Platform, device version and operating system
PC/windows 10
Screenshot or image
What you were expecting to happen, and what actually happened
I converted a bunch of purple gems to skulls, creating a giant blob of 18 skulls, but it only did a small amount of damage, I think it counted as a normal match 5. This seems really low
How often does this happen? When did it begin happening?
happens with blobs
Steps to make it happen again
make a blob of skulls, do minimal damage
Not a bug, working as intended.
A long long time ago, I can still remember…well, actually I can’t recall how many updates and fixes ago calculations were changed in order to consider huge, uniform blobs as a single match instead of splitting them up in several 4- or 5-matches as people felt it was making situation with traits that trigger on 4- or 5-matches (kr…kr…clearing throat…aken) a wee bit on the broken side.
Edit: Skullspam still works. You just have to simultaneously produce several separate skull matches.
That was for traits like kraken, only triggering once per board. I am not talking about triggering traits, i am talking about skull damage. If I get 2 match 3 with skulls that are not blobbed, it does the damage as 2 hits. as seen here, one giant blob gets counted as a match 5, and the match 3 gets counted as a match 3 naturally. you can see the 14 and 12 damage hitting at the same time. As this works now, if you get 2 match threes not connected, you do more damage then a giant mass of 18 skulls. So bugged.
I remember, a long time ago, Sirrian saying that he thought the blobs should resolve as a match-5 plus 1 for each additional gem in the blob. Something simple like 7 skulls in a row would do damage plus 4, for example. If they aren’t going to count the blobs as multi-matches, it should at least do that.
It kind of comes down to this:
Kraken/Mab teams were a plague of high-end PvP because they could use a troop like Forest Troll to generate blobs like the above. They could generate multiple 4/5 matches easily and the end result was the team could easily dole out 25+ damage to your entire team in one turn THEN perform its Kraken casts, leading to more damage and filling the NEXT Kraken, and so on.
So this change was made because players wanted something to be done about Kraken/Mab. I don’t know how it affects mana counts, but I’m pretty sure the intent was to limit Tentacles to 1 per “blob”.
So now, armed with the knowledge that doing excessive damage via generators making blobs is something players don’t like, Dhrak-Zum is going to bring us Doomskull generators. I’m pretty sure doomskuls do “damage per explosion”, so they’ll circumvent these mechanics. I think that means the situation in your original post might deal 50+ damage. I’m pretty sure in short order that’s going to get toned down.
Valid points, however this is not a bug as it has been known behaviour for years, and Devs never made it seem unintended.
Maybe make this a feature request/gameplay feedback thread instead.
No, I don’t think this is true. The blob resolution change only happened a few months ago at most and I’m not certain that this skull damage reduction didn’t take effect much more recently (like 3.4).
There were major differences between Adobe and Unity and it was only after the Unity conversion that blob resolution became an issue for PC/mobile players. That was only a year ago.
Just because it has been around does not make it not a bug. It is a bug report. Stans original response is what I would expect to happen. 18+ skull should not do less damage then 6
Not for skulls, a big skull blob for the most part always counted as a single match+2.
Now i can’t say for sure that there weren’t time periods inbetween when this was different but i know for sure it has been this way and openly acknowledged to work that way years back.
Edit: An older thread about this behaviour: https://community.gemsofwar.com/t/a-psa-involving-bone-dragon-and-warlord-4/13467
That big blob of skulls did NOT count as a single match plus 2. He did 22 damage against stoneskin. which reduced damage by 50 percent. So it would have been 44. Not really sure what linking that was supposed to be telling us? Other then blobs today appear to be treated different then in 2016…
It was supposed to show that skull match resolution has been different from gem match resolution for a long time and not because of the rather recent blob resolution change to get Kraken in line, nothing more, relax.
I am relaxed, You stated that blobs of skulls were almost always single match +2, then proceeded to show that was not the case. I was confused by your seemingly contradictory link. So I asked for clarification of what your point was. Did it sound hostile? It shouldn’t have. Maybe a little FAE going on there.
I think it’s safe to say:
I don’t know what FAE means. Anyways my post was directed at Stan not you and was as i stated just to show that the skull blob resolution is not due to the recent Kraken inspired fix but has been in the game for much longer, following the conversation we had, nothing more.
I feel like you are still a bit grumpy about my bug report comment, so let me clarify, you made a valid point with
So i immediately dropped it. What i posted after that was not directed at you or your points.
The console players in that thread were implying that the resolution on console would have been different at that time, though they didn’t quite come out and say it. In any case, what it was in the past doesn’t really matter now. It remains odd, in my view, that a board full of skulls will do two more damage than a 3-match of skulls.
Blob recognition coding has been rewritten in this update, this is pretty much obvious imho. It is quite close to what it were in the Adobe version. Maybe, continuous blobs are resolved as a single 4+ match plus 1 damage for each skull or +1 mana for each gem of the blob color. Which is what it should be. In previous versions some blobs still produced more than a single 4+ match even after multiple fixes. Also, recent lack of recognition of 4+ matches evident by lack of extra turns looks like a side effect of this latest fix. These code tables as surely messy, I don’t envy the person who writes these things.
Yeah can’t really comment on consoles, quite a lot of their stuffs seems to have been different, in the past even more so than now.
As for the board full of skulls, i guess you are right, i have just come to accept that as the way skull matches are supposed to work over time and am quite indifferent to a “fix” of it now, as skullgenerators the way it is have always been a viable part of the game, at certain periods easily the most viable way to go.
I can’t imagine how much more idiotic the pre nerf Bone Dragon would have been, seeing as how ridiculously op he already was with blobs counting as just one match for the most part.
I feel that if skull blobs would actually count as the amount of 3-matches the blob could be split up into, we would drift in a heavily skulldamage dominated meta again. With Doomskull spam around the corner i think that would probably kill the game for me entirely.
You get 1 additional damage per skull over 3 so 18 skulls should be base skull damage plus 15. That is how skulls are calculated what damage did your blob create and what damage where you expecting?
In the video i posted the blob of 18ish did 26 damage, with my weapon haveing 24 attack, So basically equivalent to a match 5. In the screenshot it has an L shape with 15 connected skulls, and one 3 match, it did 12 damage for the 3 match as it should, but then only 14 for the match of 15 skulls. So definitely not working like you say it should. Which is more in line with what I was expecting.
having it break up into 3 matches equivalents would indeed be very much overpowered,
It did simply attack+2 as i have come to expect from skull blob resolution. (not trying to argue whether or not it should be like that or whether it is always consistent in this way)
