Glue Arrow does not prevent enemies from jumping and certain enemies can fly over it

[TimesSeven]

I'm using a TA controller. When I lay down Glue Patch, enemies that are CLEARLY affected by this (diminished run speed) can still jump -- allowing them to hurdle the patch.  According to the stats listed IN-Game:

 

 Effect Area: Location (16 targets max)

Attack Types: AoE defense

 

-90.00%% run speed for 1m 1s on target

-40.00%% strength to recharge for 1m 1s on target Ignores buffs and enhancements

10.00 fly protection for 1m 1s(1m 1s) on target Ignores buffs and enhancements

-3.50 max run speed for 1m 1s on target Ignores buffs and enhancements

-50000.00%% jump height for 1m 1s on target Ignores buffs and enhancements unresistable

 

How is it possible for a non-AV, non-boss character to jump out of the patch? Again, they are CLEARLY affected by it -- this can be easily duplicated. I often use it in doorways or around corners. Once I'm the focus of aggro, but out of line of sight, they will run up to the patch, become slowed, and then hop until they clear the patch. 

 

Flying characters will realize that they can't fly over the patch and will do THE EXACT SAME THING. This is programmed behavior. Someone programmed the characters to respond in this manner because they ALL DO. Arachnos, Warriors, Banished Pantheon, PPD, Witches, Longbow, Snakes.  Either fix it so it doesn't happen or remove the stat from the description so I am not CONSTANTLY surprised when it keeps happening. 

[TimesSeven]

As you can see by the animated trail, they are CLEARLY being affected by glue patch, yet...

[kelika2]

things to consider:

enemy resistances

your level vs the targets level

target limit (since corner shots)

server data ticks.  jousting for players with combat jumping is a neat thing.  npcs might not fully something something your end

and -5000% sounds like a lot but some npcs might have a million jump height.  with enough Kinetic's inersha players can overcome a web grenade

[Luminara]

16 hours ago, TimesSeven said:

enemies that are CLEARLY affected by this (diminished run speed) can still jump

 

Glue's -JumpHeight isn't intended to prevent enemies from jumping, only limit how high they can jump.  Immobilizes disable movement, debuffs don't.  Slow is a debuff.  Debuffs can reduce enemy movement to a floor, but never completely disable it.  That oversight was fixed 20 years ago, when debuff floors were set and enemies given minimum movement abilities that couldn't be reduced to nil without using status effects, in response to players exploiting Slows.

 

Not a bug.

[Arc-Mage]

Those are awful Purple enemies you are fighting. They are probably out of the Resistance Levels for your Glue Arrow. 

[TimesSeven]

On 10/22/2023 at 12:49 AM, kelika2 said:

things to consider:

enemy resistances

your level vs the targets level

target limit (since corner shots)

server data ticks.  jousting for players with combat jumping is a neat thing.  npcs might not fully something something your end

and -5000% sounds like a lot but some npcs might have a million jump height.  with enough Kinetic's inersha players can overcome a web grenade

I could absolutely see this on certain mob types, yet all the mobs I tested are able to jump while being in the glue patch. Warriors, prisoners, The Lost… none of them have resistances or Kins

[TimesSeven]

On 10/22/2023 at 2:07 PM, Arc-Mage said:

Those are awful Purple enemies you are fighting. They are probably out of the Resistance Levels for your Glue Arrow. 

Definitely true, however I have fought NPCs ten level below me and they do the exact same thing

[TimesSeven]

On 10/22/2023 at 10:25 AM, Luminara said:

 

Glue's -JumpHeight isn't intended to prevent enemies from jumping, only limit how high they can jump.  Immobilizes disable movement, debuffs don't.  Slow is a debuff.  Debuffs can reduce enemy movement to a floor, but never completely disable it.  That oversight was fixed 20 years ago, when debuff floors were set and enemies given minimum movement abilities that couldn't be reduced to nil without using status effects, in response to players exploiting Slows.

 

Not a bug.

Power analyzer clearly shows the target’s jump height, debuff resistance, and all current buffs affecting the target. They do not have these abilities. Any of the wiki pages can show the buffs on enemy types. In this case, Longbow does not have -jump resistance.  In fact, power analyzer also shows their current jump height as well. 
 

and, as indicated by the screenshots, notice how they are jumping so high that they are going through the collision mesh of the ceiling.  Since that SHOULDN’T be normally possible in-game, can you explain how they are doing this? 
 

Unless you are a developer and can show me code, this IS a bug. 

[TheZag]

Patch notes 6-3-2004 (issue 0) :

 

 

A minimum movement speed has been set for all villains so they cannot be Immobilized (zero movement) with a slow power (e.g. Caltrops or Snow Storm).  To fully immobilize a foe, you will need to use an Immobilize power.

