[Not a bug] Invulernable on Dooms inconsistent

Platform, device version and operating system:
Any

Screenshot or image:
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What you were expecting to happen, and what actually happened:
Zuul’Goth’s ability reads: “Kill an Enemy.” If you try to use it on an enemy Doom (which you can encounter in several kingdoms exploring), you will be met with laughter, because Dooms are Invulnerable, a step up from Impervious: They are immune to the normal status effects, devour, but also mana drain, transform, and… lethal damage. That’s right, when you can’t do lethal damage to them. That’s how Zuul’Goth works: it just does all the damage it can to a target until its dead, but because Dooms are Invulnerable, they take zero damage. So “Kill an Enemy” = Lethal Damage and Invulnerable prevents it from dying.

One might think then that if they use the troop Sacrifice, which reads “Kill the last Ally” and they put a Doom in the last slot, it wouldn’t be able to be killed. After all, both wordings say they kill the target, and “lethal damage” in Invulnerable doesn’t say anything about “Lethal damage from enemies only.”

But nope. That is not the case. Sacrifice troop will happily KILL your Doom.

Now you might be saying “Okay, that’s because clearly the lethal damage is only to stop enemies from killing your troop, not from you doing it on purpose.” Nope. That argument doesn’t work. Invulnerability and Impervious provide immunity to Devour, and troops that say “Devour an enemy” like The Great Maw cannot devour them. Makes sense. But Vash’Dagon, like Sacrifice, says “Devour an Ally” and it DOESN’T WORK on Allies that are immune to devour.

Kill an Enemy = Lethal Damage = Invulnerable prevents it
Kill an Ally = Lethal Damage = Invulnerable doesn’t prevent it
Devour an Enemy = Invulnerable/Impervious prevents it
Devour an Ally = Invulnerable/Impervious prevents it

How often does this happen? When did it begin happening?

Every time.

Steps to make it happen again

Use Sacrifice troop to kill your Doom troop.

2 Likes

Your doom/Zull has different trait than ai doom/zuul.

Not a bug.
Lethal immunity doesn’t apply when targeted by allies.
And while I’m here Devour immunity SHOULDN’T either. :grinning:

3 Likes

Doom AI and player Doom are both invulnerable.

I did not know that… though never seen a player owned doom in combat.

1 Like

Right but that’s the problem with the wording. Both wordings simply say “Kill” and it’s implied that “immune to Lethal Damage” means any type of lethal damage. It doesn’t say “Immune to Lethal Damage from Enemies” just like it doesn’t say “Immune to Devour by Enemies” because the latter doesn’t have to: it already is.

There’s just a lot of inconsistency there. Either Devouring an Ally, as you suggest, should work on any Ally, or Killing an Ally shouldn’t work on Invulnerable Ally troops.

2 Likes

I’m guessing an ally doom’s trait doesn’t protect it from Sacrifice to prevent players from doing exactly that if that’s so then the wording on either the doom need to change to say enemy lethal damage or sacrifice needs to say it ignores traits. if it is a bug this is a team breaker not necessarily a game breaker but a team breaker no doubt

1 Like

@thelastdragon nailed it :slight_smile:
This is intended, I will ask if we can change the wording or add help text or something

6 Likes

that would be best as to avoid any further confusion

@Kafka might i suggest moving this topic to feedback/feature requests

I completely expected it to be intended – I mean, after all, Doom is the only troop players can own that are Invulnerable. There are three troops in the game that can kill allies:

  • Princess Elspeth
  • Sacrifice
  • Dullahan

And kill definitely implies lethal damage, but our own Doom troops die to all of those. I think the wording could be changed to say “Sacrifice” instead of Kill perhaps.

2 Likes

saying Sacrifice could still be interpreted as lethal damage though saying something along the lines of unaffected by ally traits would cause less confusion, as they say in R&D don’t treat people like idiots but make your product like they are, cause if you don’t describe/layout something perfectly at some point one person will complain about it

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FYI… Princess Elspeth CANNOT kill allied towers, despite her ability saying “Kill” just like Sacrifice and Towers having the same Invulnerable.


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So I went ahead and made a team with Elspeth and a Doom. And yep, she can’t kill them.

