Primeval Watcher damage

[Makaveli II]

Primeval Watcher damage output against units is actually half what it supposed to be. it should be 660 against the first target, but he is doing 330!

[LEBOVIN]

Can u provide a video ? I dont see it happening in the forge.

[Makaveli II]

Okay after alot of testing here is what I have found.

Primeval hit against units on the first target is not alway registered as the first hit. but as the second.

that is why he is doing 330. but it is not happening on every single hit!

so basically his attack on a single target unit is fluctuating between 660 and 330

Edited April 9 by Makaveli2989

[This Is Halloween_2]

Just tried it in the forge vs a deep one, and you're right.
Primeval damage on 1st target is not consistent, around 50% of the time he does 330 instead of 660.
It doesn't seem to have issues on XL units though.

Edited April 9 by This Is Halloween_2

[Kubik]

Replay please, I can not reproduce it at all.

[Makaveli II]

 

 

Edited April 14 by Makaveli2989

[Kubik]

Thank you @Makaveli2989. I will write the explanation, of what is happening, but most of it, is for designers, so do not worry, if you will not fully understand it, but feel free to ask additional questions if you are interested.

Steps to reproduce:

Primeval Watcher stands outside of aggro range.
Relatively fast target. (Dreadnought for me have 100% reproducibility, when spawned in forge on horizontal line like shown in the video.)
Primeval Watcher is instructed to attack, so it moves to position, only barely enters the aggro range, so the target starts turning.
Primeval Watcher shoots the projectile.
Targets move to Primeval Watcher while the projectile is traveling.
Target moves by more than 2 meters (in my Dreadnought test about 3.8 meters), so the projectile stops following it and hits the ground with primary spell (3000944).
Second target is acquired for secondary spell (3000945), which does only 330 (base) DMG.
If we would have really fast runner I guess it could outrun the projectile even more. 😅

Possible solutions:

In code fallback default for "ProjectileMaxFollowDistanceOnTargetMove" is 100 meters, but EA later decided to decrease this number to 2 meters using config (gdbasevalues.xml), so we can easily tweak this number up, to eliminate most cases, but at same time increase damage to some other projectile based things, like arrows shooting at targets leaving the range.

We can do same tweak explained above on per spell basis, or as new parameter, to not affect anything else, that would be only little effort on my side to add new parameter.

What I do not see as a possible solution:

Fixing it so that the first spell will not hit the ground, because I do not believe there is an reasonable way, to specify when the projectile should continue following the target, and when to give up, to not create slow moving projectile following target indefinitely. I think some variation of tweaking the follow distance and hoping it will eliminate the issue in most cases, is the only reasonable solution.

[Makaveli II]

At least I'm glad to know there will be a fix for it, even if it takes a while. 😄

Edited April 16 by Makaveli2989

[Kubik]

Why would it take a while?

Designers already choose to add new parameter, so the follow distance can be changed per spell.

And that is already implemented.

I do not know if for this specific case it would cause any issues, if the follow distance would be too big, and that is the only part someone else need to check. 🤔Maybe target next to tunnel, or other source of teleportation? But the window is quite short anyway.