wouldn't choose that MA? So, if you don't want your fighter to die to Tainted...don't land crits...and you can't land crits if you have 0% chance to do so.

Actually, there's an innate 5% crit chance on every fighter as a base stat. Filling up your Skill Tree will increase that to 20%. So there's really no way to avoid crit chance at all.

Thankfully, SGM's method of countering crit-based strategies exists in the form of command grabs that would never crit. Those however tend to be 1-hit moves that can deal plenty of damage.. which is where DPTB comes in.

To this day, I hate fighting Painwheels the most because of this. It feels like you have to resort to suboptimal stat spreads and builds to counter it. I don't think it needs a major rework (maybe DPTB could use a nerf), but I wish there were more consistent counters to it.

Those are my 2-cents at least.

 

[evilgordo]

Actually, there's an innate 5% crit chance on every fighter as a base stat.

Ok. Fair point, since I can't even remember when I last looked at just base stats.
So a 'crit-less' build is a bit of a misnomer, in that it is actually a 'low-crit' build...and it seems the even that 'trick' isn't as good, as you say, as command throws that DO have a 0% crit-rate.

Yeah, DPTB is only a Rifts thing, which I'm guessing the Devs didn't pay too much attention to when making that catalyst?
So, the real issue is DPTB being a '2nd' non-conditional Tainted then?...seems to be an easy enough 'fix'...