Abusing the range of melee cones.
By
300_below,
Posted on: 2009-06-06 15:12 in Archetypes and Powers General Discussion
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Same. I noticed this too, but I didn't realised it could be an exploit.
Are we not supposed to use it now, or it's "free game if it's there"? 
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Honestly, it takes a bit of effort to achieve stretching it to anything like 20', and under normal combat conditions it isn't usually easy to look for while fighting. That combined with varying latency makes it hard to be sure that what you saw is what actually happened. i think the recently increased range of melee attacks makes it much easier to notice, and also to stretch it a bit farther. It's not something that's easy to do for every spawn and takes a bit of luck to achieve, so i don't think it's really much of an exploit or game-breaking and personally i'm not going to worry too much about whether i'm hitting too many enemies with an attack.
There are many "cheats" used by players and mobs that take advantage of the game engine, and this hardly seems a major one to me. The ability of an entire spawn to instantaneously turn and return fire when first attacked is more immersion-breaking to me. Or how Freaks, the tanks especially, are fairly easy to embed head-first into walls and other objects, leaving them flailing helplessly while you beat them unconscious. 
Dr. Todt's theme.
i make stuff...
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Or how Freaks, the tanks especially, are fairly easy to embed head-first into walls and other objects, leaving them flailing helplessly while you beat them unconscious.
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I wish stuff like this was more normal and expected, making the game more arcade like. I use to love punting stuff off the buildings in Brickstown when I first started playing.
I doubt this cone range thing will get that popular. Infact, you can do this trick with any cone attack, but it is just much more extreme with melee cones. I do it with Melee Breath of Fire all the time, easily pushing 20-30ft.
A lot of people already don't like setting up cone attacks already. Setting up cone attacks and working with lag/sync/timing to make them larger may be more aggravating.
Freeedom
H: Victra Defile (Rad/Dark) & Hot Hits (Fire/SD)
V: Spike Cream (NW) & Crescent Wind (Nin/Storm)
Sub Hero Inc ARC: 1541
--If you don't like what I have to say, it was probably a typo you are refering to.
Is this a bug? I thought it was just how the game mechanics work. This is how I play my melee toons 100% of the time. Shockwave from claws is especially fun. The Shadow Maul in the OPs video was golden though. I've gotten pretty good over the years, but that one was just about perfect.
I don't think it's an exploit, that's what the target cap is for. No matter how big your make your shadow maul cone, you still hit (or miss) five enemies.
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I know that most melee cones now have a range of seven feet, and I've always done some small sidestepping with them to try to get as many targets hit as possible.
Lately, however, I've noticed that when I'm moving around a bit, I have been hitting groups of enemies that shouldn't be hit at once by a seven foot cone. Specifically, when I move away from a target, the cone acts like the range includes where I am when I click the attack, as well as where I was a moment before. For example, here I managed to hit two targets with shadowmaul, even though when I'm stationary they are too far apart to active the power. Moving appears to mess with the range.
But, I'm sure there are unbelievers, for shame, that think it might be a small oddity or the result of lag. I challenge anyone to explain what looks like extending shadow maul to 20 feet, give or take a foot. Looks like about 20.
Once I notied this odd behavior, I tried applying it to other melee cones, like golden dragonfly, which is all but impossible to use to hit more than two enemies at once. Or is it?
Perhaps I need to respec back into breath of fire for a bit...
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There goes your chance at the bug hunter badge, you had to PM this and not post it publicly 
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Same. I noticed this too, but I didn't realised it could be an exploit.
Are we not supposed to use it now, or it's "free game if it's there"?
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My gut says it's an exploit.
It's not an exploit you will get banned for, though. The consequence of it are not as big as nasty exploits precisely due the target cap.
I personally would still refrain from doing this but not due to fear of retaliation, just my own conscience.
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There goes your chance at the bug hunter badge
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If I thought badges were worth anything I might find that disheartening.
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My gut says it's an exploit
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If they don't want me to hit ten targets with golden dragonfly, then they can change the target cap.
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It's not something they can necessarily keep/remove, it's a quirk of the engine
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Well they could enforce the maximum range on the cones instead of expanding them to whatever the distance is between the attacker and target. How exactly that would be implemented I'm not sure. If the cone was anchored on the player presumably it wouldn't even reach the target so that wouldn't work. If it was constrained to the target though I think it would behave more or less as expected without being extendable.
Doesn't seem like a big deal to me. I've never had it happen to such an extent that I really noticed it before, but thinking back it makes a lot of sense. There have been a lot of times I hit things with melee cones that seemed to be too far away. I thought my ability to judge distances was really unreliable. Turns out it's Hurdle+CJ that's responsible.
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It's not something they can necessarily keep/remove, it's a quirk of the engine
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Well they could enforce the maximum range on the cones instead of expanding them to whatever the distance is between the attacker and target. How exactly that would be implemented I'm not sure. If the cone was anchored on the player presumably it wouldn't even reach the target so that wouldn't work. If it was constrained to the target though I think it would behave more or less as expected without being extendable.
