Exactly this should happen or lethal dmg should not be reflected at all.
It should go like this:
Hero does skull dmg
infernal armor reflects 25%
Bulls eye triggers
enemy dies
We can go into philosophical depths here and ask why dead enemies’ traits and talent till trigger after death. The famous Backup talent for example, you kill the hero and it summons a final bandit cause it triggers on ally death. WTF So the hero is an ally in this case, yet Voice of Orpheus’ spell is not boosted by his own mana.
1- I’m willing to accept that when dealing normal (non Lethal) Skull damage, Infernal Armor reflects it based on the final damage calculated and not actual amount of Armor/Life reduced to zero. E.g. if my Attack was buffed to 400 and I match Skulls to take out a troop with only 100 Life left I may not enjoy receiving 100 Skull damage from Infernal Armor (instead of 25) but I can at least understand how it happened.
2 - It doesn’t really impact me in a practical sense anyway.
I don’t generally run 1-hit KO strategies, even when I do I build my team around the troop’s for-sure effects (e.g. running Dracos 1337 for the Silence, Mana Drain, and third passive trait; running Persistence for that 3rd passive trait and green mana killer), and you can just avoid the issue entirely with a preemptive Barrier. (Unless … wait, actually, that sounds like a fun experiment to set up and research sometime)
(As far as the topic title is concerned, I would suggest [DISPUTED] makes a better tag since the discussion is about the underlying principle of whether it should be correct, not whether it “is” correct.)
Ah yes, that. Useful point because I have noticed more than one Troop that can Devour an ally as part of its spell, one of whom has a secondary effect occurring only if the Devour succeeds (and is noted by the card text).
Devs consistently take an extremely narrow view of what a bug means, excluding anything that is just irrational or inconsistent design. Always seems to me to be a politician’s response to avoid engaging with the important issues, which is whether something is operating the way that it makes sense to operate
Thanks for reply Jeto.
However, this is dissatisfying at least.
I remember clearly how this same issue used to be around regarding Zuul Goth cast.
They fixed it in a couple of weeks by making Zuul disenchanting enemy before casting (workaround, patch, fix, call it whatever you want).
This makes clearly understand that kill-on-reflect behavior is unwanted.
[incidentally it made Zuul also work against barriered enemies; there was a time when barrier used to save against Zuul as weel]
I know that consistency is the bottom priority for dev team; we all know and it’s proven each day more.
But still here we are. Something is NOT working correctly.
State otherwise is simply fake.
I can agree that it happens very few times and priority is low and difficult to reproduce and blah blah , but not that is intended.
Anyway thanks for reporting Jeto. It was worth a shot.
Disillusion is the way!
If the developers have said “This is what we intend to happen” then just accept it as not a bug. You could change this to “Suggestions and Feedback” though!
I could cite dozens of examples of stuff that the devs shouldn’t “get away with.” But there’s a much stronger argument for fighting back against developer gaslighting:
If something in the game doesn’t make sense or is badly designed, that increases the chance of players leaving the game. Remember that the vast majority of players don’t even know the forums exist. It is in our interests and the interests of the developers to fix the stuff that alienates players.
In my opinion, this is far more important than adding “new features,” as you get the double-whammy of disengaged players leaving and long-term, disenchanted players giving up on the game.
For a bit of a history lesson, the game originally didn’t have any proper “lethal” handling. The Bull’s Eye trait was a hack, lethal damage was handled by changing the skull damage dealt to 10000, which causes the hero to always get killed by reflected damage as a side effect. Troops added later handle this properly, by killing the target instead of dealing 10000 damage. Unfortunately, this never got ported back to the archer hero. Maybe it would be time clean up the old coding and get the handling back in sync with what all the other troops do?
Something got backported before, looks like the dmg is capped at 2000.
I made a team, and pumped up archer to 1000 hp before stared to attack troops with infernal armor. Bull’s Eye triggered and I survived with around 380 hp, I was not exactly at 1000k hp at that moment.
I did some testing and Assassins 3rd trait does not lead to suicide.
Looks like not every combination were covered
spell vs status effect (reflect) → OK
trait vs status effect (reflect) → OK
trait vs trait (infernal armor) → FAIL
spell vs trait → does not exists currently
Based on that assassin is not killing himself with his trait I assume nothing had been changed around lethal dmg but reflect got some hack-fix. So the old implementation is still there.
Honestly this is such a rare bug/situation/technicality that I would hope the devs haven’t worked on it. With the amount of much bigger and higher-priority bugs they need to fix first they hopefully haven’t spent any time on this one yet.
I do not expect an immediate fix, but it should be in the bug tracker.
And it is good to know that you can kill yourself with archer against infernal armor.
Hmm, can we maybe add a test with King Bloodwood’s Mega-Thorns? I don’t see any reason for the result to differ from Infernal Armor, but we don’t know for sure.
EDIT: Welp, that didn’t take long at all, literally my first Skull match in the battle and it confirmed a double kill:
Hero with 29 Attack, Archer class fully traited
King Bloodwood with 33 Armor 38 Life (total 71)
Assassinate triggered, King Bloodwood died (game displays “-71” for damage) AND hero died (NO damage number visible).
Frame-by-frame review showed that technically, the Hero died first (via Assassinate+Infernal Armor) before King Bloodwood also died (via Assassinate). It was only a few frames, but … weird?
