[Investigating] Reflect Did Too Much Damage!

Platform, device version and operating system:
PC, Steam, Windows 10

Video Clip:

What you were expecting to happen, and what actually happened:
Reflect killed my hero with 294 durability. The troop that died only had 288 total points, and reflect is only supposed to do 50% damage, so HOW did my hero die???

How often does this happen? When did it begin happening?
Happened during Guild Wars. cry

Steps to make it happen again
Kind of hard to replicate. Their hero died to death mark. Did the reflect apply the death mark to me instead of reflecting the damage?

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If the timestamp is correct, this is a weird clip. I see you casting a spell and defeating troop #3, then on the enemy turn troops #2 and #4 die (the latter clearly from Death Mark) which causes Reflect damage to kill the hero. Is that correct?

What class were you running? Looks like … Orbweaver? Let me also guess, Talent Lv.100 with Rising Shadows equipped? That would explain why two enemy troops died simultaneously…

If you can find a setup able to reproduce this, can you record a second clip but at x1 game speed? (Just switch the speed to x1 prior to triggering whatever happens)

Typically, Reflect deals damage based on damage calculated and (in the case of a kill) not the actual Life/Armor deducted. There is also a … dispute … that certain forms of lethal damage (e.g. Archer’s 3rd trait) vs. reflect result in lethal reflected damage to the attacker, when most other forms of lethality (e.g. Devour) are capped at the victim’s total durability.

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Enemy last troop died to deathmark. Your orbweaver’s rising shadows killed their hero. Your hero died to reflect.

To answer your question, instant kill does infinite amount of damage. Reflect does 50% of that infinite amount which is why your hero died.

(Infinite is the term usually used when describing lethal damage. It’s actually not infinite but only 4x to 10x of target’s total HP + armor depending on the trait/spell that does lethal damage)

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The good old reflect vs insta kill bug.
They just have created a band aid when they fixed zuul. Zuul dispells before he kills and maybe some other spells were fixed too, but traits and talents are not.
The real problem is that any instakill spell works by doing an insane amount of dmg instead of using a “kill command”. So insta kill = insane dmg, 1/2 insane dmg is still too much.
Megavore’s last trait kills him on reflected target every time.
Another strange reflected effect is Archer’s Bulls Eye trait on infernal armor, I have a bug report about this as well on the forum.

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…when Zuul never actually needed the change, when the victim was Barriered you would see two damage numbers pop up, one reading “0” (popping the barrier) and the second one confirming the kill. Which admittedly might have been unique to Zuul (a non-Barriered troop simply displayed one damage number when killed) … but why “fix” what wasn’t “broken”?

Making Lethal Damage dispel the target before killing was actually a significant change in mechanics (at least where Reflect is involved). And the problem is how Lethal Damage is still not implemented consistently across all possible forms. (Death Mark vs. Barrier is probably the weirdest, if DM procs then Barrier takes it but the target loses all Armor regardless and the status persists for another turn)

Really there should only ever be two implementations of Lethal Damage:

  • Ally lethal (Sacrificial Priest, etc)
  • Enemy lethal (Zuul’Goth, etc)

“Ally lethal” should probably ignore all traits and effects, including Invulnerable and Reflect. However this COULD present problems during certain Raid events (what if a raid Zuul’Goth has Sacrificial Priest on its own team who tries to sacrifice them?) so I can understand it NOT bypassing the Invulnerable trait, even if it makes the killing troop less useful in a player team.

“Enemy lethal” should NOT strictly Dispel the target, but where Reflect is concerned reflecting Lethal as Lethal is bad implementation to begin with. Lethal should probably only count for the actual amount of Armor/Life the target had prior to dying, same as Devour vs. Reflect.

2 Likes

Actually, the change was needed, since you could commit suicide by casting Zuul on a troop with reflect.

It’s actually a broken mess that just keeps getting worse:

  • Spell targeting opponent troop (e.g. Zuul): Kills without side effects
  • Spell targeting own troop (e.g. Sacrificial Priest): Some spells works, some fail, apparently individual coding for each spell, from multiple devs
  • Trait proccing (e.g. Megavore): Self-kill if target has Reflect
  • Debuff proccing (e.g. Death Mark): Removes all armor instead of killing if target has Barrier

We’ve been told several years ago that the devs have started working on unifying the text description of traits, which are also a broken mess. Given how little progress there has been, my expectations of them actually unifying something as complicated as coding aren’t exactly stellar.

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Если противник с Отражением умирает от Восходящих теней - Ваш герой умирает независимо от ХП, щита и тому подобного. Проверял несколько раз. Не знаю ошибка ли это? Столкнулся в экспедиции.

Точно! Отражение должно наносить урон в зависимости от того, сколько урона вы наносите… Оно не должно отражать мгновенные убийства.

ENGLISH:
Exactly! Reflection should deal damage based on how much damage you deal… It shouldn’t reflect instant kills.