Entagled troop issue with Devour spell or Mang weapon

Bug Reports
1

Platform, device version and operating system
PC

What you were expecting to happen, and what actually happened
When some troop devours entagled troop, devoured troop attack doesn’t add to devouring troop.
Similar thing with mang weapon: when hero casts mang spell and he is entagled - hero doesn’t get additional attack.

2

At least the second half has been confirmed as “by design”, I think. Here’s how it goes.

When you are entangled, your current attack stat is stashed away in a secret place and the attack stat is set to 0.

So if anything interacts with the troop’s attack at that point, it is 0. You can’t “steal attack” from 0, so troops that do that won’t work. Technically devour works: it’s documented as “adding the troop’s attack” and it adds 0 to your attack.

Entangled FORCES your attack to 0. So if you add +100 attack while entangled, nothing happens. Any ability that would increase your attack has no effect, because a troop that is Entangled is defined as having 0 attack.

The weird part is when you lose Entangled, that attack stat from before is restored.

Abilities that add 10 to attack don’t say, “Add 10 to what your attack was before you were entangled”. The sad fact is while you’re entangled, your “current attack” is stuck at 0 until it wears off, so “gain attack” effects are worth nothing.

This has several interesting design impacts:

  • Mixing Devour and Entangled on your team is counterproductive.
  • Teams that Entangle themselves are sort-of counters to Devour teams.
  • Troops that might Entangle like Magnus are risks if you want to use Devour.
  • Entangle is a good counter to self-buffing teams.
  • Entangling yourself is also a sort-of counter to troops that steal attack like The Wild Queen.
2 Likes
3

Unfortunatelly I dont remember how it works prior to 3.4 or 3.3 or 3.2 (more likely i didn’t pay attention).

I dont have questions with devouring troops whose attack reduced to 0 by say some steal spell, that is permanent effect. But entagle is not permanent but temprorary effect. The troops attack is still 10 (or 20 or 30) temprorary reduced to 0 by effect (yes Entagled is special effect working with attack). But it doesnt equal 0 permanent. So I think devour doesnt work as expected in this case.

And I came up with another question: what will be if we will try to steal magic from webed troop? Will we steal it? What magic will have webed troop after effect gone?

4

It’s always been this way IIRC.

That’s not quite it. Think of it as being three stages:

  • 1: You’re not Entangled yet. Your Atk is whatever it is right now.
  • 2: You’re Entangled now. Your Atk is 0. No matter how much you gain, it’s still 0.
  • 3: Entangle ends. Your Atk goes back to whatever it was during Stage 1.

It doesn’t matter if you gained Atk during Stage 2, because the moment you gained it, it instantly changed to +0.