I don't want to have to recast my auras in every zone

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That's a tricky problem in and of itself, albeit one which I've got a rough outline of a plan for. But that plan will take some refining, and then I'll need a period of development time where I can afford to spend the time implementing and testing that, and then follow up with refactoring auras to detach the action so that it can actively monitor skill changes (which will likely introduce a whole slew of instance and client crashes in rare cases depending on which order things happen in when leaving the area and/or game in certain ways, since everything needs to clean up correctly). So a bunch more QA time on that.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

It's unfortunately a very technically challenging bug to solve. ...
We could fix pretty much all instances of aura snapshotting at the cost of a day or so's work, a little extra processing, and making auras never be able to transition between areas. That last part isn't worth the cost.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

Thankfully, more recently we've implemented have the ability to perform triggered casts of a skill, which can in theory be used to get around that restriction - that's how I managed to get Tempest Shield to be able to transition between areas - it doesn't, but if it detects you had the tempest shield buff on you, it performs a triggered cast of the tempest shield skill, so by the time you're finished loading, it's been reapplied.
But this doesn't always work - because mana reservation skills can't be allowed to ignore their mana requirements when triggered (because otherwise the triggered Tempest Shield wouldn't reserve anything in the case where you didn't have enough mana - this happened for a little while).

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Mark_GGG wrote:

and it's my Birthday in 7 minutes, and I'll need to go check on the second layer of my double-decker creme-egg chocolate death orgasmacake soon, it should be almost ready.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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That's the opposite of what I want. I want for them to keep working anyway, just without me having to keep using the fancy hat.

If you want to benefit from the stats of an item, you need to have that item equipped. If you swap to another item, you lose the benefits of the old item and gain the benefits of the new one in exchange.

This is one of very few bugs where that doesn't hold, and it will be fixed. If you have your heart set on being able to permanently get the benefit of an item you stopped using, then that's simply not going to happen. Sorry.

How about scrapping and reworking auras alltogether?

In their current state they barely add any depth to the game besides being a boring and mandatory prebuff if you want to min-max

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Mark_GGG wrote:

Spoiler

Yeah, it's still a bug, and we try to make sure people are aware of that whenever we have the chance, in a (probably useless) attempt to prevent masses of butthurt "but I didn't realise it was a bug and now my build doesn't work" posts. Didn't work when we fixed the worst of the aura snapshot cases by re-adjusting them on transition, but I can hope.

It's unfortunately a very technically challenging bug to solve. Buffs of all kinds are static things, and changing them on the fly is nontrivial. The aura is created from the skill, but the skill action's long finished and gone away by the time we need something to be actively updating (read: removing and replacing) the aura.

We could fix pretty much all instances of aura snapshotting at the cost of a day or so's work, a little extra processing, and making auras never be able to transition between areas. That last part isn't worth the cost.

Thankfully, more recently we've implemented have the ability to perform triggered casts of a skill, which can in theory be used to get around that restriction - that's how I managed to get Tempest Shield to be able to transition between areas - it doesn't, but if it detects you had the tempest shield buff on you, it performs a triggered cast of the tempest shield skill, so by the time you're finished loading, it's been reapplied.
But this doesn't always work - because mana reservation skills can't be allowed to ignore their mana requirements when triggered (because otherwise the triggered Tempest Shield wouldn't reserve anything in the case where you didn't have enough mana - this happened for a little while).

So before I can (ab)use the same tech to allow auras to have their skill always actively on you, as well as the buff, we need to address the mana problem there, or we won't have actually solved the problem about them not transitioning, since they'll almost always fail to have enough mana when entering the area.

That's a tricky problem in and of itself, albeit one which I've got a rough outline of a plan for. But that plan will take some refining, and then I'll need a period of development time where I can afford to spend the time implementing and testing that, and then follow up with refactoring auras to detach the action so that it can actively monitor skill changes (which will likely introduce a whole slew of instance and client crashes in rare cases depending on which order things happen in when leaving the area and/or game in certain ways, since everything needs to clean up correctly). So a bunch more QA time on that.

That's the current state of snapshotted auras - I have most of a plan for how to solve that, once the mana problem is solved, and a less finalised plan for that one too. While it might not look externally like much has happened, we're a lot closer to a full solution than we were in August when we fixed the most ridiculous abuse cases (which thankfully were the easiest to fix, since they relied on doing things in town and thus could be caught at area transitions). We're just not deploying anything until it works, has been tested, and it doesn't compromise player quality-of-life in general cases.

I'd personally like to have aura snapshotting fixed in 1.2.0, but I can't promise that at this stage. Too many unknowns, too much that could to wrong between now and then, and it needs substantial of QA time, which will be at a premium as we approach the big patch.
If it's ready then, it'll go in. If it's not, it won't. In that case I'm not sure when it'll be fit in, because as noted above, regardless of how much we tell people it's a bug that will be fixed, people will still be very unhappy if it changes and their build doesn't work. We try to keep changes like that to the big 4-month patches when we can. I'm not the one who'd make the call on whether a snapshotting fix is important enough to go somewhere in the 1.2.0 series, or disruptive enough to be left for 1.3.0.

Minion snapshotting is an entirely different kettle of fish, and a lot trickier again to solve, both because minions are much more complicated, and because to some degree non-snapshotting is also abusable on minions (although to a lesser degree) and also quite unintuitive in some cases. That'll probably take longer and be a tougher nut to crack. I have some ideas (some of which might link into better ability to fake minion stats for display), but at this stage no more than that, and I'm not going into detail here because this is already a wall of text, and it's my Birthday in 7 minutes, and I'll need to go check on the second layer of my double-decker creme-egg chocolate death orgasmacake soon, it should be almost ready.

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Michaelangel007 wrote:

"

Mark_GGG wrote:

It's unfortunately a very technically challenging bug to solve. ...
We could fix pretty much all instances of aura snapshotting at the cost of a day or so's work, a little extra processing, and making auras never be able to transition between areas. That last part isn't worth the cost.

Huh?? You already have something like this ... excuse the lack of proper forum support for code/preformatting ....

enum Auras {
. AURA_ANGER = (1 << 0),
. AURA_CLARITY = (1 << 1),
. AURA_DETERMINATION = (1 << 2),
. AURA_DISCIPLINE = (1 << 3),
. AURA_GRACE = (1 << 4),
. AURA_HASTE = (1 << 5),
. AURA_HATRED = (1 << 6),
. AURA_PURITY_ELEMENTS = (1 << 7),
. AURA_PURITY_FIRE = (1 << 8),
. AURA_PURITY_ICE = (1 << 9),
. AURA_PURITY_LIGHTNING = (1 << 10),
. AURA_VITALITY = (1 << 12),
. AURA_WRATH = (1 << 13)
};

class Player
{
. ...
. int32 bAurasPreviouslyOn;
. int32 bAurasActive; // bit-flags of auras currently active
};

Player::OnZoneLeave()
{
. bAurasPreviouslyOn = bAurasActive;
}

Player::OnZoneEnter()
{
. if( bAurasActive != bAurasPreviouslyOn )
. ....
}

"

Mark_GGG wrote:

It's unfortunately a very technically challenging bug to solve. Buffs of all kinds are static things, and changing them on the fly is nontrivial. The aura is created from the skill, but the skill action's long finished and gone away by the time we need something to be actively updating (read: removing and replacing) the aura.

"

DogFaceNoSpace wrote:

Can you write us the fix to desync too? Thanks a lot!