Draakulis gain life for troops behind a shield

What you were expecting to happen, and what actually happened?

I don’t know if it is a bug, or if it is that an ability does not work the way i thought it worked

I thought that for Draakulis to gain life, he had to score damage against enemies

And guess what ? He doesn’t

I was fighting in GvG a team made of Humilty/Humility/Draakulis/Mercy with my good old Dwarven Gate/lady ironbeard/apothecary/highforge

Since the Draakulis was ready to shoot, I use my dwarven gate to shield my whole team

And when Draakulis shoot, as expected, only my dwarven gate takes damage, and the others lose their shield, but draakulis won a full 176 hp (4*46).

Well, I am not one of the game developper, but as a player, when an ability mention “steal life”, I effectively expect the ability to “steal”, so to inflict true damage and gain as much life as damage it inflicted

What are the steps to make it happen again?

well i don’t know if it is reccurent, but i think that just having a draakulis shooting at shielded unit will make it happen again

Do you have any screenshots or video you want to share with us so we can see the problem? Attach them to your post!

unfortunately no

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Pretty sure it’s always been like this. That doesn’t mean I’ve ever understood it.
To gain something first you must take it. If you’re not taking it, you shouldn’t be gaining it.

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I am glad he gains it, hes a mythic after all. He deserves it.

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I’m pretty sure that’s a bug. When Draakulis was released I’m sure devs discussed how this was stealing, as opposed to the already popular Crimson Bat which has a separately stated gain life…

Or probably it was a bug originally, but as Draak is so-so for a Mythic anyway the devs decided to live with this accidental improvement…

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I started seeing your issue when the switch to Unity had been made. It has never been stated whether it’s a bug or if it “works as intended”. Hopefully this post of yours will bring some sort of official word on the matter.

This is quite an elitist reasoning. You mean Draakulis deserves it but Wraith doesn’t?

I wouldn’t mind if Wraith got 16-17 life due same bug, Goodwill. As long Wraith doesnt get 80 life. :wink:

It may be a bug but there are circumstances in other games where this happens and it is a “feature”. Hello, I’m a Magic: the Gathering player. That makes me a certified rules lawyer. This works, when the rules are well-defined.

Barrier could be defined as:

A troop with the “barrier” status effect will not take damage from the next round of damage dealt to it.

That only works if we define “damage”. We could define “damage”:

“Damage” is dealt either by skulls or abilities that use the word “damage”.

So if we use those definitions, we could say “steal life” doesn’t “do damage” because the ability doesn’t have “damage” in the text. Maybe even formalize that:

“Steal Life” is an ability that subtracts some amount of life, then adds that amount to the user. If the target does not have enough life, the target’s life is reduced to 0 and the amount of life subtracted is given to the user.

There are situations like this in MtG, where the effect of a card is considered an “assignment” (there are other categories, too) rather than “damage” and that interacts with mechanics differently.

MAYBE that’s what GoW is going for. It’s logical. I can’t say we have detailed enough descriptions of the game mechanics that we can tell if it’s intended. I’m not going experiment to see if any other “steal life” troops exist or if they behave the same way. If they don’t, it’s clearly a bug.

Unfortunately, for many troops it seems the status is, “Well, this isn’t working as designed, but if the devs don’t fix it within 2 days of release it never gets fixed, so this is just how it works until someone finds a way to dominate the meta with it.”

(More unfortunately, it says very bad things about the internals of the code if two troops with the same ability can behave so differently. Odds of getting every troop doing something consistent are very slim in that environment.)

For consistency you could check with the wight troop. If it is consistent i would personally consider it a perk of stealing, since I’ve never heard of such troops being overpowered.

I agree the logic behind the ability isn’t there. With respect to a barriered card, Lifesteal creates and then takes life from nowhere. Not really “stealing” is it? Plus, stealing life is inflicting damage. The definition of “stealing” just can’t be spun any other way.

This aspect of Draakulis can get very silly very quickly. I faced a Draakulis today that got up to 530 life despite my troops never losing a single point of life. (Every single time Draak cast his spell, all four of my troops were barriered.)

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In a bizarre form of logic, it can be argued that the barrier doesn’t negate the attack but takes the damage in place of the troop. Barriers could have infinite life and upon hit remove themselves from the troop. Under this notion troops that steal life are stealing life from the barrier as opposed to the troop and so they gain life correctly.

GW scoring is based on damage. So if you use Draakulis to kill all the opponents. Did you NOT do any damage that match?
They need to make things simple @Ozball and change Draakulis cast. I suggest it be do X amount of true damage and gain it as life.
That should correct the following issues:

  • Confirmed issue with Barrier
  • Alleged issue with Fairy fire (cast isn’t buffed)
  • Probable issue with GW scoring

He used to be my favorite troop. Was a game changer as a Mid level player in PvP. Would be great to be able to use him in GW without losing a quarter of the points possible.