Length warning; risk of taken as nitpick warning
Beg to read fully
Honestly, saying "mstar is valued to deal 25% more damage than single-type weapons, therefore crit stat is reduced to bring it in line with other weapons" sounds to me like just a more technical and verbose way of phrasing "mstar is OP and we plan to nerf its crit stat as compensation"
Mstar (and other 2) dualtype weapons valued to deal 1/4 more damage (thus 1/4 stronger) than all other weapons sounds to me like an admission that these 3 weapons are "more powerful" than others, thus "overly" powerful, thus "OP". It's not about catchphrases or hasty conclusions or rhetoric; it's just a very simple fact of life that any HGer knows well.
My intention was not to trick you into agreeing with my usage of some dangerously-weighted phrase like "OP" or "imba"; but to me this looks like an agreement with my claim that you think mstar is "OP". I should have avoided using such term in the first place, but in the end the point is the same, I think.
I certainly did not mean to indicate that balance decisions were reduced to some buzzword. However, it's plain that, at risk of employing freighted terminology as "cheesy/OP", we all agree that 3 weapons with dualtype are far more powerful (and attractive) than the others; this is the essence of the analysis/suggestions made in this thread to bring other weapons up to their level of attractiveness.
It remains to be seen whether the value of critical hits is equal (or comparable/valued to what degree) to the value of a 2nd base physical type; I'm wary of mstar being made less popular by reducing its already-poor crits (already hardly a factor in calculations of the weapon's value to players that consider tank's best attribute being the delivery of consistent high-packet damage to crit-imm mobs). As I didn't exactly say, but was working toward in my above edited post, I think a safer and less-homogenizing theory of rebalance would be to make all weapons single-type, because (at least in my experience) no amount of crits will make up for the ability to deal optimal phys damage to a greater number of high-priority crit-imm targets. If anything, crits in combat, and focus upon them by tankplayer, tends to be frowned upon and looked as secondary consideration vs. greater flexibility of phys type to greatly damage a wider selection of critimm targets.
I hope none of this is taken as troll/argument/nitpick, but rather an attempt to see if, after all, mstar is indeed deemed more powerful ("for the moment"
) than other weapons, and future plans include this judgment when rebalance was/is brainstormed.
I admit that despite having looked at the spreadsheet many times, I found it a bit hard on the eyes, and easy to "lose track" of cells/data with so much "going on"; and I did indeed miss/forget that shortsword entry shows "SP" and thus slated to have dual phys type, which, if I had been more attentive, would have cleared much confusion.
My (unsolicited) opinion is that player focusing a record of his performance on "Damage Vs. Priority Crit-Imm Mob XYZ" (such as Elite Firstborn or Elite Alkilith) in run will have a different analysis than player focusing on "Total Damage Across Run" logstat; and the basis of "valuing dualtype weapons @ n% damage" is better-suited to total damage log number, as opposed "value dualtype weapon A @ n%damage vs prio mobs XYZ", and ignoring inconsequential log data like how many fodder were killed and how much damage out of total was dealt to them; as opposed to active check of math vs mobstats for focusing/prioritizing the mobs that casters have greater difficulty to instakill/gain little benefit from focusing on trying to insta when high-damage tank is focusing them anyway (if option to instakill exists, such as marilith/alkilith)/no option except eradicate to instakill, such as this list which I make fast off the top of my head and surely miss some or include some at fault perhaps, but this is what my brain says quickly anyway:
PF
Male
Ichor
Worm
Balor
DK
Marilith
Arcane Ooze
Alkilith
Nalfeshnee
Planetar
Solar
Various LL minibosses/end bosses, or higher-value LL run bosses/minis such as ely, abo, rona, pyramid
Hell/abyss bosses/most minis (all hells endbosses, most minis; not true of abyss--but then again, those that are crittable tend to be harder even than asmodeus for tank to hit, let alone confirm crit, and as rule rather than exception, they wilt quickly under concentrated caster/shifter damage barrage)
Eidolons
Not to mention lowbie tagbosses/dragons
For a player that prioritizes "hunting" these mobs (and prioritizes logstat of their dmg vs that mob rather than total run dmg, which tends to be only useful when we know player has indeed ignored lemures and aoe smite or giant crit vs bulezau didn't falsely affect data) rather than lemures/cornugons/dozens of other "trash" across endgame, crits factor little or not at all into their thought process (being mainly useful when instakiller is not in party, in which case bulezau certainly will die a lot faster to good-crit weapon than badcrit weapon).
Thus having the ability to specialize in 1 (or 2, for some cot or fighter, allowing coverage of all 3 phys types by choosing mstar + a slash weap, or halberd/scythe + a bludg weap) weapon that the engine allows to "penetrate" phys calculations better, mstar/halberd/scythe(+shortsword
) will be far more attractive, despite how many more/bigger crits another weapon gets as buff.
However, analysis such as this may only be readily-available (or obviously-true) to player or dev that doesn't consider quality over quantity (in terms of mobstats, target prioritization, and lognumbers).
To me (and other posters above, unless I misunderstand their point), it's homogenizing to have only 3 weapons to be placed on a pedestal in popular mindset, due to the fact that they are inarguably more attractive than others, for anyone that doesn't care about crits and total run dmg log. Will buffing any single-type weapon's crits address the crucial and inherent gap between dual-type and single?
Only time will tell, but my (unsolicited) opinion is that the only factors which could compete with base type flex is improvement to per-hit damage (say, 25%
) and/or # of attacks, in order to make up for greatly reduced phys penetration when using bad phys type. Of course, perhaps it's just as homogenous to have single type weapon buffed base damage to make up for reduced damage when used on mob that doesn't take well the weapon's type, but at least it may be of help to players that could find joy in using weapons that look different but are just as effective, and great help for the sake of economy/droprates when only a handful of weapons out of 50 possible drops are found.
I'm very sorry for the length (as usual, I set out with brevity as primary concern but failed to stay true) but I do wish deeply to be understood, and to understand what considerations were taken when creating/editing rebalances.