[Luminara]

9 minutes ago, TimesSeven said:

They do not have these abilities.

 

Everything in the game has minimum attribs, below which they can't be reduced.  Enemies, player characters, even objects.

 

10 minutes ago, TimesSeven said:

Any of the wiki pages can show the buffs on enemy types.

 

Perhaps you should be looking at the correct pages.

 

Here, for example, is the Limits page, in which it very clearly states the following in the Movement Speed section:

 

Quote

Minimum

Players and critters have maximum run, flight, and jumpspeed penalties of -90%.

 

Jump Height isn't noted on that page, but looking at City of Data's attrib tables, under StrMin (minimum Strength, the debuff floor), you'll find 0.1 floors (0.1 being 10%) for all Jump Height, Speed Jumping, Speed Flying, Speed Running and Speed Swimming entries, with the two exceptions being Boss Monster Flying (flying GMs) and Boss Archvillain Flying (flying AVs), which have minimums of 1 (meaning, their movement can't be debuffed at all).

 

These floors were set on June 3, 2004.

 

21 minutes ago, TimesSeven said:

and, as indicated by the screenshots, notice how they are jumping so high that they are going through the collision mesh of the ceiling.  Since that SHOULDN’T be normally possible in-game, can you explain how they are doing this?

 

Fly increases MovementControl and MovementFriction by 800%, both mechanics which improve Jumping, and neither of which is affected by Slow.

[TimesSeven]

2 hours ago, Luminara said:

 

Jump Height isn't noted on that page, but looking at City of Data's attrib tables, under StrMin (minimum Strength, the debuff floor), you'll find 0.1 floors (0.1 being 10%) for all Jump Height, Speed Jumping, Speed Flying, Speed Running and Speed Swimming entries, with the two exceptions being Boss Monster Flying (flying GMs) and Boss Archvillain Flying (flying AVs), which have minimums of 1 (meaning, their movement can't be debuffed at all).

 

These floors were set on June 3, 2004.

 

 

Fly increases MovementControl and MovementFriction by 800%, both mechanics which improve Jumping, and neither of which is affected by Slow.

 So, what you are saying is that the jump ability cannot be prevented by glue arrow or are you saying that certain types of enemies cannot be prevented from jumping?

 

Say, if I were ten levels higher than a minion, would they be able to jump out of it?

 

also just to clarify, it’s the reasons that you list above are the ONLY reasons that allow characters to jump through it, correct?

 

One last question, does Power Analyzer reflect the true debugged stats of an enemy NPC?

 

 

[TimesSeven]

2 hours ago, Luminara said:

Fly increases MovementControl and MovementFriction by 800%, both mechanics which improve Jumping, and neither of which is affected by Slow.

 

 

BTW, this doesn’t answer how the enemy NPCs are ignoring the collision mesh on the map. It’s a hard surface in the game. They shouldn’t be able to go through a ceiling whether glue patch was used or not. Now that IS a bug

[Luminara]

5 minutes ago, TimesSeven said:

So, what you are saying is that the jump ability cannot be prevented by glue arrow

 

Correct.  Immobilizations can disable jumping.  Debuffs can't, the game design specifically disallows it by setting a hard limit to how much movement can be debuffed.

 

14 minutes ago, TimesSeven said:

Say, if I were ten levels higher than a minion, would they be able to jump out of it?

 

Yes.  You can be level 50+3 and use a Slow on a level 1 critter and it still won't reduce that critter's movement rates below the 10% floor.

 

15 minutes ago, TimesSeven said:

also just to clarify, it’s the reasons that you list above are the ONLY reasons that allow characters to jump through it, correct?

 

Mechanically, yes.  Developmentally, debuff floors are one of the ways of compensating for critters' lack of intelligence, and in the case of Slows, a necessity to create a firm differentiation between Slows and Immobilizes so Immobilizes have purpose and utility in the game.

 

25 minutes ago, TimesSeven said:

One last question, does Power Analyzer reflect the true debugged stats of an enemy NPC?

 

Power Analyzer is just combat attributes, and combat attributes is just a front end for select stats, tidied up and made moderately presentable, and only presentable in such a way as to be visually appealing to the average player.  It doesn't tell you what floors are unless you reach them.  Or caps.  Or anything about attribs, or modifiers, or scalars or anything else at the underpinning level of the engine.  Use City of Data for specificity and more in-depth information.

 

10 minutes ago, TimesSeven said:

BTW, this doesn’t answer how the enemy NPCs are ignoring the collision mesh on the map. It’s a hard surface in the game. They shouldn’t be able to go through a ceiling whether glue patch was used or not. Now that IS a bug

 

The models weren't clipped, only the textures, the visible graphics surrounding the model used.  And that is normal in this game.  Stand next to a wall and /e kata, then turn your character and you'll see the same thing happen.  Longbow Eagles are animated slightly above their models when Fly is active, so when they're up near a ceiling surface, they can appear to clip, but it's just that, appearance.

