I'm not sure if this is a bug, I'm asking if there is a way to get around it.

I'm on my second playthrough, I know critical effects from mutagens stack by adding their value, viewable on the attributes page. I did my fist game with alchemy.

Now, I took the final ability on the sword tree, and it's 10% criticals replaced my 9% I had from three "critical" mutagens, intead of adding up as I knew from my first game. I should mention that I played the first unpatched, and now it's the 1.3.

Does this mean my mutagens have been useless ? Is it a patch balancing act, and if so, what was the point of using the mutagens that I did ? I would have used others.

I tried loading the game to no effect, hoping that the game would re-calculate those values, that it was some insert when I got whirlwind which would be recompiled after I loaded, but it didn't work.

I should mention that the sword tree is ridiculously easier to play with, massively unbalanced next to alchemy and magic, so I souldn't be complaing :) Just that I would have used different mutagens if I knew.

I'm not sure how you can think Swordsman is more powerful than the insane Alchemy tree, but that's beside the point. ;)

As for the critical effects bonuses added by talents; while the mutagens add a 'raw' bonus to these effects, most talents add a multiplier bonnus. So getting +10% critical effects chance from a skill, doesn't mean that critical effect will display an extra 10% - it merely means that it will take whatever value you have, and then raise it by ten percent of that value. If you have 20%, it would raise it by 2% and read 22%, for example.

I might have misunderstood you, of course, as I don't see how any skill will 'replace' the bonuses of mutagens. So please clarify if you think I have. Also, the mutagens themselves have not been changed in 1.3 - they only changed the drop rates.

Very odd. I have never heard of this happening before. The Critical Effects mutagens add a bonus to critical effects that are already active, and have a value, so to speak, but I assume you know this already. :/