Scaling damage for attack and spell skills.

I kinda have the same thought. Like I'm trying to come up with different ways to scale and it always leads back to "just get +levels and crit".
It kinda works decently for a homebrew build that I got "increased ele damage" but it's nothing compared to instakill map rush crit builds.

Crit is just very uninspired in general. It's been done to death.

My problem with crit is that almost all games (PoE2 included) try to solve two problems at once and the result is this generic crit mechanic that is kinda stale at this point.

The two problems (or wishes, I guess):

• Have an unreliable damage boost that can "bonk" really hard (gamblers)
• Have a consistent damage boost by applying a damage boost statistically (optimizers)

Crit conflates the two and you always end up having enough crit to consistenly apply your damage boost to statistically do enough damage for it to matter. The gamblers get ignored and then your whole crit systems reason for existence collapses.

Assuming your crits do double your attack damage (+100% dmg, PoE2 base crit dmg is +80% afaik but you can boost it) there is factually nothing different between having a 50% damage boost and having 50% crit chance. It's boring af.

The reason is attack/cast speed. If you're not having meaningful gameplay between crits then playing with crits is not fun at all. You could just give the player a damage boost and call it a day. Gameplaywise it makes no difference. But if you have less skill speed and need to wind up your attacks you might need to dodge and reposition and then it becomes more of a pay off/gamble wether you crit or not.

An invoker or bloodmage that can attack or cast 5-10 times a second are exceedingly boring to play with crit. But if you're slinging a hammer and if you crit or not matters because the next attack can only be done in 3-5 seconds, then I feel like crit is more of a mechanic you could play with.

Imo crit chance should be capped at 50% and only possible on skills that have a certain slowness to them. Everything else can be solved with either just increased damage or a stacking "focus" mechanic that is consistent(something akin to rage). That makes way more sense for faster skills.

I managed to scale my damage by duplicating my spells with kulemak's dominion and all the offerings. It's pretty hilarious. But you really have to pull shenanigans to scale your damage outside skill levels.

Very lazy if you think that those are the only ways

If we have a easy way to scale everybody will use this

What about shock magnitude, gain dmg, critical weakness, exposure, ignore resist, added dmg, % to physical/spell dmg and cast speed/attack speed?

Yeah, I hope they flesh it out better for the final release. I’d wager they make those so impactful to scale the game based on a predictable power level. The issue is just that it feels like an illusion of diversity, because so many builds basically boil down to having high end equipment with those stats. People have complained about this exact thing and the passive tree being unimpactful.

I agree. I would be better if for example martial attacks were more dependent on weapons while spells more on skill level, ranged maybe on quiver or something. Or crit worked differently for each. Basically more differentiation in what items and affixes scale each category of damage skills.

As it stands u just stack the relevant damage prefixes and get crit/skill levels on everything.