What you were expecting to happen, and what actually happened?
I had Celestasia in my top slot, with barrier up. Enemy Bone Dragon spawned ~65 skulls of another troop’s armor. I thought barrier would reduce the damage to 0, but I actually took a ton of damage.
Seems like the mass of skulls hit me as more than one attack - so barrier absorbed one, and then I was hit with 1-2 more.
What are the steps to make it happen again?
Spawn a ton of skulls onto the board, and hit a troop with barrier up.
Do you have any screenshots or video you want to share with us so we can see the problem? Attach them to your post!
I know you used to develop for the game so I’m assuming you’ve already thought through this but just in case: Did the barrier go down in the initial, first hit of skulls or after the skulls started cascade matching? If the former, then that definitely seems like a bug; if the later then I’m guessing it’s working as intended.
My (possibly wrong) understanding is that any number of skulls over five in one connected group counts the same as any other critical hit, i.e. (first troop's attack) + 2 damage. So if you manage to fill the entire screen with skulls, that’s the equivalent of a single match-five on skulls.
For the serious damage to roll in from a skull spam, there must be multiple “clumps” of skulls separate enough for each to count as separate attacks. In those cases barrier would only stop the damage from one of the hits.
I could be completely misunderstanding how skull spam works, but it would explain the behavior you’re describing.
This bothers me as well, since I use Celestasia often lately. It seems like simultaneous instances of skull damage are not exactly simultaneous. It’s not rare to find Bone Dragon during PVP, so it’s an often case for me where BD spawns lots of skulls and my Celestasia with active barrier goes in one shot.
Are the multiple, simultaneous skull damage queued?
No. She took maybe 40 or 50 damage. (I have all 5-star kingdoms, race bonuses, dragon bond - my teams start with like 45 armor and 60 life, so 40-50 damage is still a bunch, but not lethal.)
On console, every skull after 3 gave +1 damage. Multiple sets of skulls would hit in sequence. But this turned out to be an incorrect implementation, gave rise to Maw devouring multiple opponents, for example. So it was fixed such that multiple groups of skulls all just become +1 damage. So any number of skulls (X skulls) does X-3 damage total. At least, that was our intent. But there are some subtle elements that were always a bit different between console and PC, like the way entangle did or did not counter the critical damage.
Just popping back in for a quick FYI. I’ve been tinkering with some anti-bone dragon builds today. I noticed this exact bugs on multiple occasions. I’m going to make a video later and post it here.
Barrier has never worked any other way on PC/Mobile. When dealing with damage from skulls, it blocks one skull match worth of damage. It is inconsistent with Agile, where one instance of skull damage counts as “any number of simultaneously matched skulls” but otherwise not I would not consider it a bug. I always considered Agile the annoying/inconsistent one.
Here’s the first video… here you can see the skulls are broken into two separate blocks. Barrier broken and troop dies.
Is this working as intended? Can we get a dev to comment?
(( I had a troop with barrier get one shot today when a full screen of skulls hit, not two separate blocks. It happened several times actually. I’m trying to capture that on video now but who knows how long it could take to get conditions just right ))
Using the examples presented, skull hits seem to work something like this.
Calculate skull match instances “separately”. (2 separate skull matches > 2 connected ones, etc.)
Calculate “on skull hit traits” chance to each individual skull match. (Greatly increased Agile potential.)
Calculate all damage to opponent separately. (So each “separate” skull match is calc’d individually.)
Traits activate depending on previous calculation, taking effect first. (Roll for agile/devour.)
Damage calculated fires off as one massive strike. (So one roll of Agile trumps all damage.)
The issue is either the trait(s) counting the damage as one massive hit or that the damage taken is calculated as multiple skull hits. What a unique way of determining damage.
Hate to reply to myself, but I just counted the skulls. Even if this was treated as two hits and we treated the block with the fewest skulls as breaking the barrier, and the block with the most skulls as the one that dealt the damage, there aren’t enough skulls in the larger block of skulls to do the required damage to kill the troop. The troop’s effective health is 22 Armor + 39 Life = 61… and with 25 Attack + 21 Extra Skulls that’s only 46 damage. The troop would have lived.
When I counted the skulls in the first video, I could resolve about 4 different matches at least. However, if you look at the spider, the big trait triggered ELEVEN times on the initial skull spam, so you have at least that many hits, possibly more if any resolved as just match 3’s. There is a reason why Bone Dragon does such massive damage. Clumps with tiny little offshots and gaps resolve to many more skull hits than rectangular or neat “T” formations.
Looking at the second video, though, you’ll see virtue of courage triggering to give 30 life and attack. Since there were two courages used, this is five times that skulls hits were resolved before your front troop died. Now this one depends on order of operation. In my experience, separate skull matches will trigger Virtue of Courage, but only if they “resolve”. By this I mean, if you skull spam and the first target would die in one skull match anyway, only one skull hit resolves and you get virtue of courage to trigger once (per courage used on the team). If you, for example, entangle the first troop and get skull spammed, you’ll resolve every single skull match (regardless of if they actually did damage) the opposing team will get a much larger life and attack boost, (barring attack for the entangled troops). I know for single skull matches, the attack resolves before the attack boost, and for skull clumps, the attack boost seems to resolve before each sequential skull match. Considering sequential trigger and skull hit resolves within the same big clump, we could potentially have 35 + 41 + 47 + 53 + 59 damage (plus up to 2 per match for critical hits).
However, even considering this, the barrier should have blocked the first 35-37 damage, resulting in no more than 208 damage. So, at least something is off. I have, on occasion, have a skull hit resolve for twice the damage it should have, but I’ve never been able to reproduce it at will. That could also be at work here.
