- Critical Power - Base bonus changed to 1% (down from 1.5%) and spec bonus changed to 0.1% (down from 0.15%); I'm not happy with this feat in general. Straight unconditional passive damage boost feats is something I'm going to avoid in the future for sure
Styg disliking the Critical Power feat's unconditional nature prompted me to spend some time musing on what could be done to rework this feat. And I thought of an idea that might be interesting. Feel free to shoot me down if it's a stupid idea though.
So the problem with the feat is that it just triples your crit damage bonus above 100% without any strings attached (when fully specialized). In other words, if your crit damage bonus is 130% it turns it into 190%, for example.
My proposed change would be to make it so that for every 1% crit damage bonus above 100%, on your base weapon, you lower the enemy's damage resistance by 0.5% when critting instead (multiplicatively).This sounds iffy, but I did the math and the numbers look promising. Let's assume we deal 100 damage and have a crit damage bonus on our weapon of 130%. I made a quick graph below for our final damage (y) in relation to the enemy's damage resistance (x). The blue line shows our final damage without any feats, the red line with Critical Power in its current state, and the orange line is my proposed change.
As you can see, this change makes it so that our initial power spike against unarmored targets is much lower than Critical Power in its current state. But when facing increasingly more heavily armored opponents the damage slowly but surely climbs back up to expected values, with 65% damage resistance roughly being the point at which the armor penetration really starts paying off in full.
I feel like this stays in the spirit of what a feat called Critical Power should reward you with. Having the damage increase be proportional to the strength of your opponent also makes the feat at least somewhat conditional. And by using the base weapon's crit damage bonus for the calculation and not your total crit damage bonus you avoid any excessive penetration shenanigans when stacking other crit damage bonus feats. The numbers can be adjusted too of course, so that it's only 0.3% + 0.02% per spec point or something.
I don't know, what do you guys think?
