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Netherwarp Green bug abuse


MaranV

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I'm not sure whether this belongs in the technical issue category or just card discussion, cards probably is the best place to discuss this old bug. Come to think of it I have no idea why this was never fixed seeing that it is an obvious bug. 

According to the Nether warp (green affinity) card description every unit that gets teleported (warped) receives a 40hp heal every 2 seconds. The problems begin when the starting point and the end point of the warp are placed close to each other, effectively 'teleporting' to the exact same place, which results in the heal being applied twice. This effectively means an 80 hp heal per 2 seconds (actually 40 hp every 1 second). Combine that with an army of shadow mages and you get a broken blob of damage dealing & self healing that carries the shadow player against just about every deck that doesn't have lavafield or wildfire. This is nothing new, but now that we have an active dev team this might actually get fixed, especially since I've already seen several players abusing this bug by camping & building a mage spam. This will hurt the PvP community as frustrated players leave the game eventually. 

In my opinion this is a glaring bug considering the card is a teleport (warp) and you achieve this unintended effect by starting & ending the teleport in the exact same position, effectively nullifying the entire design of the card. 

The technical solution I would like to propose is to ensure that nether warp's starting and end point must at least be 20 meters apart, ensuring that the warp actually teleports you instead of giving you a heal on steroids. If anyone else has ideas I'd like to hear them. Thanks for reading!

PS: Found an old replay on YT to illustrate the issue:

 

 

Edited by MaranV
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1 hour ago, MaranV said:

I'm not sure whether this belongs in the technical issue category or just card discussion, cards probably is the best place to discuss this old bug. Come to think of it I have no idea why this was never fixed seeing that it is an obvious bug. 

According to the Nether warp (green affinity) card description every unit that gets teleported (warped) receives a 40hp heal every 2 seconds. The problems begin when the starting point and the end point of the warp are placed close to each other, effectively 'teleporting' to the exact same place, which results in the heal being applied twice. This effectively means an 80 hp heal per 2 seconds. Combine that with an army of shadow mages and you get a broken blob of damage dealing & self healing that carries the shadow player against just about every deck that doesn't have lavafield or wildfire. This is nothing new, but now that we have an active dev team this might actually get fixed, especially since I've already seen several players abusing this bug by camping & building a mage spam. This will hurt the PvP community as frustrated players leave the game eventually. 

In my opinion this is a glaring bug considering the card is a teleport (warp) and you achieve this unintended effect by starting & ending the teleport in the exact same position, effectively nullifying the entire design of the card. 

The technical solution I would like to propose is to ensure that nether warp's starting and end point must at least be 20 meters apart, ensuring that the warp actually teleports you instead of giving you a heal on steroids. If anyone else has ideas I'd like to hear them. Thanks for reading!

 

 

I completly agree with you, this bug makes a shadow mage spam allmost unkillable for players that play a faction without damage spells. 

I think that a lot of people underestimate how broken the card actually is. Since the majority of the PVP players play with a pure fire or fire splash deck. 

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It just encourages spam like in the replay, i am seeing that a lot in higher gold elo. Especially without damage spells, you are having issues. Stonekin has it the worst out of all factions actually and its just sad to watch... the only "real"  counter is to get the shadow player to run out of charges. fixing it might actually encourage players to switch to blue nether warp in lower elos as well since shadow mages won't be an easy defense anymore (well, at least not THAT easy).

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1 hour ago, LagOps said:

It just encourages spam like in the replay, i am seeing that a lot in higher gold elo. Especially without damage spells, you are having issues. Stonekin has it the worst out of all factions actually and its just sad to watch... the only "real"  counter is to get the shadow player to run out of charges. fixing it might actually encourage players to switch to blue nether warp in lower elos as well since shadow mages won't be an easy defense anymore (well, at least not THAT easy).

Hey, good to see you man! Thanks for your input, couldn't agree more. 

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If this is fixed in the way you are suggest MaranV then wall hops will be impossible for pve speedruns. Would be nice still to use it for pve wall / gate hops in the way it is. But for sure i understand the general balance problem for pvp.

 

 

Edited by Pritstift
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1 hour ago, SunWu II. said:

+1, but i dont really like the suggested solution simply because it would make some wallhops impossible. It would nerf the blue netherwarp, wich i prefer to use, too.

Hey, thanks. As far as I'm concerned the issue gets fixed in its core (i.e.properly applying the buff only once upon entering the warp). That would be the best solution, if the devs can pin point the cause of the issue of course. 

Thanks for your feedback too Prit, nice to see you!