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You're missing the point. The CAUSE of this was a patch that was added because back in ye olden days, playing a melee character and trying to hit a moving target was impossible. The question I pose is, even with the extended range on attacks, would, if it were possible to remove the patch that is the CAUSE of the "problem" bring back the issue they originally wanted to fix? (The preceding sentence should bring any grammar nazi to their knees in agony!)
Remember: Knockout Blow, with its already double-sized range, suffered the exact same problem.
Blue: ~Knockback Squad on Guardian~
Red: ~Undoing of Virtue on [3 guesses]~
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There goes your chance at the bug hunter badge
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If I thought badges were worth anything I might find that disheartening.
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It is worth something: the powa to tell badge hunters you, who could care less about badges, have a badge they will likely never get
PS, no, i dont have it nor I care about it. I just thought it was a funny thing to note.
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If they don't want me to hit ten targets with golden dragonfly, then they can change the target cap.
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They want you to be able to hit that many target max, provided you struggle doing it. Also, certain tiny critters (like monkeys or the tiny shards that come off defeated DE critters) also may easily be fit within the normal radius of the power. So no, "lowering the cap" is not the fix for this.
In MMO terms, exploiting is not committing a crime but notably making intentional use of something that is obviously an unintended bug.
The argument about "if they did not intended me to hit so many foes..." may be attempted to be squeezed because, well, it's sort of true, but the truth is not about how many foes but over how big of an area.
Now, I would not fear any retaliation out of exploiting this bug as the personal benefits of it, although not insignificant are not game breaking either. I would fear more retaliation out of promoting and attempting to convince people that it's intended and that everyone should be doing it.
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You're missing the point. The CAUSE of this was a patch that was added because back in ye olden days, playing a melee character and trying to hit a moving target was impossible.
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To be more precise: it was an issue with Gauntlet in tankers (and to a lesser degree all targeted aoe attacks with very small radius.) True single target attacks never had the "impossible to hit moving targets" issue.
I was under the impression the fix only affected targeted aoe powers, though, not cones. Although I can see how certain cones would also require the fix as in theory they would had suffered very similar issues.
I'd experienced this before, but never on such a large scale. I'd assumed it was just due to me getting lucky and having lots of targets in the cone arc for an attack but this makes sense as well. Seems similar to the "if you fire an AoE attack, it'll check as many targets are in its radius until it hits its max targets" phenomenon. Like, if I trow Fireball into a group of Romans, and there are 30 NPCs in the radius of that power, Fireball will check rolls until it hits 16 targets.
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"One day we all may see each other elsewhere. In Tyria, in Azeroth. We may pass each other and never know it. And that's sad. But if nothing else, we'll still have Rhode Island."
"One day we all may see each other elsewhere. In Tyria, in Azeroth. We may pass each other and never know it. And that's sad. But if nothing else, we'll still have Rhode Island."
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To be more precise: it was an issue with Gauntlet in tankers (and to a lesser degree all targeted aoe attacks with very small radius.) True single target attacks never had the "impossible to hit moving targets" issue.
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Single-target attacks had a different issue. You couldn't get them to activate reliably. You could queue an attack and chase after a running opponent, and it was significantly unlikely that the attack would actually activate unless you ran past the opponent, rubbing shoulders with it the whole time.
This problem significantly predated the problem with cones/AoEs.
My very first character in pre-release was a Katana Scrapper, and I really hated this.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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I personally would still refrain from doing this but not due to fear of retaliation, just my own conscience.
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Really?
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If they don't want me to hit ten targets with golden dragonfly, then they can change the target cap.
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They want you to be able to hit that many target max, provided you struggle doing it.
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I certainly struggle, but now it's more of a possibility without forcing that many opponents to stack, which is all but impossible itself. Without this feature/exploit, I'd say it was practically impossible to hit 10, struggling or not.
I vote for extending the target cap of shadow maul to 10!
Yeah severely doubt this is fixable unless they either fix the set amount of targets for the melee AoEs, or rewrite the code altogether, the current system doesnt do postitions.
I could have sworn a dev chimed in on this a long long time ago and said it was ok, but I might be remembering incorrectly (This was back before Castle was the powers guy).
I always figured it was payback for the ways mobs take advantage of latency themselves.
They "drunk-sprint" at 50 mph after being stunned, we use them as a cone target and hit their entire spawn. Fair is fair.
Infatum on Virtueverse
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Once I notied this odd behavior, I tried applying it to other melee cones, like golden dragonfly, which is all but impossible to use to hit more than two enemies at once. Or is it?
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Nice!
Reminds me of the good ol' days stacking robots on the PI docks.
Of course, that was before the current dev pogrom against "exploiters", so tread lightly lest they decide to flex their swollen, manly muscles and make an example of you.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
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Reminds me of the good ol' days stacking robots on the PI docks.
