User blog comment:Willbachbakal/(Item Concept) A New Kind of Crit/@comment-1920550-20150702041033/@comment-1330314-20150702043707

Thank you for your feedback! You strike a valid point with the possibility of AP crit items, and I think any such item should be designed so as to avoid having mages/assassins overtaking marksmen in DPS unless they're especially well-suited for it (e.g. they're Azir or Cassiopeia, who sort of qualify as AP "marksmen"). I feel ability use is important here because I feel crit makes autoattacks a little too good in the late game: sure, autoattack-based champions tend to start out weak and come out super-strong, but that also sort of crowds out design niches, in the sense that you can't really have a hyperscaling spell-based marksman (even AD is mainly autoattack reliant). It also means damaging abilities automatically lose value on marksmen as games progress, since they end up falling behind their autoattack damage. Partially decoupling crits from autoattacks would allow even caster marksmen to scale really well, though ultimately hyperscaling autoattackers would still end up scaling better most of the time.

I didn't intend for there to be any cap on the number of crit items you could purchase. As with current crit, stacking crit items carries a price, in the sense that doing so eventually becomes inefficient because purchasing any other stat (e.g. attack speed or attack damage) would increase your damage a lot more. I also tweaked the numbers on the items so that you'd deal the same overall damage with these new crits as with the current crit system.

I made a blog post a while back on an idea for reworking Zeke's, which is similar in certain ways to the PBE implementation. My main issue with the PBE iteration is that the crit/AP bonus isn't class-agnostic enough and that the item would likely be better if it were designed towards tanky champions, and for that reason I feel its steroid should likely just be flat bonus damage on every strike.

The lightning strike on procs when you autoattack someone while at 100 charges. The lightning then essentially applies on-crit effects to all four targets. If your attacks on the targets were gonna crit anyways, this won't deal additional damage, but this would still often let you crit a little faster in fights.

I tried making more of a caster-oriented item and streamlining its active, though I likely went a little overboard. I intended for the active to be useful in engaging, as well as disengaging, but if it provides too much safety it might be worth toning down the movespeed boost and bringing back some attack speed.