Projectile Traps

This has been brought up before, but i'd like to shine some new light on it.

When creating a trap using the trap support gem, projectile skills literally go in random directions. It's actually not limited to projectile skills, since Lightning Warp traps simply warp right next to where the trap was thrown, instead of on top of enemies.

The major problem that i've noticed so far with this, is when trying to make Bow Skills into traps. Every single bow skill, except Rain of Arrows, will literally shoot into a random direction. Even if the trap is set ON TOP OF AN ENEMY, the arrow will still shoot in a random direction and miss over 50% of the time.

Can we please get traps to actually target enemies with projectiles? Every projectile turned into a trap should at least shoot itself in the general direction of the enemies. With Rain of Arrows and Poison Arrow, landing on top of where the trap was laid or on top of the nearest enemy is fine either way.

Please fix this. :)



edit: i think giving traps the same targeting AI as totems would probably be the easiest method. if this is too hard, at least remove the ability to make projectile traps, it's just silly as it is.

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so i'm assuming that this is working as intended then, that projectile skills supported by trap aren't actually supposed to target anything.

I used Ledge in Cruel exclusively as my testing site, since the skeletons there move slowly and are easy to find.

For testing with the sunblast belt, i would throw traps next to, but not on top of the skeletons. I tested every bow skill using sunblast and none of them seemed to target the skeletons, but i suppose that since the skeletons didn't actually set off the trap, they wouldn't be targeted.

For testing without the sunblast belt, i would throw traps directly on top of skeletons or in front of them and wait for them to trigger the traps. It wasn't entirely conclusive whether or not the traps were targeting the skeletons, since the projectiles would miss the skeleton that stepped on the trap a very large percentage of the time. I even tested the Ethereal Knives spell, since it has a cone and thus should have a better chance to hit the targets. Even then, it could miss the skeleton who stepped on it.

Maybe they are technically working properly, but just not the way i expect them to. For sunblast triggered traps, i'd expect the projectile to target the nearest enemy. For manually triggered traps, i'd expect them to 100% of the time, hit the enemy they are supposed to, unless it misses due to accuracy or something similar.

The only inconsistency with them "working fine", is when i tested Poison Arrow. Poison Arrow explodes on top of the point that you target when you shoot it, even if you don't hit anything. I'd expect that if the traps truly targeted the enemy who stepped on them, that Poison Arrow would explode on top of the enemy who stepped on the trap, regardless of whether the actual projectile hit them or not. This was not the case. When triggered with both sunblast and having enemies manually trigger Poison Arrow traps, the Poison Arrow would fly off in a random direction to a random location.

How many projectiles do each trap throw out?
If it's more than one then the point blank triggering spreads the cone wide...in some cases enough to fire behind the trap.

And this from the known issues would suggest that single projectiles can do the same

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Ranged attacks at point blank can fire sideways or backwards.

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lagwin1980 wrote:

How many projectiles do each trap throw out?
If it's more than one then the point blank triggering spreads the cone wide...in some cases enough to fire behind the trap.

And this from the known issues would suggest that single projectiles can do the same

"

Ranged attacks at point blank can fire sideways or backwards.

All the projectile traps that i tested shot 1 projectile each, except for split arrow traps. That is actually pretty solid sounding, i didn't know that projectiles at point blank range can go in the wrong direction. This could possibly explain why traps triggered by stepping on them could cause such problems (except for what was going on with Poison Arrow). I wouldn't mind if that was actually was going on with that kind of trap triggering, since it would be an entirely different problem. Hope that's the case, but i'm still worried as to why activating traps with sunblast causes them to go in completely random directions. It would be nice if they could do some kind of small AI change to those traps so that Bow Skills turned into traps can actually be used. I would love to try out a DoT build using Puncture, Poison Arrow, and Fire Traps.

By the sounds of it, if you are waiting for the duration to expire for the traps to trigger via sunblast then the actual trigger point would be the center of the trap itself and would count as point blank...if you test it with split arrow and see if it actually selects a direction at random and the additional projectiles head off in the same direction OR as i likely to be the case they'll be fired in 3 directions.

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lagwin1980 wrote:

By the sounds of it, if you are waiting for the duration to expire for the traps to trigger via sunblast then the actual trigger point would be the center of the trap itself and would count as point blank...if you test it with split arrow and see if it actually selects a direction at random and the additional projectiles head off in the same direction OR as i likely to be the case they'll be fired in 3 directions.

Was a good theory, but i just tested it, no-go. Using sunblast and split arrow trap, the 3 projectiles all go in the same random direction. They stay in a tight cone, suggesting that their target destination it either the edge of the screen or off-screen. Still continue to choose a random direction for the volley of arrows to go in. Tested without sunblast as well. The results were a little weird. Still continued to miss the enemy that stepped on the trap quite a lot, but the grouping of the split arrow varied. Sometimes it was a close grouping like the target was far away, sometimes it was half-way, and sometimes it was very spread out. I'd imagine that if it was targeting the enemy that stepped on it, it would always be very spread out, since the target area would be right next to the point of origin. My conclusion from this is that the AI from traps regarding projectile skills is either bugged, broken, or non-existent. I actually do programming as a job and started with small video games. I would occasionally cut corners and i can only assume that when traps were introduced to that game, they didn't fully prepare for the many types of traps that we can make. They probably felt that since the base traps, fire bear conversion lightning, didn't actually need to target anything, they could be a bit lazy about it and just make the traps target a random location, since it wouldn't matter anyways. I could be wrong though.

Just please make it so that using projectile traps with and without sunblast becomes a viable option. There are currently 0 builds that i know of that are pure trappers with a bow even though it's possible to do so.