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Once, playing my BS/Inv Scrapper, I pulled so many Jaegers of them around a crate and used Headsplitter on them all, the resulting explosion and screenshake was so loud and disruptive that for a moment, I wasn't sure what had happened. I seriously thought that the Fire/Fire Blaster who was on my team had used Inferno, but she hadn't; it was all the exploding bots.
I also nearly died from the damage they deal when they explode.
Some passers-by actually applauded in /local.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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To be more precise: it was an issue with Gauntlet in tankers (and to a lesser degree all targeted aoe attacks with very small radius.) True single target attacks never had the "impossible to hit moving targets" issue.
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Single-target attacks had a different issue. You couldn't get them to activate reliably. You could queue an attack and chase after a running opponent, and it was significantly unlikely that the attack would actually activate unless you ran past the opponent, rubbing shoulders with it the whole time.
This problem significantly predated the problem with cones/AoEs.
My very first character in pre-release was a Katana Scrapper, and I really hated this.
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Correct! Someone finally gets it! Having my first character being a DM/Regen Scrapper with Super Speed and a dial-up connection, the moment they released the moving target fix, I discovered that with sufficient tinkering, it was quite possible to stretch Shadowmaul's effect radius. Granted, it never jumped more than a few feet ("waypoint feet", where standing on something means you're 4 feet away).
Other end of it? It's extremely dependent on server/client incongruities. Spawns, whether or not they wander, have a bad habit of both being accurately and inaccurately placed. You can get a huge pile of them one time and another? Even with "stretching", you get no more than one. With that, it's not even clear if its a 'stretched' cone or just a very liberal measure of how the spawn is actually positioned versus how it appears.
Blue: ~Knockback Squad on Guardian~
Red: ~Undoing of Virtue on [3 guesses]~
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It's not something they can necessarily keep/remove, it's a quirk of the engine
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Well they could enforce the maximum range on the cones instead of expanding them to whatever the distance is between the attacker and target. How exactly that would be implemented I'm not sure. If the cone was anchored on the player presumably it wouldn't even reach the target so that wouldn't work. If it was constrained to the target though I think it would behave more or less as expected without being extendable.
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You're missing the point. The CAUSE of this was a patch that was added because back in ye olden days, playing a melee character and trying to hit a moving target was impossible.
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I was unclear. What I meant is that they could allow the initial range/tohit check work as it currently does, allowing you to hit running foes, but change the way the second check is handled. This is based on my presumptions of how things are being handled. I don't know how the change to melee powers was implemented that made it easier to hit a moving target. It could have been an extension of melee range based on the speed of the player and/or target, or something completely different.
My guess is that the way this is happening is that you fire off the power while you're moving. The server checks when you fire the power to ensure you're in range. If you are it lets the power activate. Then it seems to process the actual damage/effects of the power a bit later, possibly on the next server tick. This is what allows you to fire the power while one location, but get the power to hit mobs based on your location a moment later.
If so, my "fix" would be to allow the first check to proceed as it currently does. This would allow you to hit moving foes just as you can currently. What would change is that when the power effects are processed the size of the cone would be constrained to its maximum size, preventing you from stretching it out.
I don't know if that's the way it actually works, but even if not some variant would possibly work.
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There goes your chance at the bug hunter badge
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If I thought badges were worth anything I might find that disheartening.
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It's also not true.
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To be more precise: it was an issue with Gauntlet in tankers (and to a lesser degree all targeted aoe attacks with very small radius.) True single target attacks never had the "impossible to hit moving targets" issue.
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Single-target attacks had a different issue. You couldn't get them to activate reliably. You could queue an attack and chase after a running opponent, and it was significantly unlikely that the attack would actually activate unless you ran past the opponent, rubbing shoulders with it the whole time.
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That was more of a PvP issue and how Auto Follow works, and Auto Follow is the best way to deal with moving foes in pvp if you are melee. Not that it made huge difference there, you still have to rub shoulders but now you don't have to do it so darn close.
In pve it was just a bonus as pve critters rarely move a much.
I've known about this for several months. I've Petitioned in game and even PM Castle regarding it a while back.
Both routes lead to dead ends. Play testing could not confirm what I was experiencing. Castle wanted a demonstration, but I was unable to provide one for a number of reasons. Neither party met me in game. Ultimately, I wasn't going to stress out about providing them information on the issue with regards to a service I pay for, if the issue doesn't negatively impact me.
I find I have a much easier time pulling off some crazy cone attacks if the NPC targets are in transit. I can do it with immobilized or idle targets, but its harder to pull off. I was able to hit almost an entire group on the Cimerora wall, with One Thousand Cuts, but that was hard/lucky to pull off.
Freeedom
H: Victra Defile (Rad/Dark) & Hot Hits (Fire/SD)
V: Spike Cream (NW) & Crescent Wind (Nin/Storm)
Sub Hero Inc ARC: 1541
--If you don't like what I have to say, it was probably a typo you are refering to.