Other factors which skew it in BG3:
- Crits only increase dice damage not all damage, so they’re more valuable on setups where damage dice represent a large portion of the damage, like Rogues and Paladins, and are less valuable on setups where high static numbers (such as double strength bonus) are the majority of your damage, as is often the case with Fighter and to an extent Monk
- You auto crit paralyzed targets, so your crit range becomes entirely moot once you land a hold person or similar effect. This both makes crit enhancing effects (like the half orc racial) more valuable since you have a reliable trigger, and makes crit range increases less valuable. As an auto crit is also an auto hit, it also skews the effect of accuracy boosts, though of course these effects are situational
- Advantage conversely makes crit range bonuses more impactful than they otherwise would be. With advantage, +2 crit range isn’t taking you from 5% to 15%, it’s taking you from 9.75% to 36%, a far higher percentage of your attacks and more importantly a far higher percentage of your hits. This means you need more damage, proportionally, than you otherwise would for raw damage to be better than a crit range increase if you have a reliable source of advantage (which with a crit build, you certainly should).
Of course these factors (and all the normal ones) play out differently for different enemies across different ACs with different initial damage amounts and damage makeups. But while a choice might be right for one situation and wrong for another (increased crit range might result in a damage increase generally but a damage decrease Vs paralyzed opponents as an obvious example), it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out generally which is better and what situations you need to watch out for, and how common those situations might be.
But yeah, in this case the strength elixir and GWM is *always* better than the crit elixir and savage attacker, against all enemies and Vs all AC targets. This is without even having properly taken into account the double strength damage, which only swings it more in favor of that setup of course. Whether Vs enemies who are easy to hit, in which case +16 damage is better than +2 to hit and +1 crit rate, or against enemies which are hard to hit, in which case +3 to hit and +6 damage is better than +1 crit rate. There is simply no situation whatsoever where the crit elixir and savage attacker is better.
I mostly agree, but obviously with Ranged attackers like, well Rangers using say Gontr Mael instead of Titanstring Bow it makes sense to use the Elixir of Viciousness OR Elixir of Bloodlust + Sharpshooter depending on what the rest of your loadout looks like. If you are already stacking Crit, then Viciousness' makes a bit more sense especially for the Gloomstalker Ranger build or even a Dex Fighter build. I have minsc specced out this way and am currently testing between different build types to maximize that ranged attack ability.
I was planning to look at Dex fighter because I think the Improved extra attack is more consistent damage in a longer fight. (not that any fight lasts that long with Jaheira as a Monk/Thief murdering everyone in round 1)
