What you were expecting to happen, and what actually happened:
I expected spells with identical core functionality (“deal damage to the first and last enemy”) to function the same way.
What actually happens is that with one remaining enemy, Knight Coronet hits that one enemy twice and Skeleton Key hits it once.
How often does this happen? When did it begin happening?
Happens every time.
Steps to make it happen again
Step 1: Expect a tight connection between “the text description of what the spell does” and “what it actually functionally does.”
Step 2: Be disappointed.
Agree. I’d hate to see Knight Coronet get nerfed because of this (or would it be more accurate to say, uh, “bug fixed” after 4 years?) and Skeleton Key doesn’t really need to be buffed. Would be nice if they used different terminology, though.
Hey this technically isn’t a bug so I’ll move it to the feedback section.
We’ve been reviewing the consistency of wording mostly in game but I’m sure things like this will be touched on as well in future.
It’s a huge undertaking due to the sheer amount of content we have in game so this will take quite some time, but we’re aware and working on our consistency.
Out of curiosity: Have you folks thought of having a description for each spell effect and then generating the whole spell description from the component effect descriptions? IE to my understanding, Skeleton Key is “Deal [a ton] of damage to the first enemy, deal [a ton] of damage to the last enemy, take an extra turn if either died” under the hood. With some stuff for combining commonly-paired descriptions (“deal damage to [first and last]” or “deal damage to [first two]” etc) it seems like it could be feasible if there’s going to be an effort to overhaul, and it would help make things simpler in the future at the cost of a very large short-term overhaul:
If you’re getting spell effects like “Transform [color] to [color]” and the colors are filled in by the code that handles the actual transformation, you prevent some of the translation issues that were recently raised on the Discord.
Given the spell step descriptions occurring in the same order as they actually occur in the code, this would prevent some of the previous inconsistencies I’ve heard of where the spell description doesn’t match the order in which effects are actually applied.
You would only need to describe each effect once when it’s new, and then the spell descriptions would write themselves for new troops using existing effects.
It’s interesting to think about how to word these things to be consistent to their functionality.
Knight Coronet
Functionality:
If there are more than two enemies: Deal X damage to the first, deal X damage to the last.
If there is one enemy: Deal X damage to it, Deal X damage to it.
Current Wording: Deal X damage to first and last enemies
Clear Wording: Deal X damage to the first enemy, then Deal X damage to the last enemy.
Skeleton Key
If there are more than two enemies: Deal X damage to the first, deal X damage to the last.
If there is one enemy: Deal X damage to it.
Current Wording: Deal X damage to first and last enemies
Clear Wording: Deal X damage to the first enemy. If there is more than 1 enemy, deal X damage to the last enemy.
Other considerations
Deal X damage to 3 random enemies. How does this behave if there is only 1?
Interested in hearing how people would word these situations? Maybe ‘cleave’ for the situation of skeleton key, since the verb implies that you need multiple targets to get the additional damage. “Deal X damage to the first enemy and cleave the last enemy”.
