Patch v52 Dot Damage reduced?

[Conarc]

Since patch 52 dropped this morning, I have noticed a couple things in regards to DoTs. 1st was the apparent intended DoT readout being removed from the chat log. Saw a post form admin answering that saying 'working as intended and will remain'.

not a big fan, but if its classic i can work with it, after all game isnt re-made just for me :P

Second issue is the obvious reduction in DoT damage on a ROOTED mob. past 2 days i have been farming same spot, same thing over and over, and today i have to spend roughly 1.5-2x more mana per mob to kill it root rotting.

Is this intended? was it intended just for green? or is this also going to be a blue thing too?

*gets ready to retire druid*

[Tecmos Deception]

Test a dot with known damage against a mob with known hp and see if the numbers add up.

Like pick a level 5 mob, or 10 mob, and nuke it with something. Observe hp bar, divide damage done by percentage reduction. Then root the same mob, dot it, see if the % changes to hp bar each tick suggest the correct damage per tick according to the wiki and the mob hp number you established.

Or something.

[Conarc]

Its def reduced damage against a rooted mob. I would use 2 creeping crud and 3 flame licks followed by a careless light nuke and mob would be dead with maybe 5-7% flux in hp due to lvl variance of the mob in question, sometimes resulting in me having to meele a fleeing mob, or a smaller nuke. Repeatable results for 2 days, 3.5 levels of exp. 3-4% hp mob a tick, now its 2-3%.



Just looking for conformation to see if this was intended or not for blue. I do believe, if memory serves me right, reduced dot dmg against a rooted mob was an early classic mechanic that got patch at some point.

[SharkStomper]

Came here to report the no dot damage bug. I guess it's a feature? Wow.

[stebbins99]

With DoT damage not displaying, is the best way to test this by dueling someone? (and rooting / dotting them)

And, separately, has anyone noticed if this is the case (reduced DoT dmg) with a feared mob?

[Conarc]

ill attempt this test this later using that duel method when time permits if a GM hasn't commented 1 way or the other b4 then (or someone else willing to test)


(Keep up the great work Project1999 Team! Thank you for all your hard work!)

[Mairelon]

This is anecdotal, rather than hard evidence, but I'm not seeing this damage reduction on my kills. Before the patch, I was root rotting guards in Felwithe B by stacking Boil Blood, Cessation of Cor, and Splurt, and was getting kills either on the last tick of Splurt or one or two additional ticks of Boil Blood (depending on how many buffs they had gotten off); I just ran through the guards and was getting kills the same way. I didn't have a whole lot of damage margin before, so I doubt that there's been any significant change to DoT damage on rooted targets - at least, not on the spells I've been using.

[Polixa]

I am experiencing clearly reduced dot damage on rooted mobs, which break root and are then re-rooted.

Specifically - crystalline shardwurms. When rooted, I cast on them Drifting Death and Breath of Ro, and so long as they stay rooted, DD wears off after 25% of their health has melted away.

However, if they break root, and I re-root, so that they move for at the most 1 tick, I notice by the time DD wears off they have lost significantly less HP than 25%, something approaching 2/3rds, as if server thinks the mob is still moving after re-root is applied.

Subsequent dot casts also appear to be subject to the reduced damage per tick.

If I reapply root often enough that they never get to move, then the 2 dots combined consistently take 25% of the mob's health.

[Mairelon]

Since a couple people have reported suspicions about DoT damage reduction due to root (or re-rooting) since the patch, I decided to go crunch some of my own numbers based on my logs from my time in Felwithe. With Patch v50 N = 130 and Patch v52 N = 68, I created Time-To-Kill histograms, using 6 second intervals (to roughly match the span of a server tick). Pre-Patch and Post-Patch populations show very similar statistics, with a 1.5 second longer mean TTK pre-patch (likely driven by the greater number of outliers in the Pre-Patch data). I also attempted to assign cause to the various outliers by quickly scanning the log data to see if there was any obvious difference (e.g. whoops, I forgot to cast Splurt).

There is a slightly larger "right shoulder" to the Post-Patch data. One might interpret this as an increase in "movement ticks" with reduced DoT damage; however, the shoulder ends sharply within two ticks of the mean&mode TTK, indicating that if damage is being dropped, it's likely not more than one tick. This could also just mean that I've been slower on the draw with getting my DoTs stacked, due to fumbling my insta-clicky or what have you. Given that the Patch v50 and Patch v52 data match so closely, I would conclude that if there is a bug with DoT damage as reported, the impact is extremely minimal.

[Polixa]

That analysis is incredibly impressive!