 

Real clipping does happen, and is a bug, but it's almost always caused by KB knocking the critter right against a surface and trapping it when it animates standing up.  And that's not a bug that can be fixed without a complete rewrite of the engine.

[TimesSeven]

Oh well, hell. Guess that’s a power I’m going to respec out of. Its purpose was to prevent enemies from reaching me. Game mechanics has them hopping through the glue patch instead of being stuck, so that makes this ability fairly useless. Even the Longbow Eagles —who can’t not fly — are hopping over the patch. That mechanic is built into most of the enemy mobs I’ve encountered. Useless now. 
 

Luminara… the name sounds familiar. Were you on the boards with the same handle before the shutdown? If so, let me apologize immediately for questioning your answers. You were the “know all and be all” outside of a dev! 
 

Thanks for the answer. I just got sick and tired of throwing GP around the corner only to see the ENTIRE mob jumping over it to reach me. Died A LOT of times because of that. 
 

much appreciated 

Edited October 26, 2023 by TimesSeven

[Luminara]

36 minutes ago, TimesSeven said:

Oh well, hell. Guess that’s a power I’m going to respec out of. Its purpose was to prevent enemies from reaching me. Game mechanics has them hopping through the glue patch instead of being slowed to stuck, so that makes this ability fairly useless. Even the Longbow Eagles —who can’t not fly — are hopping over the patch. That mechanic is built into most of the enemy mobs I’ve encountered. Useless now.

 

Until TA was revamped, it didn't matter if they eventually hopped/crawled out of the patch, they'd still be debuffed for 30s.  Now... yeah, between it having no persistence and being changed to location-targeted, I've skipped it on my TA characters.

 

40 minutes ago, TimesSeven said:

Luminara… the name sounds familiar. Were you on the boards with the same handle before the shutdown?

 

Yes.

 

42 minutes ago, TimesSeven said:

If so, let me apologize immediately for questioning your answers.

 

Don't apologize, certainly not to me, for not accepting an answer out of hand.  I'm no more infallible or above reproach than anyone else.

[Burk]

12 hours ago, Luminara said:

Jump Height isn't noted on that page, but looking at City of Data's attrib tables, under StrMin (minimum Strength, the debuff floor), you'll find 0.1 floors (0.1 being 10%) for all Jump Height, Speed Jumping, Speed Flying, Speed Running and Speed Swimming entries, with the two exceptions being Boss Monster Flying (flying GMs) and Boss Archvillain Flying (flying AVs), which have minimums of 1 (meaning, their movement can't be debuffed at all).

 

This doesn't seem to make much sense to me. It is really easy to test that player jump height can be floored all the way to 0ft. Simply get a Malta Tac Ops to throw a web grenade on you and your feet cannot be made to leave the ground by jumping. If the minimum strength of jump height is really 0.1, that means you should always be able to jump at least 0.4ft off the ground. By that token, these NPCs should also not be able to jump ABOVE 0.4ft off the ground if they are actually jump height floored since they have the same base 4ft jump height.

 

This also cannot be explained by the NPCs having too much jump height or resistance to -jump. The NPCs' jump usually comes from some sort of Super Jump or Super Leap power and every one of those I have looked at (there are a lot of identical versions) is either regular Super Jump height (+2780%) or half regular Super Jump height (+1390%). The -jump from glue arrow is also unresistable so its -50000% jump should easily overwhelm their +jump even if it is reduced by the purple patch against the +3s in the pictures to a -32500%.

[Luminara]

5 hours ago, Burk said:

Simply get a Malta Tac Ops to throw a web grenade on you and your feet cannot be made to leave the ground by jumping.

 

You'd be better served testing with Caltrops, which isn't an Immobilize (Web Grenade is).

 

5 hours ago, Burk said:

If the minimum strength of jump height is really 0.1, that means you should always be able to jump at least 0.4ft off the ground. By that token, these NPCs should also not be able to jump ABOVE 0.4ft off the ground if they are actually jump height floored since they have the same base 4ft jump height.

 

Jump Height occupies a fuzzy point between debuff and status effect.  It's sort of both, but not, in that it's binary if the quantity is sufficient, even though it doesn't use the magnitude system.  Player character jumping can be reduced to 0' by Slows.  NPC jumping can't.  Even with all the -Jump you can stack, they can still jump their base height.