Sacrifice can kill Dooms, but Elspeth can’t. Both of them have you “Kill” an ally. At first I thought “Well, Elspeth has you select an Ally to kill and Sacrifice strictly kills the last ally, so maybe it’s because you can’t select the ally being killed that makes it ignore the trait.” So then I tested Dullahan…

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Nope, he can’t kill Dooms either. If you put a Doom in first place and the 50% lands on killing the first Ally, it will just come back saying Invulnerable. He doesn’t select an ally to kill either. Dulluhan says kill the first ally just like Sacrifice says kill the last Ally, except Sacrifice can kill Dooms and Dullahan can’t, nor can Elspeth.

So Kafka… if it’s “intended” it sure seems really, really inconsistent when the wording is exactly the same.

7 Likes

I thought I’d check if ‘not a bug’ meant Sacrifice was ninja-fixed to not kill last troop: Nope, still does.

Also noticed Black Beast and Vash’ can’t devour Dooms. Maybe you said that. Maybe I read that. My memory is a bit dodgey at times. Inconsistent at best.

Correct – Dooms cannot be devoured by allies, nor can they be killed by Elspeth or Dullahan, but they can be killed by Sacrifice, despite all three troops using the same “Kill” (which which lethal damage) and immunity to devour providing protection against allies.

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Hey, just to clarify they will kill/devour/sacrifice the Doom on a player’s team, but they will not do so on the AI team (ie. in Invasion).

Read the bullet points at the bottom for a summation. This issue (set of issues) is murky on what is a “bug” versus what is not a “bug” on areas where the intent is not clear, which is discussed in the following paragraphs, but there are at least a couple instances here that are bugs because the intent has been clearly stated by official sources in the past and will require game changes (as opposed to text) to fix. Or all the way to the bottom to get the gist to show that this is relevant to the issue(s).

Until as recently as a several months ago, Sacrifice’s kill used to be stopped by simple barrier as well as the Invulnerable trait. At the time, it was the only kill ally spell that worked like this for barrier, and I thought I tested everything with Invulnerable as well to similar results. As far as I know, things that kill allies are always supposed to pierce through any immunity, and this is the official stance, so Elspeth and Dullahan are both technically bugged (FYI, both Sacrificial Preist and Widow Queen “correctly” pierce Invulnerable, I just tested that right now, and I also confirmed Elspeth did not kill my doom on my team). But its the spell that pierces immunity, and it is the spell on each that is inconsistent, not the trait.

Actually, technically, the spell and trait are both consistent in the way that they work for either side (not with other versions of things that use the same language), but for them to be working as intended, they actually need to be inconsistent. For example, if the towers this week are going to block Elspeth’s instakill and this is intended even though it comes from an ally but the towers are “special” in a way that player controlled Dooms are not so the player shouldn’t be able to skirt this rule, then there would either need to be a different Elsepeth spell in this weeks invasion or a different invulnerable trait for boss entitites. Otherwise, Elspeth needs to be able to kill both player controlled dooms and AI controlled towers, because both are allies, and thats how ally instakills work, because that is the unwritten rule. With something like Dullahan, in order for it to abide the “kill ally always works” rule, it would have to have the “transcendent” instakill if it targets an ally, but the “normal” instakill if it happens to target the enemy, so an enemy doom would always block it, but an ally one would always get killed. One could argue an exception for Dullahan, because it is random on which side it targets and therefore immunity should apply on both sides). I’m going by the logic that Invulnerable on event bosses is considered sacrosanct, and no instakill should ever work on invulnerable event bosses, so something like Dullahan should not be able to pierce immunity on both sides to be “equal”.

Devour Ally being blocked is a different issue, because I don’t think it was ever explicitly stated that Devour Ally was intended to always land through traits. In fact, it never has pierced traits, historically, and there are only two troops that have it, only one of which is a legacy, whereas instakill ally first appeared on Sacrificial Priest and was allowed to be blocked by barrier for all of a couple hours before being changed to pierce it and has been officially stated that spells like this are intended to always kill. However, there is also a massive inconsistency here when it comes to how this works for the Devour as well - neither troop (vash’dagon or black beast) will pierce traits, but one of them (Vash) does not even dispel his victim before attempting to devour and is blocked by not only traits but Bless OR Barrier. This latter part was confirmed to be unintentional on stream (one of the dev QA streams, when asked the question about giving Vash’Dagon a shadow dispel like Black Beast, Nimhain said something along the lines of “oh, I thought we did, we’ll look into that”), and is therefore a bug that still needs action to fix.

So this may only be tangentially related, but in my opinion, Devour Ally should be made transcendent in the way ally sacrifice instakills are (intended to be) for the sake of consistency and balance. Especially for Vash’Dagon, who can otherwise summon stuff he can’t devour. (If this cannot be directly facilitated due to coding reasons, have the spell dispel then curse the target, then attempt the devour, which would work on anything but the Dooms on the player side).

