Archery - powerset is completely broken

[Blackbird]

Archery is VERY badly broken currently. Archery is VERY closely coupled to animations and extremely fragile, so ANY change to any base value requires complete rebuild of the animations and extensive additional testing. (I used to be the designated Archery guinea pig on live.) These bugs are all new as of latest or immediately previous.

 

Blazing Arrow: using incorrect animation and double-triggering the incorrect animation intermittently. Double-triggering has always consistently indicated a broken base value or broken trigger going back to I6. Usually one that has exploit potential.

Ranged Shot: ranged shot in long-cast mode is intermittently NOT being interrupted by damage. That ain't right.

Explosive Arrow: animates less than 10% of the time, if even that much. Radius is also broken - KB was observed on an enemy at over 20m.

Rain of Arrows: casting cannot be cancelled using Z key (default settings.) This is not the correct behavior since RoA was changed to a non-interrupt.

Fistful of Arrows: frequently does not fully animate. Sometimes it's first frame only, sometimes it's zero frames. Looks to be both trigger and animation error.

Aimed Shot: does not appear to be correctly animating; appears to be using snap shot animation. Aimed shot animation has multiple dropped frames visible due to a cast time adjustment. Also intermittently fails to animate at all.

Snap Shot: frequently fails to trigger even first frame of animation. Often fails to cast when animation doesn't trigger.

Aim/Build Up (Secondary): typical cast pattern is BU->AIM. When cast as AIM->BU, BU appears to trail past the animation causing subsequent cast to error or delay.

ALL powers: bow draw animation is completely broken and does not render. This is EXTREMELY undesirable because it removes a limiter and can create exploit paths.

 

Changes to archery need to be reverted to I24 using I24 animations, and any support either explicit or implied for non-default animations needs to be removed.

 

In fact, just do not touch Archery. At all. Seriously. One, it's a very fragile power set because of what was going around the time of it's original implementation. Two, the reason it got so few balance passes is because any alteration to base values that affects timing requires a complete rebuild of all animations. (Which is why we had to wait for BAB for the big balance pass post-I8.) Even a single frame disconnect between the animation and actual cast time at base values (as in non-enhanced) breaks the entire set. Every time. Unlike other sets, Archery is MUCH more tightly linked to the animation.

Believe me, animation changes have been tried before and they have never worked. Several attempts were abandoned before seeing the official test shard. The only rational thing to do is to revert and put a large sign on Archery that says "DO NOT TOUCH."

[srmalloy]

I was noticing after picking up Blazing Arrow with my Archery/Tactical Arrow Blaster that -- not always, but most of the time -- Blazing Arrow was using the Dual Blades 'Vengeful Strike' animation. It didn't seem to use the wrong animation if I had it queued up as the pending attack, but any time I hit it without having it stacked up behind another attack, the Vengeful Strike animation played.