This post covers a few bugs on the same issue.
Escentially, some times you take damage when, visually, you should not.
Ghost animations:
I have experienced this due to 2 main reasons:
- Mob modifiers:
Any modifier that affects the attack/cast speed of some of the new monsters causes huge desync on some of their animations.
The most notable are Fire Golems. On the clip below you can see how the particle effects, the damage numbers and the monster animations make it imposible to read what is going on.
Desync animation due to mob modifiers
- Crowd Control:
When you CC enemies that are in the middle of an animation, specially a channeled one, some strange stuff happens.
If you CC a mob intentionally to cancel a skill they are about to cast, they will just instantly recast the skill, with no cast, charge or pre channeling frames, they will just insta cast it, without canceling the internal CD the mob has. So not only does it not cancel the mob skill, it makes the mob cast it faster, and therefore, harder to anticipate. This is pretty strange, as it feels like it hurts the player rather than rewarding him for using CC on the enemies.
Some times, the mob will appear visually stunned or frozen, but the skill would still be casted. The most extreme cases will show the enemy as stunned, and the skill will be performed and hurt the player while totally invisible.
You can see this in the clip below. The mob gets frozen by my skills mid animation, I apporach the mob thinking I’m safe and I get one shoted by the invisible skill that it’s still applaying damage.
Ghost skills after CC
Ghost damage:
There are also 2 different occurances for this issue. The following example illustrates both pretty well.
Clip with two examples
- Damage taken from unknown source, with no numbers displayed:
In the clip above (from second 7 to second 8), my character takes 231 damage from an unknown source, with no red damage numbers displayed at all.
You might need to slow the clip down to properly observe this. Before taking this unknown source of damage, I have 139 Ward with 536 HP (675 total) and then sudently take 231 damage that leaves me with 0 ward and 444 HP.
I have seen the clips many times and I still dont get what happens here.
- Misleading hitboxes and ground AoE targeters:
After I take the unknown source of damage I just covered, my character walks next to 2 poison pools that are already fading visually.
I first take 525 damage, at that point my character is standing where the first pool, now completly faded, was. The second pool is about to dissapear but we are not inside what visually, delimits its hitbox. The second pool fades visually and then we take another 294 damage from it, causing our hero to die.
It is not clear to me if this issue has to do with the pools doing damage while visually gone, or if the hitbox is larger than displayed visually, it looks like it’s both.
This issue is quite common with some of the AoEs in the game, specially the ones with particule effects with fade effects that might vary depending on graphical settings. I would personally love a very visualy clear lenguage for some of this skills, so this kind of deaths feel like player mistakes and not like you died becouse you can’t trust the visual queues of the game.
Thanks again for keeping the great work on an amazing game. Tried to made the post as in detail as I could to make your lifes a bit easier.