I'm having a difficult time understanding why the +15% HP bonus on Toughness was shot down as overpowered, yet you keep making traits with scaling percentage bonuses left and right
Let's say that 5% fire resistance translates straight to 5% fire damage reduction, and there's no resistance cap. Now say there's a trait that increases fire resistance by 5%/level. At level 2, that's 10%, hardly very exciting. You'd be a fool to think it would make a noticeable difference against a hypothetical fire caster encounter at level 2. At level 20, it's immunity. At level 25, it's immunity even in a "fire environment".
All these flat amount per level traits don't work like that. +2 magic, while unlikely to be better than the diversity of another spell, is not an unexciting bonus at level 2 (it would probably help more against that fire spell than the resistance would, too). Meanwhile, +25 magic at level 25 doesn't translate to "your spells will oneshot everything" (well hopefully

). On average, that trait would translate to +10-20% magic for the mages I checked on various saves. From that perspective, you could make it +15% magic, but that would scale with nerdiness - the more restock roulette you play, the better it is - and I thought this was the reason we went for the flat amount per level idea. For the record, none of those mages were particularly pimped out.
So we're not getting +15% magic on the trait, we're getting 1/level. What you definitely wouldn't do then is make a +1%/level magic trait... still you did it with dual wield, and after I thought I'd explained why that's a bad idea, you're doing it again with crit. The crit trait is gonna scale like that hypothetical fire resistance trait; first it sucks and you wouldn't take it even with a free trait point, then at some level it's a balanced trait, and then it's overpowered.
I get you want to do something different from the birthday gift, but consider:
- It's far more likely than not (assuming equal probability for a player to take each gift) that that gift won't even be taken
- Even if it is, your twin won't have it, and the other 6 characters don't even have birthdays, so it's a rather small case of "diversity needed"
- Crit traits/gifts can make uninitiated mage players waste their points, so I'd rather they were gone altogether
I'm not as worried about this as I was about dual wield though, because I still find crits unexciting
