Jolting Chain: Chains are Auto-Hit?

So I have been spending some time testing Jolting Chain and am fairly sure the chain aspect of the power is auto-hit. This may allay some people's concerns about the power. Or it may just be that I don't have a good testing regimen.

The test went like this: Since the numbers don't show in the Combat window, to find out how the chain aspect worked I swarmed groups of enemies and repeatedly cast the power. I did this at a variety of levels in a variety of settings, including on teams, while running down the street, against the same mob repeatedly, and finally on a specially created group of mobs in the AE.

If there was a chance to miss, it should have occasionally failed to complete the chain after hitting the first enemy. In all of the casts I did, and the over 250 casts I made in the controlled setting, that never happened. The power always either failed on the first cast, or hit all of the enemies.

The other thing I noticed, in teams, is that when faced with an enemy with high defense the power always hit them. For example, against Banished Pantheon I had a lot of trouble hitting the masks. I started targeting the enemies around them and that resulted in the power arcing to the mask every time I tested.

One other interesting bit is that if there are fewer than 15 enemies in the chain but the chain is long enough (say, 14 enemies) the power can arc back to the original target and hit them again, presumably because the indicator that prevents chaining has faded. Here's a screenshot showing that happening:

(NOTE: I have not had a chance to test Synaptic Overload yet because my character is currently level 24.)

Forget that, where are your pants?

So... your pants... were... stolen by prostitutes?

Listen to the wind blow
Watch the sun rise
Run in the shadows
Damn your love
Damn your lies

And if you don't love me now
You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying
You would never break the chain.

Great work! Did you notice any alternate chains or "double taps" were the chain hits the same enemy twice but a couple of seconds apart?

I notice a few times a very light colored "white" chain appeared even after a particular enemy was defeated. This would jump to the next enemy if it was close enough.

P.S. I am running similar tests on Synaptic Overload right now with the exact same results so far. I had heard in Beta that this power branched two targets at a time but if that was true then it doesn't appear to be now. In the AE, at least, the power appears to be using the exact same mechanic as Jolting Chain. One target at a time, if first is hit all others are as long as they are in range. If you line the enemies up in a line you can actually see the power progress one at a time from enemy to enemy.

Of course, the Recharge on Synaptic is long, so I've only cast it about 20 times now. I will post if I get something different. Meanwhile if anyone can convincingly show a chain ending earlier despite enemies being in range please let me know.

Very impressive testing... If what you're seeing is accurate (and as of now I don't see why it isn't), that's a fairly handy thing to know. That means it's only important to hit the first target, and the rest fall like a house of dominoes. Checkmate!

That would also mean the idea that it's a "sub-par" AoE power would be lessened, because it only needs ONE accuracy check to hit up to 15 targets, as compared to every other AoE which requires all accuracy checks to hit to hit all the targets. For being such an "all or nothing" type power, that makes sense.

[EDIT: Added additional screenshots for clarity.]

Did some more testing on it, and got some weird results. This was also some of the most boring testing I've ever done. :P But this may be helpful info.

First test: Versus enemies with ridiculous Defense. To achieve this I created a group whose only powers were Deflection Shield (the enemy version of which is combined with the other shield) and Dispersion Bubble. This gave me an average 8% chance to hit the enemies.

Results: Very strange. Hitting the first enemy (after many, many tries) would indeed bring down most of the group. However it almost seemed like sometimes the first guy I hit wasn't falling. Instead he would play an animation like he was casting Dispersion Bubble, then a bunch of random people would fall. I really don't know what to make of that.

Here's a screenshot of the enemies falling over despite their massive defense (really hard to see what's happening though, and note that the first enemy I fired at was actually the guy on the right, not the character in the suit to the left, who fell despite a few other targets NOT falling. That character had no powers at all, but should have been equally buffed by the shields and dispersion bubbles. When I tried casting directly at him, I had the same chance to hit him as everyone else.):





Second test: In this test all of the "Tanker" enemies were switched to Super Reflexes, and given all powers except the mezz protection toggle. This gave me about a 20% chance to hit them. I kept the character in the suit as the single armorless squishy character, who served as the initial target of the attack.

Result: If the squishy was hit, the full number of targets was hit just like the experiments against armorless enemies. However the pattern was much harder to make out. Look at the screenshot below:



Now what to make of this. It appears its at least possible there is a ToHit check of some kind in here. However it also appears from previous tests that the 95% ToHit cap is either not used or is ignored. It's also possible having all those Force Fields in proximity glitched something, or that I made some other mistake.