 

That's not unintentional, nor is it a quirk of the engine, and it's most definitely not a bug.  Cryptic specifically revamped enemy movement to make it work this way.  It was part of their "kill the mosquito with a cannon" approach to the problem of /Devices blasters double- and triple-stacking Caltrops to immobilize enemies and burning them down safely (they also added ranged attacks to hundreds of enemies which didn't have any at that time, due to this player behavior).  No, it's not fair.  Yes, it's ludicrous that you can debuff an enemy's jumping ability and it can still jump.  But that's the way it has to be, because NPCs don't have brains, they have very limited scripts and no ability to deviate from those scripts.  Without cheating, NPCs are no more threat than those target dummies in the Vanguard base.

[Burk]

So you're basically saying that jump height has a minimum strength of 0.1 for players and for NPCs, however the game completely ignores that and makes up its own rules for both? (Also I completely meant testing web grenade with a character that has immob protection.)

[Luminara]

4 hours ago, Burk said:

the game completely ignores that and makes up its own rules for both?

 

Yes.  And it's not an isolated case.

 

4 hours ago, Burk said:

Also I completely meant testing web grenade with a character that has immob protection.

 

Never mix test beds.  If you're going to test Slows, test Slows, not Immobilizes.

 

Like this:

 

[Burk]

53 minutes ago, Luminara said:

Never mix test beds.  If you're going to test Slows, test Slows, not Immobilizes.

 

Like this:

 

 

Under that logic, you should switch to a build with no movement bonuses, turn off sprint super jump, and make sure the Blade of Artemis is 51 to not have any purple patch (or 50 if you get rid of your own incarnate shifts). Unfortunately you can't get rid of hurdle, so you're still "mixing test beds".

[Luminara]

1 minute ago, Burk said:

 

Under that logic, you should switch to a build with no movement bonuses, turn off sprint super jump, and make sure the Blade of Artemis is 51 to not have any purple patch (or 50 if you get rid of your own incarnate shifts). Unfortunately you can't get rid of hurdle, so you're still "mixing test beds".

 

I don't need to.  I invested ten years in playing without travel powers and accumulating information on how movement works.  I have other projects now.  If you want to test it, that screenshot shows you how to go about it.

[Burk]

I have no need to test it any more than you do. My point is that the stated purpose of the power and all of the info provided to the player imply that glue arrow would prevent an NPC from jumping and having the power used on the player would confirm that. However because of hidden mechanics it does not work at all as intended against NPCs. That makes it at the very least seem like a bug to newer players. Sure I've come to just expect that behavior, but statements like "glue's -JumpHeight isn't intended to prevent enemies from jumping, only limit how high they can jump" still don't really explain the issue when by all information given to the player they are still jumping FAR above what they should have been limited to.

[TimesSeven]

I honestly wish they would just take out the -500000% jump height completely. Both of your statements is what confused the hell out of me when I was using it -- As someone who has been the victim of Tar Patch and Glue Arrow, I can't jump AT ALL, so it stood to reason that if I used it on an NPC, they wouldn't be able to jump either. That was the absolutely frustrating part was watching them just jump out of it whenever they felt like it. 

 

The other part that frustrated me was the fact that the devs KNEW THIS, so they created a program that specifically tells the NPC's to hop over (and through) the patch. If you play a TA character, you'll see every type of enemy NPC hopping over it -- even Longbow Eagles and Mu Mystics who can't land! And since GA has -fly, the NPC stops short of the patch and just hops over it. That's not learned behavior, Devs put that into the game and never mentioned it. Just take out the -50000 jump height because it seems like a complete misrepresentation of what GA does. 

 

It's basically a lie at this point. 

 

Like I told, Luminara, I'm done with Glue Arrow. It goes straight to the recycle bin for me. It has now become a very useless ability. 

[TheZag]

I doubt the devs programmed in any specific avoidance of glue arrow.  If it interacts with pathing beacons (mobs move around obstructions) or the fact that mobs jump when they cant get where they are trying to go fast enough (they jump when obstructed by another mob) would be purely coincidental and not intentional.  That doesnt make it less frustrating,  but the devs never had a vendetta against glue arrow.

 

Unfortunately,  power descriptions arent written by anyone,  it pulls the power data from the game and displays it.  -50000% just means 'their jump height is set to minimum'.  Not that their jump height will be .001 millimeter,  it will be whatever that particular NPCs minimum jump height is.

 

I find use out of it but only when i use the /powexeclocation target macro.  

 

[Wavicle]

Glue Arrow is pretty important on a TA Defender or Corruptor to keep enemies in the patches. It's not going to keep them around a corner, but it will keep them from spreading out too much. In addition, the -Recharge is very important.

 

It may not be good at doing what you've been trying to do with it, but it is quite useful for what it actually is good at. I wouldn't drop Glue from any of my TAs, with the possible exception of a Controller with powers in the primary that accomplish the same thing.