Guild Wars 2

Some recent observations make me bring up this very old bug on Necro’s main attack in Shroud. It should be known, but basicly boils down to your lifeblast not hitting for no apparent reason. There’s been a lot of speculating what causes this and the circumstances when you hit miss seemed hard to reproduce, which is probably why this bug still exists while being on a #1 attack. I’ve looked for patterns to better report this for over a year. So here’s the thing.

It appears that the Life Blast can be bodyblocked by friendly bodies. Could it be that there is some code limiting piercing attacks to 5 targets to limit their power (like AoE)? And could it be that somehow Life Blast is counting all bodies travelled through as pierced?

Regardless of where in the actual code the bug is, my theory is confirmed by all the Life Blast behaviour checking I’ve done since coming to this conclusion. If you line up to pierce friendlies, you will see it miss. If you move to the side, it starts hitting. If you move back you miss. If you have big targets which get hit ‘higher’ so your Life Blast angles up, you will hit much more reliably since your chance to ‘pierce’ friendly bodies is less. If you have many players in melee and you’re on the outside on a ‘small’ boss, you will almost be guaranteed not to hit. But it will hit if the boss is ‘big’. Sometimes you stay in the same place and wondered why it hit/missed; this would be other players ‘clearing’ the path so you pierce less of them.

This probably means that in regular fights with multiple enemy targets, you also miss out on some pierces if you travel through friendly bodies. Hope this helps squash this very old bug. I am really looking forward to reliably land Life Blast in the future Soon™.

Thank you for reading.

Nice detective work. Thanks for reporting this.