Damage vs Blaster - not much difference

[aethereal]

11 hours ago, drbuzzard said:

Have you never had it do different number of volleys? I've seen that all the time. It can be 1, 2, or 3. I think I read a developer mentioning it was supposed to be equal chances, but it doesn't work. 

 

I took time on my archery sentinel and notices that it only did one most of the time. 

I think it pulses two or three times, 0.4 seconds apart, but there's no conditionality on it that I can see.

 

I don't think that your description of it is accurate unless there's something about the power coding that I'm fundamentally misunderstanding (which is always possible).

[drbuzzard]

6 minutes ago, aethereal said:

I think it pulses two or three times, 0.4 seconds apart, but there's no conditionality on it that I can see.

 

I don't think that your description of it is accurate unless there's something about the power coding that I'm fundamentally misunderstanding (which is always possible).

 

It does 1, 2, or 3. It doesn't do any number all the time. I spent some time testing this on my sentinel, and it was a rather set of chances. If it pulses only once it does damage well below what is normal for sentinel t9s. 2 pulses gets you the sentinel damage norm, and of course 3 gets you above it. Hence it should average 2 pulses but doesn't. That is a problem. 

[Maelwys]

12 hours ago, drbuzzard said:

Have you never had it do different number of volleys? I've seen that all the time. It can be 1, 2, or 3. I think I read a developer mentioning it was supposed to be equal chances, but it doesn't work. 

 

I took time on my archery sentinel and notices that it only did one most of the time. 

 

The only thing I'm aware of that could be causing that is the separate ToHit check in each damage pulse. Is your slotted accuracy in the power itself high enough? (Remember it's a pseudopet so only the first tick is likely to be affected by Accuracy Set Bonuses/Kismet/etc)

[drbuzzard]

14 minutes ago, Maelwys said:

 

The only thing I'm aware of that could be causing that is the separate ToHit check in each damage pulse. Is your slotted accuracy in the power itself high enough? (Remember it's a pseudopet so only the first tick is likely to be affected by Accuracy Set Bonuses/Kismet/etc)

I'm slotted with IO sets (think it's purple sent set in RoA). Accuracy is quite high. I was shooting at grays in RWZ so I wasn't going to miss. My test was to see how often it landed. I did it a couple dozen times. 

[aethereal]

12 hours ago, drbuzzard said:

I'm slotted with IO sets (think it's purple sent set in RoA). Accuracy is quite high. I was shooting at grays in RWZ so I wasn't going to miss. My test was to see how often it landed. I did it a couple dozen times. 

I got interested enough to test, as I happen to have a level 50 Archery sentinel.  I went around in Peregrine Island and tried to snipe at small spawns with bosses in them to make it easy to see the numbers.

 

It's a bit frustrating since the pseudopet indirection hides all the to-hit rolls from you in the combat window, so you just have to go by eyeballing the orange numbers.

 

For reasons passing understanding, Sentinel Rain of Arrows does its damage in two packets of lethal damage.  So for each "tick" that hits, you expect to see two orange numbers.

 

My experience was:

 

• Most of the time, I saw 3 ticks of damage (six total numbers)
• A non-trivial amount of time, I saw 2 ticks of damage, in a way that does suggest to me that something might be off, here.  Especially, in one case, I was shooting two different Warhulks and I did 2 ticks to each of them.
• Once, I saw only one tick of damage

Based on City of Data, these are pulses of damage from a pseudopet autopower.  Each one will roll to hit separately, so it wouldn't be crazy for one to miss.  But I did think it was weird that as far as I noticed, I always saw the same number of ticks for everyone in the group.  That seems unlikely if it's just a to-hit roll situation.

 

So, contra @drbuzzard, I did not see a majority case of only one tick happening, but with @drbuzzard, I did see enough here to make me suspicious that there might be a bug.

 

My understanding of the correct behavior is:

 

• All three ticks are guaranteed to go off (for targets that remain in the area of effect -- and they happen quickly, so I never saw anyone move significantly in the 0.8 seconds that it takes for the ticks to all go).
• They do roll to hit, so it is possible for some ticks to hit and some to miss, but that should be unlikely in the case of high chance-to-hit, and particularly unlikely for two targets to simultaneously get the same two ticks hitting.

[Uun]

All versions of Rain of Arrows summon a pseudo pet with a 1s duration that does the damage. They summon a separate pseudo pet with a 3s duration that provides the visual.