Savage Defense implementation is buggy

#0 - April 17, 2009, 3:56 a.m.

It has 2 problems (at least):

1) It drops without absorbing attacks if the mob hits you between your crit and SD going up.
You crit
Mob hits
SD up
SD down

2) It absorbs multiple attacks if they are near simultaneous.

In multiple mob situations, it's possible they could cancel each other out, at least over time. Without looking through every single combat parse, it's impossible to say. It's going to be encounter specific.

In a single mob encounter, it means that SD is not providing the level of mitigation it should. And the first bug listed definitely happens against single mobs.

I just finished tanking H UK and checked my combat log for Ingvar. I have at least 2 places where I crit (with Maul, Mangle, or Lacerate), Ingvar hit me (no absorption), and savage defense went up and then faded on the next line in the same second.

Ghostcrawler

#52 - April 22, 2009, 8:49 p.m.

These type of issues (and there are several abilities so affected) are not bugs per se. They are disagreements or just delays in between the client and server. It takes time for that communication to happen and sometimes things get offset. Talk to mages about Ignite munching for instance. We try to implement a certain amount of split-second timing, because it feels better when the game is responsive and perhaps more exciting when changes are instant. But there are real technological limitatons to what we can do.

It's not a bug in the sense that we can't fix it. It's Internet latency. If we think it is going to become a real liability for bears, then the kind of thing we can do is design around it. For example, Savage Defense could have 3 stacks that affected the next 3 hits. Dropping from 2 stacks to 1 stack because of latency mismatches would be superior to dropping from the shield being on to the shield being off. We need to get a better feel for how common the problem is and how SD is working in general before we started iterating on the design though.