Can Orion miss?

I was down to 1 troop at 1 or 2 life and opponent orion filled (again…) and shot. And nothing at all happened except Orion’s mana went to 0. I checked the text, it said like ‘deal 3-15 damage’. Yet either dealt 0 to my troop or dealt the damage to an empty place…

I had that happen months ago once too. Reported it back then as a bug on the Steam forum. shrug Dunno if it ever got looked into.

Spell don’t have a chance to miss, so Orion should have dealt damage. Did he get the magic boost or did the spell have no effect?

I’ve seen this bug too. From what I remember, he would get the magic boost but
the attack animation appeared to target the first slot even though it was empty.

Ok, I’ll let the team know.

As Pasa mentioned, it shows a 0 on the magic when this happens, as if he loses magic instead of boosting.

May be hit by one of the cards who reduce magic?

Like the StoneCold of Stormheim

I think Orion tries to target the first troop and when you’re down to one troop in a lower position it can miss. I’ve only ever seen it happen when my last troop is in the last slot and the other team is down to Orion only. Thought it was a known bug or I would have reposrted.

This has happened before… single target damage spell, one remaining troop on single digit hp… must be something super rare for this to come back, I doubt you’ll be able to reproduce it. I can name people who told me this was being fixed… or at least known of. One of the two.

Nope. I think I’d know if I was using one of those.

Okay, seems like I wasn’t imagining things after all. Had this happen to me yesterday, two troops left on my side, not sure if second/third or third/fourth position. Upper one had 7 health left, lower one 2 health left. Orion activated his skill, no damage taken.

Hey guys, we did fix a bug regarding this back in 1.0.6, where the AI was mistakenly targeting a dead troop, because it was mistakenly checking if there was a troop alive on that position on its own side, not on the enemy’s side.

I just checked the codebase, and that fix looks to be working, so this must be something else.

The only other thing I can think of is that the AI is looking for a target BEFORE a troop has been killed and fully removed (it could, for example, be caused by the speed up to combat effects)

Is it possible that Orion has had this error immediately the turn after a troop was killed on your side?

That sounds like a pretty weird handling. Why would Orion want to select a target a turn ahead of using his skill? I’d rather suspect this might be related to Hunter’s Mark. Is there any special target selection going on for this effect, like attempting to avoid targets on low health?

That sounds like a pretty weird handling.

Well… think about it like this… in any event-driven system, like Gems of War combat, the game simply reacts to a series of events, some from the player, some from the AI, some from the board. Imagine that we had a queue of events that looked like this after the AI player matched 4 skulls:

  • APPLY DAMAGE
  • WAIT FOR BOARD TO STOP CASCADING
  • TAKE ANOTHER TURN
  • DECIDE WHAT TO DO (it decides for Orion to cast a spell)
  • PICK ORION SPELL TARGET
  • CAST ORION’S SPELL

Now suppose that the very first step kills a troop… Ideally it should add a priority event “REMOVE DEAD TROOP” into the system to remove that troop, so now the queue looks like this

  • APPLY DAMAGE (completed)
  • REMOVE DEAD TROOP
  • WAIT FOR BOARD TO STOP CASCADING
  • TAKE ANOTHER TURN
  • DECIDE WHAT TO DO (it decides for Orion to cast a spell)
  • PICK ORION SPELL TARGET
  • CAST ORION’S SPELL

But suppose because things moved through too quickly in the queue, when it inserted that event to remove the troop, lots of other stuff had been resolved… we’d now have

  • APPLY DAMAGE (completed)
  • WAIT FOR BOARD TO STOP CASCADING (completed)
  • TAKE ANOTHER TURN (completed)
  • DECIDE WHAT TO DO (it decides for Orion to cast a spell) (completed)
  • PICK ORION SPELL TARGET (completed)
  • REMOVE DEAD TROOP
  • CAST ORION’S SPELL

As you can see… the targeting event could now select the dead troop.

That’s just the kind of error you sometimes see in event driven systems… it means the Finite State Machine that runs the system has a flaw in it that has allowed a game-state to advance, when it should have been been waiting for something to resolve. Not saying that is the case with this one, just that it’s something that sprang to mind

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I am always pleasantly surprised at the way the devs communicate with the players through this forum. This elaborate explanation is a perfect example of how dedicated the GoW team is. Thnx, @Sirrian and the rest.

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When this happened to me, it continued for several successive casts of Orion’s ability. Each time he gained the magic and the attack hit no one. Pretty sure that was on 1.6 as I think that was the first version I played on.

-Razlath

Okay, I guess I misunderstood the part in your post about “the turn after the troop was killed on your side”. I had the impression this involved switching control between player/AI, you were actually talking about a chained event (e.g. due to a match-4) that left control on AI side.

I still think it’s unlikely to be due to a glitch in the Finite State Machine. As much as I know the issue has only been observed with Orion, I’d expect a generic timing issue to also have an effect on other units. Now, I don’t know anything about the Gems of War architecture, this is just from observing how the game reacts, so it has a very good chance at being entirely wrong. I had the impression the game may give skill targets a higher priority based on the skill effect, e.g. Silence preferably getting applied to units at full mana. My reasoning is that Hunter’s Mark is a very rare effect, only two units have it, Dire Wolf (which nobody plays) and Orion (which you don’t encounter often). With my limited knowledge, a bug in Hunter’s Mark targeting algorithm (e.g. pick the position with the highest health, incorrectly taking both sides into account) would fit the posted observations best.

Sorry for bumping an old post but I noticed that the bug still occurs on the latest patch. I manage to capture a video of the issue happening while I was playing the AI match against Orion in the last quest of the Divinion Fields.

As you can see from the .gif:

  1. My hero (on 1st position) died just before the turn Orion misses his spell (he killed my unit → I play → he casts the spell).
  2. Orion casts Wild Hunt but seems to aim for the 1st position (as seen by the spell animation) which is obviously now empty.

For some more context, Orion managed to cast Wild Hunt successfully once on my hero prior to the events unfolding in the .gif.

Hope it helps you reproduce and fix the issue.

To add a bit to this thread, just a few days ago I saw a similar situation:
I’m fairly certain it was pvp, and on PS4: the game wound down to only the fourth slot troops remaining on either side: the player had a venberak (can’t remember exact name, but it is the purple rarity card that does damage to each enemy with 30% chance to disease them) and the AI had the lion with wings, sacred guardian?

I’m certain that venberak had 2-3 hp left, and sacred guardian had something like 8 armor and 4 life left. Sacred guardian filled his spell up and used it, I figured it was gg, but it did no damage, showed no animation, HOWEVER, it did show the shield animation for when his armor increased, and it did indeed increase his armor by the appropriate amount. I even saw what the lion’s spell was supposed to do; 8 damage to an enemy, and gain 8 armor. After a few moves, Sacred Guardian had filled up again, used his spell, and it did the exact same thing as before: it left the 2 hp venberak untouched but it DID fill the lion’s armor up correctly. Eventually, the player lost due to a skull match for sacred lion, but it was freaky that he “dodged” the damage from the spell two times.