User blog:Willbachbakal/(Item Concept) A New Kind of Crit

Critical strikes have been a contentious mechanic in League of Legends since pretty early on: in a game defined by its competitive scene and player-focused gameplay, having a mechanic that is both core to the power of an entire class of champions (namely, marksmen) and completely random (or pseudo-random, anyways) feels out of place. Crit has a lot of issues: it's heavily unstable in small amounts, undesirable unless stacked in large amounts, which creates itemization islands (i.e. some items work only on one class of champions, even though the stats and effects could easily be desirable on other classes), and can determine the outcome of trades, fights and even entire phases of the game (or the game itself) based on what is essentially a virtual coin flip. This is particularly visible in cases like 1% crit rune pages and, who both rely on cheesing lane opponents early on with lucky critical strikes. Many players have called for its removal, and many others have proposed changes to the system in order to make it more reliable, though not without problems: a popular suggestion (which I used to support) was to turn crit into a flat autoattack damage amplifier, where 1% crit meant you dealt 1% more damage on every basic attack, but that would just make crit completely flat as a mechanic, and wouldn't really add any interesting gameplay. I feel like any rework to crit needs to keep the explosive bursts of power it provides, but also add gameplay and fairness to the mechanic. In view of this, I think there's already a common mechanic out there that could provide all of that, and that's the three-strike mechanic as popularized by Gypsylord.

Players familiar with champions like, and  will know what I'm talking about: basically, all of these champions get to deal bonus damage every time they land three basic attacks or abilities on their targets, plus some additional effects. Three-strike mechanics are common on an even larger scale, too, and have existed for a long time on champions like and. Because this kind of mechanic provides explosive damage over extended trades and fights (which is the purpose of crit), I think this would work well as a new model for critical strikes.

Crit V2.0=

Critical Strike

 * Reworked: All champion basic attacks and damaging abilities now apply a critical strike mark on enemies, lasting up to seconds and stacking up to 3 times. The third mark causes the strike that applied it to be a critical strike, which consumes all critical strike marks on the target.
 * Critical strikes initially have no additional benefit or damage, but can be modified by champion abilities and items.
 * Basic attacks that trigger a critical strike will always use the champion's critical strike animation.
 * Abilities only apply one mark per target and per cast. This means that, unless otherwise specified, abilities that deal damage over time, such as, or , only apply one critical strike mark to each target, but abilities that can be cast multiple times, such as  or , apply one mark per cast, and can therefore apply multiple marks.
 * An exception to this is on-hit effects: abilities that apply on-hit effects multiple times, such as or, applies the same amount of critical strike marks.
 * Pets are counted as an extension of the player, and therefore their attacks apply critical strike marks. Not sure how this would pan out for stuff like or, but I feel this would be worth implementing as such for the sake of consistency (perhaps AD  might even become more legitimate as a result). I think pets in general need to be looked at in greater depth, particularly since a great deal many of them (including Malz's Voidlings) are heavily underused in the kits they belong to.

Items

 * reworked: critical strikes deal bonus physical damage.
 * and removed.
 * Items with critical strike chance reworked accordingly.

Runes

 * Critical strike chance and damage runes removed. I'm personally not a fan of runes in the long run, and it might be a better idea to remove them entirely, the reason being that they offer mostly unseen and uninteresting power with very little variation, but here removing these specific runes would be more directly justified. Even just in the framework of crit, I'm not a fan of crit chance runes, due to their instability, or crit damage runes, which are far too unreliable and dependent on an already situational stat (i.e. crit) to work.

Masteries

 * changed to "Reduces the damage of critical strike effects received by 20%". This would provide a similar effect by reducing the damage associated with critical strikes. As with runes, I think masteries offer a fair bit of behind-the-scenes power that is mostly difficult to appreciate and really static, and so it might be worth trying to phase them out, but a replacement like this would be the most direct answer to the changes proposed in this article.

Changes

 * Combine cost reduced to 150g from 250g.
 * Total cost reduced to 1000g from 1100g.
 * Critical strike chance removed.
 * Movement speed removed.
 * New passive: critical strikes deal bonus physical damage and grant 5% bonus movement speed for 3 seconds.

Changes

 * Now common to all maps.
 * Critical strike chance removed.
 * Reworked passive: critical strikes deal bonus physical damage, plus  additional magic damage over 3 seconds.

Changes

 * New recipe: +  + 1050g (total cost unchanged).
 * Critical strike chance removed.
 * New passive: critical strikes deal bonus physical damage.
 * Reworked passive: critical strikes require one less mark to activate.

Changes

 * New recipe: +  +  + 400g (total cost unchanged).
 * Attack speed reduced to 40% from 50%.
 * Critical strike chance removed.
 * Movement speed removed.
 * Unit collision removal passive removed.
 * New unique passive: critical strikes deal bonus physical damage and grant 20% bonus attack speed and 10% bonus attack speed for 3 seconds. The bonus attack speed stacks up to 3 times.

Changes

 * New recipe: +  +  + 650g (total cost unchanged).
 * Critical strike chance removed.
 * Movement speed reduced to 5% from 6%.
 * New passive: critical strikes deal bonus physical damage.
 * Unique passive:
 * Base damage removed.
 * Lightning instead critically strikes all targets it hits, applying all of the wielder's on-crit effects.

Changes

 * New recipe: Morning Star (see here for its description -- it's an 800 gold, 15 AD + 10% CDR advanced item) + + 700g (total cost unchanged).
 * Attack damage increased to 40 from 30.
 * Critical strike chance removed.
 * Armor penetration removed.
 * New unique passive: critical strikes deal bonus physical damage and reduce the cooldown of the item's active by 1 second.
 * Reworked active: grants 100% bonus movement speed for 2 seconds. 60 second cooldown.

Changes

 * New recipe: +  +  + 525g (total cost unchanged).
 * Critical strike chance removed.
 * Reworked unique passive: critical strikes also deal bonus physical damage.

Changes

 * New recipe: +  + 350g.
 * Total cost increased to 2750g from 2280g.
 * Attack damage increased to 40 from 30.
 * Critical strike chance removed.
 * Reworked unique passive (critical vision): critical strikes also deal bonus physical damage.
 * Trap detection passive removed (I'm proposing to change the way stealth and sight works, see here for a more in-depth explanation).
 * Reworked active: fire an arrow that critically strikes all enemies and grants of the area for 5 seconds. 60 second cooldown. (800 range)

Changes

 * Combine cost increased to 100g from 3g.
 * Total cost reduced to 3700g from 3703g.
 * Stats changed (see here for a better explanation).
 * New passive: critical strikes deal bonus physical damage.