I tested my shardwurms again this evening, and the following is 100% reproducible:

Rooted shardwurm - Drifting Death and Breath of Ro take off 25% of a wurm's health every time, without fail. Mob dies with 4 rounds of dots.

Shardwurm that breaks root and is immediately re-rooted (meaning no loss of dot damage due to a server tick, but let's be generous and allow 1 reduced tick due to server lag) - all subsequent dot damage is reduced. Even a fresh round of DD + BoR will now do about 19% damage to the rooted shardwurm. 5 rounds of dots (extra 450 mana) now needed.

I can easily see that a rooted shardwurm takes 2 or 3% damage each tick. Once it breaks root and is re-rooted, it now only takes 1-2% damage per tick. So I conclude it is the damage per tick that is broken, rather than the dot length.

It appears the code which reduces dot damage on a moving mob does not reactivate full damage once the mob is re-rooted.

Once the mob enters flee mode, full damage of 2-3% per tick does seem to be working again.

As I said, I can reproduce this 100% of the time, both scenarios (mob dies in 4 rounds versus mob requires 5 rounds of dots.)

Wanting to demo this - I looked into Fraps (never used it or anything similar) but I see the free version only takes a 30 second video. Is there another video tool which takes longer videos for free?

[evilkorn]

OBS is generally what is used these days. People just say Fraps as a generic term for screen recording software.

[Mairelon]

Since I established a baseline for my TTK, and showed that it appeared to be substantially similar pre-patch and post-patch, I decided to use it as a basis for further experimentation to attempt to replicate the bug as described. Rather than using Paralyzing Earth to root rot, I swapped it out for Root. Root has a maximum duration of 8 ticks, which is well below the TTK I achieve with either of the two DoT stacks I use; this guarantees that every data point will have at least one root break and subsequent re-root.

To make a projection of what my experimental TTK would be in "working as intended" (DoT ticks at 2/3 damage while a mob is moving, but ticks at full damage after they are re-rooted) and "bugged" (DoT ticks at 2/3 damage after root breaks, and continues ticking at reduced damage until DoT is reapplied), I made a couple data tables. From the baseline mean TTK data and the damage values for the spells I'm using, we can assume that the guards I'm killing take more than 3100 points of damage to defeat, but equal or less than 3245 points. Knowing that, and assuming a reliable root break at 8 ticks (which, for this small sample, turned out to be true), we can create upper and lower bounds on the impact of a root break. The lower bound can be assumed to be zero impact: root breaks, and I re-root before another DoT tick occurs. The upper bound can be defined by determining what the worst case damage lost would be. For the "working as intended" scenario, I drop the damage of two ticks - one occurring simultaneously with the root break (row highlighted in green), and the one directly after. Then, finally, for the "bug" behavior, all ticks after the root break are dropped, until I apply a new DoT. I took a look at the total damage, and once it fell within the damage bounds established in the baseline, I label that as the projected mean TTK (highlighted in red).

When things are working as intended, the impact of a couple dropped DoT ticks is actually fairly minimal; no intervention is actually required on my part to reach the defined damage range with either DoT stack (though on my table and in the experiment, I immediately recast Cessation when Splurt finishes ticking, for consistency of practice). The resultant shift in the mean TTK is only one tick; hardly noticeable in the grand scheme of things. The projection for the "bug" behavior, however, results in a significant projected shift of 6-7 ticks before achieving a kill.

I ran through the guards a couple times tonight (N = 14), and was pretty surprised at the results. The bulk of the data showed absolutely no impact from the intentional root break; the histogram looks remarkably similar to the baseline. However, there are three data points that are definitely not within the population... and correlate well with the projected TTKs for the "bug" behavior. These data points do not have any player error factors - all DoTs were applied, and none of the guards fired off a heal or lay hands. I could actually see, as I watched their health tick down, that the individual DoT ticks were taking away much smaller portions of health than I would expect. There are a couple commonalities between these three data points: one, all three guards were rooted while still moving (they were not casting, and hadn't stopped to engage me in melee); two, both were killed near the water, and were z-axis glitching between the water level and the level of the land (tower/cliff) directly above them. These circumstances were also true for other data points, however.

My sample size is relatively small, and I don't intend to continue running this experiment any further, but based on my observations during this test, I agree that there appears to be a bug specifically related to DoT damage on rooted mobs; this may be specifically related to re-rooting or rooting a mob that is currently chasing, or it may have to do with z-axis glitching resulting in a mob that is rooted, but still technically moving/chasing.

[mischief419]

This is pretty major. Why wouldn't this be in patch notes, or am I blind (maybe they did)? So to confirm, this is a bug or classic? I hear different things. However, it should probably be disclosed officially whether it's a bug or not. No one seems to be aware.