What you were expecting to happen, and what actually happened:
The Deep King is missing his second spell damage when there are 3 enemies, and 2 die from his first shot.
How often does this happen? When did it begin happening?
this has happened twice during the Delve event
Steps to make it happen again
Happened both time when the enemy had 3 troops, Deep King hit one and killed both, and then never fired again.
Edit: Just happened again, but this time the first hit only killed the splash damaged troop, and then no second hit.
This happens on other troops (infernus for example) and I was never sure if it was a bug or just the way the spell worked. Some dont have the problem and I was never sure on the difference.
I think The Deep King is working as intended but I’ll need to double check this with the Team and get back to you next week.
We have some Troops which do re-target if their target dies before the spell damage step is fired on them and others which don’t, I can’t remember which category The Deep King fits into.
Your response is appreciated, but why would you intentionally design troops that don’t re-target if their target dies? That seems to serve no purpose but to screw over a player who got lucky on their first splash shot.
It’s because of old code. The game has been running for just over 5 years so over time the code and design has been improved and there are still legacy Troops in the game.
We are in a constant process of updating older content as necessary (from the game text to the mechanics) but it is a herculean Task so it’s a long term project.
I’ve informed the Team that it appears Deep King is still using the old setup as it was created before we updated some of the targeting mechanics, so we’ll will look at getting a fix out in the next couple of weeks.
I want to add to Kafka’s explanation of “legacy code”, which is true.
What she means is the first way troops were implemented this is how they behaved. Later, it came out that some newer troops that were supposed to be exciting (and potentially power creep) were NOT exciting because of it. So they implemented a new bit of code for that kind of attack logic to make those specific troops more powerful. This segues into the thing I want to add.
Strategically speaking, both are interesting. A troop that retargets is “worth” more than a troop that doesn’t since it’s more flexible. So having both options opens up a little design space: a troop can get a more powerful ability than its mana cost or traits might suggest but have the downside of sometimes not getting its second hit.
Also, I think their intent for not just updating the targeting behavior in general includes two assumptions:
There’s probably some ability where this targeting is better.
They didn’t want to risk breaking older troops not part of their current balance discussion.
(“breaking” above has the sense of “making the troop broken”, not necessarily ruining the logic.)
I took Kafka’s reply to mean that all troops should have the new targeting, and The Deep King’s having the old targeting is a function of accidentally not being updated to the new targeting, not an intentional design decision.
(Aside: There is room for both as you say, but the worse targeting variants should either be super-buff to compensate for worse targeting, or be limited to being lower-rarity troops. Otherwise they’d just be annoying and/or useless.)