Also, FYI, while I did not do as much testing on Synaptic Overload this round, I did note that unlike Mind and Illusion Control based Confuses, it IS affected by Force Fields. What I don't know right now is if this is because of a Postional component, or because it's tagged as Energy (Mind and Illusion are both tagged Psi, with no positional flag at all).

Thanks again for the feedback. If I find anything new I'll be sure to post.

Nice testing, Tex! Now a key question . . . I haven't tested it yet, but I saw some comments that Procs only hit the first foe in the chain. Is this true? Are there any procs that can make it through to the pseudopet and hit the rest of the chain?

Pay dirt! I changed the enemies so their only power was a Confuse. This caused the rather hilarious effect that after hitting the first enemy, the group Confused me and the power rebounded and hit me. That's how I was able to retrieve this:

First try:
You are confused!
Chain Jolt Jump 3 HITS you! Charge power had a 80.00% chance to hit and rolled a 29.96.
You are zapped with a charge of electricity for 16.24 points of energy damage.

Second try:
You are confused!
Chain Jolt Jump 2 HITS you! Charge power had a 95.00% chance to hit and rolled a 54.40.
You are zapped with a charge of electricity for 16.24 points of energy damage.

Third try:
You are confused!
Chain Jolt Jump 2 HITS you! Charge power had a 95.00% chance to hit and rolled a 20.61.
You are zapped with a charge of electricity for 16.24 points of energy damage.

So indeed, it is NOT auto-hit, at least when used against players. It just has a very good chance to hit. It also must ignore the normal 95% cap against enemies in at least some situations. Or the AE ignores that cap. Or using enemies with no attacks skews the results. I don't know. My head hurts. This should be easier.

Meanwhile here's the pic of me getting zapped by my own chain to entertain you while I get some Tylenol:

Just after I posted the last experiment with the Confusion I decided to click a few more times for old times sake. The final time I tried it I got this result:

First National Tank confuses you!
You are confused!
Chain Jolt Jump 2 MISSES! Charge power had a 95.00% chance to hit, but rolled a 95.12.
Conductive Aura is recharged.
Chain Jolt Jump 3 HITS you! Charge power had a 80.00% chance to hit and rolled a 14.24.
You are zapped with a charge of electricity for 16.24 points of energy damage.

Basically the power missed me on the first try, then rolled again and hit. In other words, it missed, but did NOT end.

I think there's a whole lot about this power we have yet to understand.

Jolting Chain spawns two "jolts" on its target that are staggered by two seconds from each other. When the target is hit, 2 seconds later Jolt A is launched at a target. 2 seconds later Jolt B is launched at a target. Both of these will show up in combat spam as "Chain Jolt Jump 1" because those are both hop #1 of the chain.

Each of those will, if they hit a target, spawn two more. So if both Jump1's hit targets, you'll end up with up to 4 Jump2's, and then up to 8 Jump3's. However, there is a limitation on jumps: a jump cannot arc to a target that has been hit by a jump within the last five seconds. Also, jumps are not autohit. If a jump misses its target, it dies.

Because of the 2 second stagger and the fact that many people do not know each arc spawns two "child" arcs, the sequence of events can appear a bit confusing.

To reiterate: arcs have to hit, and they use normal tohit calculations to do so. But there's a lot of them staggered around, which can make it seem like arcs are taking multiple chances to hit a target when in fact its just that there are so many potential jumps to account for. And while jumps cannot arc back immediately to a previously jumped target, that prohibition only lasts 5 seconds, whereas the jumps will arc around for potentially longer than that. It is possible for a target to be hit twice by the jumping arcs, just not twice in five seconds.

They could fix the problem I have with the power by making the initial attack 2 jolts instead of a single one. If the first jolt hits the initial target would be flagged as invisible to the second jolt.

It would make a huge difference in the power especially in the low levels where this is most of your mitigation, you have few enhancement slots, and the enhancements you can slot are of low value.

Arcanaville, I have a question. Does the chain effect work as Tex's diagram suggests, where a missed single jolt stops itself and all children, or does it keep going until it either hits its 15 target cap or until all jolts have missed or died due to lack of eligible targets? His testing suggests the latter case - that if one of the first two branches fails, the targets will in all likelyhood be jolted by branches spawned from the other one. That would make it extremely unlikely for the chain to die out without either hitting its target cap or rendering all targets in range ineligible for jolting.

Tex, if my thesis is correct, the reason you never saw an entire half of the tree fail to jolt is because once you reach the bottom of the left side of the tree, assuming the right side failed, then you still have active jolts on all the targets at the bottom of the left side, and their only valid targets are the unjolted targets who would supposedly have been jolted by the right side. So unless you manage to kill *ALL* the jolts off to missing or traversing far enough away that there are no eligible unjolted targets, the chain won't stop until it reaches its target cap.