Ion Judgement "fizzle"

So I'm sure this has been said before, and I don't know if it's a bug or WAI, but...

I'm getting tired of seeing my Ion Judgement do nothing because my target was killed during the cast time. I don't know how the whole jump mechanic works, but what I do know is any targeted AoE power in th egame will splash off a dead target, so long as it was started while they were alive. In fact, pretty much every power short of snipes and Twilight Grasp calculates everything as soon as you click it, then executes regardless of what conditions have changed during cast time.

So why can't Ion Judgement calculate it's jump path on activation? Or whatever the heck needs to be done, I'm just really sick of getting screwed because it has such a long cast time and my team went ballistic on my target.

I'm guessing there's either nothing they can do about it, or they'll fix it when Ion Judgement stops being so ridiculously powerful against large spawns.

the jump mechanic is basically using the same mechanic as most of the other chaining powers which is spawning pseudo pets on the target

if said target dies before or while the pseudo pet is activating, it will fail essentially because the pseudo pet required the target to be alive

i dont know how it could be fixed to still hit other targets if your target dies during the cast time though unless it was changed to a target aoe, but it only spawned 1 pseudo pet, so it spawned a pet on one random target it hits thus firing into a large group will nearly always guarantee a hit for the chain to work

Maybe shorten the activation time so this becomes less frequent?

This is common among ALL powers which summon a psedopet at the target's location (eg, Transfusion), as well as chain attack powers (more generally, powers which grant a power to the target, but non-chain powers which do that are generally debuffs, so it doesn't matter).

The way chain attacks work is that the target is given a power, which will then lance out to attack nearby allies, etc. But if the original target is dead, there's no critter for that temporary power to come from, so nothing happens. AFAIK, there is no solution to that problem using the current mechanics for chain powers.