We might have a secondary bug/issue: Traits like Infernal Armor should display a damage number against the troop who triggered it, to be more consistent with Reflect. Currently there is NO visual feedback that the attacking troop incurred ANY damage from the trait (especially given the distracting nature of the attack itself). Other traits that inflict damage (Storm, Aspect of Death, etc.) at least show some effect on the troop who received it, but Infernal Armor (et al) doesn’t do this, it doesn’t “show its work” so to speak, it is just “hey why is my lead troop suddenly low/out of armor? Why is their Life decreasing? How did my hero die?”
(And while I’m at it, can Mana Burn display damage numbers too?)
PS - I’m doing Delve runs today and my Dracos 1337 just took out a Bunnicorn through Reflect without any damage in return. I distinctly heard the “dispel” sound FX as Bunnicorn got disintegrated, but keep in mind that Dracos’s spell only inflicts (in order) Silence, Stun, and Mana Drain prior to attempting the kill. I know patch notes mentioned that “lethal damage dispels the target first” and I can’t say I was un-happy with the result this time, but now I realize that “Lethal Damage” has no helptext, no in-game explanation of exactly what it does how, and if it’s going to bundle a distinct secondary effect (Dispel) then we should get one. Something like:
Additionally, this is why Lethal Damage spells never have problems with Reflect, because it specifically dispels them – thus we can’t actually use it in comparisons.
Gathering what everyone has been sharing here and wanted to drop a summary of what is being reported.
Both in case anyone has experienced something different or if there were any further examples that I had missed, or you wanted to share.
Appreciate the depth of some of the reports as well, helpful when collating & sharing this information with the development team!
The instant kill from Archer’s Bull’s Eye trait (15% chance for skull damage to be lethal) can be reflected by Infernal Armor (which states it only reflects 25% of skull damage) and kill your own troop.
Issues raised:
Should Lethal damage be reflected by Infernal Armor when the Trait only states that 25% of the Skull damage will be reflected?
An example comparison is Devour, where the damage reflected back is calculated from the life/armor lost from the enemy.
To this, where Zuul’s cast will Dispel before it applies “Annihilation” so it cannot be reflected should this be applicable to all traits/spells that do lethal damage.
Infernal armor is reflecting lethal damage above what is visually displayed to the player on the enemy troop. ie. Bull’s Eye shows the total damage done to the enemy troop as 500 (the enemy troop’s total life and armor), the player’s troop has 1000 Life and Armor and instantly dies.
The player’s own Troop dies (or takes damage) with no damage numbers displayed on it as it dies.
Currently there is no help text for Lethal Damage within the game or within the Status Effects Game Guide article.
Again, I am discussing this further with the team but feel free to add other extra info/feedback on Bull’s Eye, Infernal Armor & Lethal Interact.
My biggest issue with any sort of reflect damage is it’s calculated based on potential damage rather than actual damage.
If my troop has 60 attack and does damage to a troop that has 0 armor and 8 life. Then 15 damage is done to my troop instead of 2 damage.
Not a big deal with level 20 vs level 20 troop. But a huge deal when it’s level 20 vs level 500 troops.
And with the games direction to consistently face David vs Goliath, it would be nice if David’s slingshot didn’t cause death to itself because skulls cascaded that were supposed to favor the player in that instance.
I understand that questions of “should” tend to be thorny by their very nature, but questions of consistency (e.g. Assassinate vs. Devour, Infernal Armor vs. Reflect) are easier to evaluate, especially keeping in mind what information is actually shown to the player in-game.
Of course no dmg should be reflected at all from lethal dmg spells or traits.
The main problem as it was stated many time that lethal dmg implementation is wrong, it uses the regular dmg mechanism instead of a kill switch.
Do lethal dmg does any dmg? No it kills the target → no reflected dmg
Do devour does any dmg? No it devours the target → no reflected dmg
Do lethal dmg trait do dmg? No they kill the target → no reflected dmg
Archer’s Bull’s Eye can lead to suicide on target with infernal armor when it shouldn’t.
Megvore’s last trait can lead to suicide if it triggers on a target with reflect. My guild mate found out this the hard way in Mirrored Halls delve.
Oh, a few more complications: go fight Eternal Stonehammer in the Boss Dungeon and you may notice his boss trait (Mega-Unbreakable) blocks Bullseye. Which … actually makes sense given the wording of the class trait (implying it is still typed as Skull Damage, rather than “Lethal Damage” separately).
This doesn’t really impact the boss fight, and I can still bypass the trait with Curse+Stun or Berserk if I want to. (One Shield of Ursksaya cast on a Razor Armor hero / Carnex and whoops I just one-shot the boss…)
On the other hand, look at Scorpius, the Mythic of Drifting Sands. When the enemy is poisoned, it is clear that the Lethal Damage is inflicted separately from the initial damage (e.g. two damage numbers appear on the target), which is consistent with troops like P4-NTH4 (Scylla, Captain Macaw, etc) who can also damage+kill, except for the phrasing of Scorpius’s spelltext (“The damage is lethal on any Poisoned enemy”) which is similar to the phrasing of Bullseye. And I am not able to test how Scorpius’s spell interacts with e.g. Reflect…