I’m not sure this will get any attention now that it has been marked [Not a Bug] (maybe edit to [New Info]?). The original issue brought up was to disambiguate ally instakills (sacrifices) from enemy instakills through terminology, but the Elspeth (and possibly Dullahan) thing should be considered a bug that will require some changes to the way the game works to fix. Part of what was brought up in the original post (devour being blocked by immunities) was also completely glossed over in the response, and part of it is a confirmed but still undocumented bug.

In summation:

  • BUG: All instakills that target allies are intended to pierce all immunities. Therefore, currently, Elspeth (and possibly Dullahan) are not working as intended because they fall outside this leaving Elspeth (possibly Dullahan) bugged and needing a spell change to fix
  • UNSURE: Not sure if Towers “Invulernable” are intended to be special in the sense that they are supposed to override the “ally instakills always work” rule mentioned above. If so, they need a different version of the Invulnerable trait than player obtainable dooms. Unclear if “bug” or “intended” EDIT: it appears to be the case that towers are intended to skirt the “ally instakills always work” rule. I’m pretty sure this wasn’t the case during the last invasion to have Elspeth, and the only reason she can’t kill towers now is because she can’t hit through Invulnerable, full stop
  • FEEDBACK: Not a “bug” per se, but this “ally instakill rule” should be better documented (the original conclusion that was arrived at when this thread was originally marked “not a bug”, ie., looking at changing the language of ally instakills to “sacrifice an ally”, adding a tooltip for “sacrifice” that states it bypasses immunities)
  • BUG?/FEEDBACK?: Ally Devours (Black Beast, Vash’Dagon) should probably work like this as well for not only consistency but balance and logic reasons, but they are different, they are coded differently, and I haven’t heard an official stance on this either way on the “intent” here behind Ally Devour spells and why they should or should not be treated differently from sacrifice spells. Therefore not sure if “bug” or “feedback request”, but ally devours should function like ally instakills and always work regardless of traits or statuses, including possibly some kind of terminology differentiation BEFORE POSTING EDIT: It is now been stated that things that devour allies will do so through immunities on the player teams, and these very explicity do not, therefore, bug, needs spell change to fix.
  • BUG: Vash’Dagon is intended to at least not be blocked by status effects that prevent devour, which is a confirmed (on dev QA stream), persisting (as of right before this post) but not documented (on known issues) bug that will require a spell change to fix

Super condensed TL;DR version:

It doesn’t currently work this way, and the spell(s) and/or traits would need to be changed so it does work this way, therefore, this is a bug.

Edit: And heres a clip of Elspeth, casting on and not killing an ally doom on the Player controlled side:

Edit2: Heres one of Vash’Dagon failing to devour an ally with immunity trait on the Player controlled side:

Edit3: Vash’Dagon getting a devour ally blocked by barrier on Player side (consumes barrier, just like any devour attempt would on an enemy)

7 Likes

Then the player and the AI are playing under 2 different rule sets.
If the AI is that terribly programmed that it can’t operate under the same rule set as the player. Then the game has a way bigger issue than inconsistency when dealing with allies traits.

More information!

I discussed this with a designer, I was a bit wrong sorry.

So all of the Troops mentioned by @Mithran are working as intended.

Sacrifice can kill an ally while the others can’t.

This is because Sacrifice gives Magic as part of his spell, which is the reason he sacrifices. He’s very powerful so the trade off is losing a Troop to balance his spell out.

The other Troops which insta kill an ally are balanced in other ways. For example if you were to place a Doom in your team to counter act Dullahan’s spell, the Doom would have to be in the first team slot, which makes it more susceptible to damage and makes it more likely to be the first Troop to be defeated regardless of whether Dullahan kills it or not.

I’ve given the team feedback to try to change Sacrifice’s spell text.

@awryan this is a choice based on balancing and intended game play, not due to us being inept at programming. You must defeat all Towers/Dooms/Zuul’Goth yourself to earn the points in the event, not sit there til they self destruct.

1 Like

I’m pretty sure Elspeth has sacrificed towers before. But if that’s not the case anymore then so be it.
But rather than play by two different rule books.
Troops like Elspeth or Priest should just NOT be used on defense in things where Invulnerable troops are part of the event. That way everyone can play under the same rule book.
It’s silly that this week we had Invasions were it’s elf vs Elf…just silly.