 

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I think this could be very easily fixed by changing the effect of Nether Warp so that it only refreshes the duration instead of applying it again.

A different option would be to lower the teleport delay after the first teleport. If this is set to a high enough frequency then units like Shadow Mage won't be able to finish their attack animation before they are teleported to the start again. This would make most armies useless for any offensive and effectively negate any benefit gained by the affinity. I don't know what kind of impact this has on the server performance, given that it hasn't been implemented like this from the beginning.

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I once made a test to check the actual values of this bug. Nether Warp is supposed to heal for 200 hp, but witch the bug it can get to more than 900, which is quite a remarkable difference. I was in talk with some guys from EA about quite a good amount of bugs. They always told me they would fix them, but never ended up doing so ... 

For the Netherwarp bug it's probably quite under the radar as just a few decks really suffer from it. All Mages need to be around the same place, which makes them vulnerable against AoE burst damage and you can' t split against cc. The 4 fire splashes do have Lavafield & Shadow Frost can deal with it easily by using high hp nasties (Lyrish Knight to give an example). Pure Frost can use War Eagle to intercept the bug abuse as a scream forces a long range port in oder to dodge it (scream can be cancelled, so there is alot of outplay potential). Shadow Nature can use cc + nasty or an early root aura before the mages get into attack range (you just have to be aware, that oink + phoenix doesn't work before nether warp is played as you can dodge them easily). For stonekin you showcased a pretty solid counter combo by using lyrish knight & Stone Tempest which worked despite a wasted crystal fiend. Razorshard is also a very potent counter against Mages, I personally don't like using them though. The only deck, that really suffers is pure nature as it has no knockback, no burst & no way to rush instant T2 by pure shadow unless you are very close to the orb. I ended up picking up spikeroot in order to survive the early game in this matchup as the ranged attack bursts down shadow mages, which works very well, but isn't really fun to play. 

Balancing wise it is just a minor issue. That said the Magewarp playstyle is easier to execute than the proper counter strategies. So even though there is reliable counterplay, people that aren't familiar with that kind of playstyle may suffer alot, so a potential fix of this would be definitely a good thing for the quality of games.  

26 minutes ago, Kaliber84 said:

I think this could be very easily fixed by changing the effect of Nether Warp so that it only refreshes the duration instead of applying it again.

A different option would be to lower the teleport delay after the first teleport. If this is set to a high enough frequency then units like Shadow Mage won't be able to finish their attack animation before they are teleported to the start again. This would make most armies useless for any offensive and effectively negate any benefit gained by the affinity. I don't know what kind of impact this has on the server performance, given that it hasn't been implemented like this from the beginning.

Your first solution is the one I do support. Just remove the constant refreshing and everything is fine. The second one would break nether warp for defensive uses as it would be a 20s hard cc against enemies. Server wise this shouldn't be a problem as the "permaport" already works once units do have the green dryad buff :D 

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I disagree with the conclusions. 1. On video, shadow lost 2. That would make four sorceress plus teleport, you need 270 of energy, and this is the minimum combo. You just need to be able to control this strategy 3. When battleforge was before, the developers fixed all the bugs. This is not a bug, its not fixed 4. I see a lot of players playing the same way, using the same strategies. This strategy turns out to use me, because it is not easy. 5.All the strategies that you win, you like, and who loses, you need to change that it would be easy to play. That would all be the same

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17 hours ago, PutinVV said:

I disagree with the conclusions. 1. On video, shadow lost 2. That would make four sorceress plus teleport, you need 270 of energy, and this is the minimum combo. You just need to be able to control this strategy 3. When battleforge was before, the developers fixed all the bugs. This is not a bug, its not fixed 4. I see a lot of players playing the same way, using the same strategies. This strategy turns out to use me, because it is not easy. 5.All the strategies that you win, you like, and who loses, you need to change that it would be easy to play. That would all be the same

Hi Putin, thanks for your reply. I understand it is difficult to communicate through a translator. 

1. I think you misunderstood the point of the replay cast. The point was to show the absurdity in how well the nether glitch + mage spam works, no matter how poorly the shadow player performs.

2. Are we really going to pretend it is hard to defend with mages? They are probably the most efficient (power to damage ratio wise) unit for defense.   

3. Radical stated it was a bug and reported to EA, but that it was never fixed. Probably because EA pulled back nearly all development resources. Besides that you can read the card description and conclude the heal only applies to entering the warp, the glitch is that the game seems to think you constantly re-enter the warp if the start & end point are close to each other (even though you don't actually get teleported repeatedly). 

4 & 5. Spamming mages in combination with nether warp is not the only strategy you can try as pure shadow.

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