I'm interested to hear about (potentially) more changes to RF's snapshotting. We've already established that activating RF then replacing it with a completely unrelated set of skill and support gems (hell, even a Kaom's) WILL STILL WORK under the (currently) planned changes.
zSavage has also posted another similar question in another thread: snip
My assumption based on the information in this thread is that this will also WORK. And I'm also assuming that the dev team DOESN'T want that to work, but it's a much more technically challenging case to tackle.
We don't (ideally) want Righteous Fire to be able to snapshot. We do want Righteous Fire to not be something you can "turn off" by just removing the gem - it's a fundamental part of the skill's design that you must either include elements in your build that allow you to manage it, or suffer the burning until your last life point.
These two goals are somewhat at odds, as the basic non-snapshotting version on Righteous Fire would be one that did turn off when you removed it's gem.
Technical stuff:
Under the new system, the action-in-progress is notified that its skill has been modified, and passed a pointer to the new, up-to-date skill. In the case of the gem being removed, this is a null pointer, indicating the old skill been replaced with nothing rather than a new version.
Most skills react to this notification by updating their own internal skill reference to the new pointer, and deleting if it was null. Righteous Fire instead will, if passed a null pointer, keep its current pointer to the old skill. While that skill is no longer available to your character to use, it will still exist as long as the action-in-progress maintains a pointer to it.
So the RF action-in-progress in this case keeps its pointer to the obsolete skill. That skill contains all the stats of the skill gem and support gems that make it up, and also is linked to your character's stats. Since the skill is no longer tied to a gem, changes to the gem can't update the skill (including changes to what's linked to the gem). Because the skill is still linked to your character's stats, it will still update based on changes to those (gear, passives, etc).
Making it lose all the support gems would require that instead it created it's own new skill, based on the one it has, but without the supports included, and then kept a pointer to that. But creating a new skill is technically more challenging and would cause some problems.
We're currently looking into some solutions like keeping the part where it burns yourself, but removing the enemy burning and/or spell damage, so you couldn't escape burning yourself, but do need to keep the gem socketed to get actual use out of it. At this point I can't say if that's the path we'll take or not, or even if anything will change from the article before 1.2.0. As I said, I'll do my best to keep you guys up to date.
Last edited by Nightmare90 on Jul 24, 2014, 9:07:01 AM
