Giant enemy hit boxes are screwy.

[Luminara]

This is something I'm only now noticing, as I tended to play TA characters on the original servers, which was... shall we say, less than optimal for soloing certain content in the past, and ranged, with plenty of AoE, so any issues related to hit boxes were undetectable from that perspective.  Playing through content on my main now, a Staff/Willpower brute, and being both melee and engaging in content which I used to avoid, I've noticed that two of my powers are essentially useless when I face extremely large enemies.  Foes such as the Eye of the Leviathan, the Thorn Tree and, unexpectedly, bank vault doors, can't be hit with Eye of the Storm, and aren't in range of Rise to the Challenge's radius.  I'm pressing my character's face against these enemies, and neither of those powers is affecting the target.  They're not missing, there's just no target there as far as those powers are concerned.

 

The target point in those hit boxes is at a height which puts them out of range for small radius PBAoEs.  Consequently, builds reliant on small radius PBAoEs are at a disadvantage when facing enemies with these messed up hit boxes.  Build-critical powers are effectively non-functional when facing over-sized foes with bad hit boxes.  That's not balanced, as it deprives melee characters of damage mitigation tools and damage dealing/increasing powers while not subjecting ranged characters to the same restriction, and it's disorienting for the player, who see their powers fail to have any effect and no explicable reason for it.

[Arc-Mage]

It's been like that since live. The one that bothers me most is the AV CoP. I have to jump to make any of my powers hit. Not many CoPs are run so the frustration is mitigated a bit. 

 

Still this problem isn't the end of the world. 

[srmalloy]

The targeting is screwy in other ways, too. I'd need to go back through characters to assemble a list, but I've noticed in MSRs during the pylon phase with my ranged characters that most powers target the pillar a short distance below the rotating top, but some target the base of the pillar, with no apparent consistency -- within a single powerset, one or two attacks shoot the base, while the rest shoot higher. It doesn't seem to affect combat, so I haven't bothered to submit anything about it; it's just one more quirk of the game.

[Glacier Peak]

I always thought it was because I couldn't zoom out enough. Interesting!

[TheZag]

Also savage leap never works on destructible objects like vault doors and all the stuff in mayhem missions.  It says target is blocked while my other melee attacks work just fine.  I assume that other teleporting attacks have the same issue (shield charge,  lightning rod, ect.)  But i havent specifically tested them.

 

Edited March 26, 2022 by TheZag

[Luminara]

1 hour ago, TheZag said:

I assume that other teleporting attacks have the same issue (shield charge,  lightning rod, ect.)

 

No error message, but they deal no damage and there are no Missed notifications in the ToHit channel or any of the Pet channels, so neither Shield Charge nor Lightning Rod are considering a vault door to be a target (testing now on my Shield/Elec tank).

[InvaderStych]

1 hour ago, Luminara said:

No error message, but they deal no damage and there are no Missed notifications in the ToHit channel or any of the Pet channels, so neither Shield Charge nor Lightning Rod are considering a vault door to be a target (testing now on my Shield/Elec tank).

 

Most objects that are protected from teleport will flummox Location targeted powers that are using a macro to make them "targeted."  I don't clearly remember, but I think that vault doors also flummox Savage Leap.  At least with SC and LR one can fall back on the reticle to get vault doors or other objects that flummox the macro.  Burst of Speed macros do the same thing.  I have a feeling that there are still some objects which consistently don't end up in the SC/LR/BoS "Area" even though they should be, thus not taking damage as you noted, but I don't think this is a consistent problem as I've been able to damage objects with SC and BoS which could not be directly targeted with my macros simply by landing the fallback reticle near them. Savage Leap/Feral Charge are already targeted to an entity so no recourse for those.

 

FWIW:

 

The hitboxes in Big Giant Things is a known issue.  But I don't think that a fix for that will necessarily resolve the issue with vault doors and other destructible objective objects that are protected from being teleported.

Edited March 26, 2022 by InvaderStych

[Luminara]

3 minutes ago, InvaderStych said:

Most objects that are protected from teleport will flummox Location targeted powers that are using a macro to make them "targeted."

 

I also tested manually targeting on the vault door.  Same result.  It's not the bind/macro (i use a bind for Shield Charge, macro for Lightning Rod), it's the (s)hit box.

[InvaderStych]

Ok. I had to double check the Vault doors, because I know my /SD and /Martial characters have no issues with some of the other entities you mentioned.  It appears that Giant Static Objects are the most problematic, while Giant Mobile Objects (Crimson Bot, etc) are in a better place.

 

First though, to be clear - I was not blaming the bind or macro.  There are/were objects that are/were immune to being teleported which does/did prevent them from being the target of tele-attacks.  This is/was true of both location targeted and entity targeted powers.  The difference between these and vault doors is that those objects would still take AoE damage.  I did notice that the Vault Door worked with both combat teleport and the tele-portion of SC, so that either was never evident on vault doors (my tele-toons didn't really do mayhems) or was fixed during teleport pool updates, which is when the tele-immunity problem surfaced.  For a while there this problem existed on Recluse's towers and Hoe-Dotz' portals as well.  Now that I write this out I feel like I am talking about a teleport thing that was largely fixed.

 

So let's rule that out.

 

Vault doors are also immune to Mass Levitate as it happens, which I suspect means they have some extra oddity to them that is not the same thing as let's say the Giant Crimson Bot, or any of the other Giant entities where Melee players are forced to stand on the ground in order to be effective against them.

 

I know there is a giant door/wall someplace where this also is a problem, but I don't remember where.

 

Long story still long.  I don't think that the cause/problem is necessarily the same for each entity.  There are "Giant" things that definitely take damage from SC and Mass Lev if I am at their feet (super #$^#ing annoying btw) and the Vault door clearly was not.

 

Like all things Cities, it's an inconsistent mess.  FWIW, they are known issues and I am reasonably confident that some of them are on the radar for upcoming improvements.

Edited March 26, 2022 by InvaderStych

[TheZag]

One other thing on some of the large targets.  If i place the drop ship on follow with my dark melee,  single target melee attacks will fire off,  but the cone shadow maul wont because follow isnt close enough.  but all of those powers have a 7 foot range so they should all work from the same spot.  my broadsword also with head splitter 10 feet cone wont fire off from following the drop ship but disembowel is a 7 foot single target and follow is close enough to make it work.  All of those cone powers work if i manually move closer to the drop ship,  usually along its side.

[Luminara]

7 hours ago, TheZag said:

One other thing on some of the large targets.  If i place the drop ship on follow with my dark melee,  single target melee attacks will fire off,  but the cone shadow maul wont because follow isnt close enough.  but all of those powers have a 7 foot range so they should all work from the same spot.  my broadsword also with head splitter 10 feet cone wont fire off from following the drop ship but disembowel is a 7 foot single target and follow is close enough to make it work.  All of those cone powers work if i manually move closer to the drop ship,  usually along its side.

 

That occurs with all melee cones on all targets, regardless of cone length or target size.  AoEs (all melee cones are AoEs, despite not always being categorized as such in power definitions, because they all have radii and that's what the engine looks at) use a different prediction algorithm than that used by single-target powers (which is why we don't see oddities like Rain of Fire's graphics curving to hit a moving target, or Fistful of Arrows' projectiles swerving to nail something moving to the side, whereas we do see Moonbeam arcing gracefully to catch up to a runner), and when rooting and movement are thrown into the mix, the engine sees the target as always being out of range and out of radius.  Moving slightly ahead of the target permits the AoE to activate because it places both the player character and the target at points which can be considered static, from the engine's perspective, at the instant of power activation.