Why Certain Stuns Don't Work as Intended

[Madnex]

---Click to skip to the last post for the updated version!---

 

Cutting to the chase, certain skills and effects appear to reset the stun immunity timer without the target receiving a stun. This does not only greatly affect the Mage class (mainly in PvP) but also several other pets and skills that offer a chance for one or more stuns.

Note: This topic does not refer to debuff-cleansing Arcane Abilities like Ironbite's and Misty's that end up resetting the stun immunity timer as well.

This is still undergoing research but here are a few examples of stuns not working at all or with halved effects:

1. Trying to stun a PvE or PvP target with Singe's 75% stun in Arcane Ability after the targets are under Damage over Time from say, Noxious Bolt. There's simply no effect.
2. Trying to stun a PvP target with a charged weapon normal attack (eg. charged bow) while Noxious Bolt's or Frost Bolt's DoT is in effect. There are not even stars above the target's head, no indication that the target was stunned at all.
3. Trying to stun a PvP target with Fireball after landing a few attacks. The stun is so much shorter in duration (when comparing with a two-second full Fireball stun) that you're only going to notice the knockback.

It seems that any hits severely decrease the duration of the next stun while in certain cases, Damage over Time effects completely prevent the stuns! While the results are not conclusive yet, this appears to be quite a bothersome issue. This is precisely the reason why Singe owners report that the stun is nonexistent - because 90% of the time the AA is used after the targets have already been hit either by skills or the passive attacks of the very pet!

Lastly, there is a differentiation not only in stuns but also in panic/terrify duration times (tested with both targets under the exact same conditions and sometimes the panic lasted longer on one of the two in PvP and with 12 targets under the same conditions in PvE).

So the questions are simple:

1. Why are there not solid stun duration-times for each effect?
2. Why is randomness and simple hits reducing the stun durations?
3. What is the purpose of such a nerf on stuns, if this behavior is intentional?

Here's how to reproduce this abnormality to stun when the target is under DoT effect, in steps:

(1)Get in an elite dungeon and gather a few mobs that can be stunned (green dragkin here).


(2)Park them (I chose six of them since that's the max target for charged Noxious Bolt).


3)Summon Singe in range (making sure his AA will hit all of the targets).


(4)Tap the AA, record how many mobs stunned. Repeat, calculate average (mine came out 60% out of 20 tries).


(5)Repeat in an equal amount but previous to AA, fire a skill that will damage all targets (charged Noxious Bolt for me).


(6)Compare results. Nothing to compare here really, there were 0/120 mobs stunned by AA after they were damaged.


Conclusion:
That's a 75% stun chance being 0% most of the time.



Comments are welcome as always. Thanks for reading.

[Jazzi]

Hi there Mad,

I must stop reading threads started by you, because they are going to make quit the game :-P. I wish I had singe to try this out. Have you tried it with any other stun pets like slag? Or others with 100% stun like george/kelvin? Btw since when do mobs have a stun-immunity-proc? Thank you for the game mechanics testing!

Regards,

Azek

P.S. I have never seen a game with so many bugs, which have persisted for a long time, and seem to require a very simple fix. There are three possible explanations for this:

1. They are desperately understaffed and cant cope with the sheer amount of tasks.
2. They havent actually compiled the game and have a terrible contract with the support/programming company. I work in a very big international company and back in the day they have signed some contracts for one of the company-wide high criticality tools (processes). As a result fixing bugs for this tools costs us 15 k + Euro per man hour (mostly more than 2 people must be involved), whereas for the newer tools this kind of support is free or you get charged a minimal amount. So this one tool, as the bugs are rather cosmetic and do not flaw/exacerbate the work-flow, will never get fixed.
3. This last one is more a joke, that a serious possibility. They think that most players are never gonna find the bugs, or care about them if found :-)

[Raselph]

I LOVE THE LAST IMG!!!

that cute lil whelp doing "rawr!"

[Madnex]

Hi there Mad,

I must stop reading threads started by you, because they are going to make quit the game :-P. I wish I had singe to try this out. Have you tried it with any other stun pets like slag? Or others with 100% stun like george/kelvin? Btw since when do mobs have a stun-immunity-proc? Thank you for the game mechanics testing!

Well, this type of behavior is not present for all stuns or else people would have noticed much earlier. Obviously, this was not intended; mobs in PvE have the bare minimum of stun immunity at 1.5-2 seconds, which is the time they need to get back up on their feet after the knockdown and stun (ice is an exception, allows permafreezing).

Slag doesn't have a stun, it has terrify which is another word for panic. That is a different type of movement-impairing effect that does not follow the immunity rules --meaning you can "stun" mobs and players back to back with a couple Slags--, similar to how ice works in PvE.

The inability to stun at all or the severely reduced stun durations is the subject of this topic, trying to shed some light to faulty mechanisms so further changes planned for the future (eg. mage buff) can be assessed from a correct state of the game.

Another way to get some not-so-fun results this is to use Noxious Bolt on any target in PvP and then attempt to stun them with charged bow. It will fail, 100% of the time. Any skill/Arcane Ability with Damage over Time should prevent charged weapon stun and several other pet stun apart from the aforementioned exceptions.

[Madnex]

Updating...

So the questions are simple:

1. Why are there not solid stun duration-times for each effect?
2. Why is randomness and simple hits reducing the stun durations?
3. What is the purpose of such a nerf on stuns, if this behavior is intentional?

I believe I've found the answer to the questions here, judging by a recent dev's comment.

- During the freeze, about every .5 seconds there will be a X% chance for the trapped player to break free. This would likely be around 25% or 33%, but could go as high as 50% depending on the maximum length of the freeze.

So the culprit is most likely the mechanism explained above. A chance to free yourself every 0.5 seconds would perfectly explain the diversity in panic/terrify durations, meaning why under the same conditions, two characters had afflicted those effects for different time length, apparently in a random manner. With those three questions out of the way, there's only one more thing to be answered..

Why doesn't Singe's stun and charged bow stun work on targets under Noxious Bolt/Frost Bolt/Fireball DoT(damage over time)??

[Madnex]

This also happens if the target is under Frost Bolt's DoT (or any other skill's/pet's DoT) in PvP. Disappointing news for sorcs.

[Kakashis]

Maybe that's why I never see Singe do it's stun in pvp

[Madnex]

This has been fixed for PvE.

[Yumisa]

Yeah, there are alot of small bugs like that in this game, I have noticed for example, thet Samael, NEVER, Absolutely NEVER terrifies Spider bosses. Arachna elite in Elite caverns and The Spider boss from arena

[Astrea]

FIX SINGE !! and 4% dmg reduction is joke for him make it 5% and all will be alright in those stats, also fix his stun abaility as stated in this thread.

#BuffSingeFixSinge

[Madnex]

Yeah, there are alot of small bugs like that in this game, I have noticed for example, thet Samael, NEVER, Absolutely NEVER terrifies Spider bosses. Arachna elite in Elite caverns and The Spider boss from arena

It's actually a visual bug. Terrifies/panics work on Arachna too but it's not visible as there's no reaction but a slight stop. You can cancel red zones with these AA's if you time it, I've tried.

FIX SINGE !! and 4% dmg reduction is joke for him make it 5% and all will be alright in those stats, also fix his stun abaility as stated in this thread.

#BuffSingeFixSinge

They already fixed it.. that was my last post here. I'd advise you to check out this chart here, 4% dmg reduction is not too small at all.

[Rx8]

Finally singe is now able to stun with a DoT effect. Wew