Currently, the way I understand how critical works with AoEs is as follows (based on my experience in game and information from forums and dev diary):
If I cast an AoE, say against 4 enemies, then I will roll for critical once for each enemy instead of just once for the spell. This makes it pretty common that I crit against some enemies but not all of them, especially with the effective cap of 95% on crit. In this situation, even though the game displays "critical", some enemies will not say "critical blocked" and not take critical damage, which is extremely confusing to players. Additionally, since critical on an AoE is mostly useful if I crit on all enemies, this makes it so that the 95% cap is really a cap of about 81%, which is really low.
It really makes no sense for one spell to have multiple critical rolls. I should either crit, or not crit, and then it should just be up to the enemies' block ratings to see if they take crit damage.
When different enemies have different block ratings, this presents a slight problem: which block rating do we compare to the player's crit rating to compute crit chance? However, this is very easy to fix. One solution is to just use the average block rating of the enemies. Another solution is to use the highest (or lowest) block rating. Any of these solutions (even taking the highest block rating) would be better than the current system, which is both confusing and makes for a frustrating experience.
Note: I sort of posted about this in another thread, but I didn't understand exactly what the issue was when I posted there, so I'd like to put this in its own thread.
I keep seeing people post that this is a bug and I agree. (I know it's supposed to be a feature, but it just doesn't make sense).
If I am questing and use an AOE I would expect to do the same amount of damage ACROSS all enemies of the same time. It just makes sense for farming. I'd be very annoyed if a mob randomly appears to live and didn't block. I'd have no idea why. VS. If the mob BLOCKS then it's OK, that makes sense it blocked. However, as it currently stands it looks like my spell is just randomly doing less damage or that mobs are blocking when they shouldn't be. (no animation) There needs to be a cue for what is happening and as it currently stands it's a bug.
Mil46 says it best right here: "It really makes no sense for one spell to have multiple critical rolls. I should either crit, or not crit, and then it should just be up to the enemies' block ratings to see if they take crit damage."
This is especially annoying because there doesn't seem to be a reason for the change in the first place? I mean even in PVP, that just promotes the use of having a higher block.
