When you spec Fireball with Homing, the animation switches from smoothly running at your refresh rate to a very low rate. This is in online mode and causes numerous issues listed below.
The spell animates at a very low rate, sometimes disappears, and general feels like it’s bugging out.
Easily reproducible: Be on Online Mode, shoot multiple fireballs with sequential casting and it’s nice and smooth, spec into homing and it because what feels like a laggy mess.
EDIT: Extra Information
Fireballs occasionally disappear while laggy.
Extra Fireballs do not do damage past a point. 4 projectiles in a barrage produce 3 damage numbers and damage sounds. Does not appear to be due to tooltips combining to save spam, but actual loss of a hit due to the stuttering of the skill.
Fireballs often collide with invisible terrain while laggy, destroying them. This can happen anywhere.
Fireballs that pierce and home will laggily circle their target and maybe 10% of them end up doing damage, the rest vanish.
Fireballs with >= 100% pierce with this appear to still be consumed while hitting some enemies after a pierce. Cannot be replicated at dummies, as it will pierce them all there.
To be tested: Reports that full 100% lightning fireball conversion fails to scale with lightning damage, and only fire. Could be tooltip only, will update once tested. COULD NOT REPRODUCE THIS. TOOLTIP SCALES WITH LIGHTNING AFTER FIRE TAG IS REMOVED.
This is still an issue after patch 0.9c and 0.9d were released. To add on as well, the projectiles that laggily spin around a target typically do not do damage as well.
The skill is pretty much unplayable at this point with homing and barrage, which is how most build it.
It also appears that the stuttering of the skill causes extra projectiles to not do damage. 4 projectiles shot in a barrage only produce 3 damage numbers, and it does not appear to be adding two of the damage numbers for less spam.
I’m playing homing fireball with sequential projectiles as well and wanted to add to this.
Although I didn’t really notice the behaviour xmitty is describing (probably because I didn’t pay close attention to the damage numbers) I have found several areas, where I am not able to produce any projectiles. The skill animation is playing, but no projectiles are generated. Also I couldn’t produce any projectiles with Ice Barrage in the same area, so it might be a general projectile problem.
I’m playing online and am adding a screenshot of the last such area that I encountered: Screenshot
Within the whole circle around the fire left of the character I couldn’t produce any projectiles. It started working again if I moved on the bridge that you see on top of the screenshot.
Hope you can figure out what’s causing these problems
sorry to hijack but this seems like a general multi projectile skill problem, it happens with hungering souls too, it starts lagging and projectiles stop hitting/go through monsters without hitting etc.
