0.9.12 - Arrows will now be real projectiles

Hey guys, I just wanted to give you a quick heads up on one of the major changes in 0.9.12 that has just been completed.

As has been mentioned elsewhere, 0.9.12 will feature PvP arenas. One of the big issues that we had with PvP in our testing was the inability to dodge arrows by moving your character out of the way. Because of this, we decided to do a major rework of bow/wand skills and turn them in to real projectiles that can be evaded, much the same way you can dodge a fireball.

The reason arrows worked this way previously was due to a set of design trade-offs. I'm going to attempt to give you guys an idea of what these were.

In Path of Exile, we really want to try and mitigate the effects of lag so that you get the correct feeling of impact at the right moment when doing an attack. Because of this, for Melee attacks we predict what the damage will be at the point you start taking a swing and that information is sent to the client in advance. The client then predicts if it should display the damage or not at the contact point of the attack.

The obvious important part of this is that you need to know in advance who the target of the attack is going to be. For a melee attack, the target is obvious. The guy standing right in front of you. For a projectile, we can't really predict who it will hit easily, and so because of this, we don't do damage prediction for projectiles. The visible damage for projectiles is delayed while you wait for the information to arrive from the server.

When we came to implement bows, we were faced with the question of if we should implement them as real projectiles or as kind of ranged version of a melee attack. There were two reasons why we picked the latter option.

The first reason is that we thought that the damage prediction ability of picking fixed targets in advance was more important than the ability to dodge arrows. Our stance on this has now reversed, especially in light of PvP.

The second reason was that there are actions that can be performed by both melee weapons and ranged weapons, the prime example being your Default attack. It was a lot easier to implement these skills if bows worked like a melee attack with an extra delay for the arrow travel time. With the new approach, we need to have a separate implementation of any skill that can be used with either melee weapon or a bow/wand.

This change has actually turned out to be quite positive for our code base because the ability to assume in a skill if it is melee or ranged has simplified quite a lot of code paths.

With all of the explaining above out of the way, here is the list of practical changes that this has caused:

• You can now dodge arrow and wand skills.
• Arrows that fail an accuracy check on a target will now pass through and may hit another target behind. This is much better than previously where it would stick in but do no damage.
• Damage from bows will no longer be predicted in advance so in laggy conditions, you will need to wait for the server's response to see the damage on the target. This behaviour is the same as you would see using fireball.
• Bonus Change: Bow/Wand skills will be able to be used with Totems and Traps so long as you are wielding a bow when you use them. This hasn't been implemented yet due a few tough implementation issues, but we are keen to do it.

We will be deploying these changes to Alpha within a few days to get feedback.

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Z999z3mystorys wrote:

woot, first of a number (I hope) of details about 9.12 soon :)

I do wonder how viable it'll be to dodge arrows/wands, I guess it depends on the speed of the projectile, right now it is possible to dodge spell effects like Ice spear as it's slow enough for it to be done, not sure how fast the projectiles will move for arrows and wand attacks

In our PvP balance sessions from now on we will be testing modifications to the base arrow speed. At the very least, it will be quite hard to hit a target that is moving horizontally to you if they are far away.

It's worth mentioning that arrow speed is now a much more important mod than before. We may decide to add some nodes of it to the passive tree, or potentially to some of the existing arrow mastery nodes.

We also have the ability to modify the arrow speed per arrow skill, so we might decide to slow down some of the "fatter" arrows.

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Covert wrote:

Does this mean I can 'shotgun' with arrows the same as I can with projectile spells?

No. there was discussion of this, but for balance reasons and to help make attacks more distinguished from spells, multiple wand projectiles or arrows from the same attack cannot "shotgun" the same target, but most spells can.

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KatGunz wrote:

Now I'm just waiting for when they make melee hits like projectiles where if you move out of the way of the swing you avoid the damage completely. It's kind of annoying to take damage when you clearly moved out of the way of the attack. :(

This does happen if you actually get far enough away.

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Dreggon wrote:

The most important question of all:

Does this mean that ranged attacks now follow the same hitscan rules as projectile spells and - provided they come into contact with a target - can no longer artificially miss?

Arrows are still subject to accuracy/evasion. But now if they miss, instead of hitting but doing no damage, they'll travel past the target and potentially hit something else behind them.

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TehHammer wrote:

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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Covert wrote:

Does this mean I can 'shotgun' with arrows the same as I can with projectile spells?

No. there was discussion of this, but for balance reasons and to help make attacks more distinguished from spells, multiple wand projectiles or arrows from the same attack cannot "shotgun" the same target, but most spells can.

I assume this means that if I shotgun something with lesser multiple projectiles and lightning arrow 2 of the arrows will pass through that shotgunned target.

Yes, just the same as now. One arrow hits, and other arrows from the same attack then ignore that hit target completely, and pass through.

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Britannicus wrote:

I think the bow totem idea is a bit flawed. This is the first time that a pet skill is based upon a characters weapons. I really don't like the idea that the bow totem would take weapon damage from your bow. a) It stretches the imagination 2) gives bow uses sole access to a swathe of options.

I would recommend this alternative:

Add a special bow totem support that can take bow skills. This bow totem support will supply the base damage to the bow skills.

Apart from the fact that this is mechanicaly impossible with how totems actually work, totems are not a "pet" skill. They are a means of using your skills from a different location. They always have been using your skills, with all your bonuses, and it would make little sense to arbitrarily change that relationship now even if we could.

As to stretching the imagination, I disagree. Every bow clearly already comes with an infinite number of arrows that deal a certain damage, why couldn't you put some of those in a totem, and have them deal the same damage?

For those asking, yes a different totem art could be made for arrow skills, but that may not happen immediately.

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Tertium_Quid wrote:

How would bow/wand skill traps/totems be handled? Since traps/totems are spells, would bows and wands be improved by spell damage? Or, would they just simply be the same as if they were directly used by a player (simply using weapons damage), but with 40% less damage in the case of totems?

Totems and traps are not, in and of themselves, spells. Skills are either spells or attacks, and totems and traps are modifiers which can be applied to those skills to change from "use the skill" to "make a thing which uses the skill". Up until now those modifiers have only been able to affect spells because we needed this chance, but they are not inherently spells themselves.

This is a great change, I love how the visual representation of the arrow now represents what actually happens. No more pincushion monsters that have barely received damage.

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dust7 wrote:

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Mark_GGG wrote:

Totems and traps are not, in and of themselves, spells.

What about shockwave totem or fire trap? I thought increased spell damage improves them.
So if I understood correctly, the shockwave and the burning ground themselves are the spells?

You're correct in general. The actual skill being used is the shockwave of the ground fire explosion. (Shockwave is not actually affected by increased spell damage. Like bear trap and detonate dead, it's technically a spell skill because it has a cast time and doesn't use a weapon, but the damage it deals is not spell damage. The fire trap explosion is a spell and deals spell damage).

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dust7 wrote:

Or were you talking about skills with a trap/totem support gem on them exclusively?

There's absolutely no difference to the game. Some skills have the stats that the totem/trap support gems would give them build into the skill gem, and some don't, but can get them by being linked to the skill gem. Either way, they have the 'using this skill summons a totem with this skill' flag.