Marksman's decoy second charge issue

Backup Buddy allows a second charge for the Decoy skill. The problem is I can’t consistently use it on separate occasions. Having no cooldown, on key press it just throws both of them. I don’t think this is intended, since it is not like AA. More like those suicidal red skeletons of the necro.

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For skills with charges and a cooldown the cooldown starts when the final charge is used. This is intended.

I am not sure if we talk about the same issue. If I have 2 charges available, I cannot use only one. When I press once the button for it, it instantaneously throws both charges. So I have 2 charges, press once, 0 charges. They both appear on the map and do the damage accordingly. This is not how any other charge works. Right? Maybe I am wrong, but I doubt it. I can use only one charge, but I have to lift the finger within a few frames. I have never heard of a mechanic like that for charges.

It should only consume 1 charge per use though I’m not sure if points in Grand Diversion would use 2 charges per skill use.

For me, when I used it, it always threw two decoys at once. Never one by one, always the two together.

That’s how Grand Diversions works, but if you have Backup Boddy by itself you only throw 1 Decoy at a time. If you have Grand Diversions and Backup Buddy you throw multiple Decoys per charge, so with 2 points in Grand Diversions you could have up to 6 Decoys at once.

Just tested it out with only Backup Buddy and it appears to work fine for me, consuming only a single charge per keypress. I’m a tad too lazy to grind the skill points to test if it’s a bugged reaction with Backup Buddy + Grand Diversions, but it would definitely be interesting if that’s the case. Although do you even have Grand Diversions? Given Llama was the one mentioning that not you.

However @Dorulet have you checked that it’s not actually your keyboard (or mouse) not de-bouncing properly? Could just re-bind it to another key to check that quickly, although given the clarity of your typing here I doubt it’s the case if it’s a keyboard bind lol, but mice are more prone to have de-bouncing issues (e.g. accidentally double-clicking) as they wear down faster.

I tested it, it’s not bugged.

Thanks for testing it out! I ask of you one more thing to try. How long do you have to keep the key pressed in order to throw both of them?

@Kehtnok I use what I think is a perfectly functional mechanical keyboard. Truth is, it records keypresses immediately [not when the key reaches the bottom position], so maybe when my fat fingers press a key, it just takes too long before it records a key-up event. I changed the bind and it behaves exactly the same.

@Llama8 I didn’t say it is a bug. Just more like AA behavior rather than Ballista for example.

Oh wait, it could be that the animation for Decoy is extremely short. Which explains why one charge can be used, as long as you do not keep the key pressed for it to start the second animation. Might make sense in code, but in gameplay, for me and my super sensitive keyboard, it’s just an annoyance because it is a survival skill… What I do now is I keep one on cd at all times, so it comes faster while also having one in the bag.

You didn’t but Khetnok (who I was replying to) suggested it might be.

That’s likely what’s happening since Decoy works as expected for me.

Chipping in - To test this, you could setup a macro that takes your “fat fingers” out of the equation and will allow you to add any delay between presses to see what actually happens with the skill, its animation delay and the second charge…

Obviously this doesnt help in real play, but it should help confirm (or disprove) what you think might be happening…

:+1:

I tried now with the mouse and I have way better control. Still, I would argue this shouldn’t be the case.

Also are there other skills that have charges and behave like this one? Maybe this is truly what they wanted. I would think no, because Grand Diversions is throwing 2 or more at once, charges are to be used separately, if that is my choice as a player.

My conclusion in terms of feedback/suggestion:
Decoy’s core value comes from crowd control which is lost if I cannot consistently use one charge at a time.

My suggestion is to increase the duration of the animation for a more consistent experience. I see no reason why it should not behave similarly to Ballista which has no cooldown [like the first of the 2 charges], yet I can consistently use it one at a time.

I think I used consistent 20 times :smiley:

Thanks for reading, all the best!

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@vapourfire Cool idea! Thanks!

Pardon but I didn’t, I was replying to your comment to that affect :sweat_smile: :

That’s why I mentioned it would “definitely be interesting” because that would be a very bizarre bug indeed. I was of the opinion it was an input issue.

It seems it may only be the case for you though. I agree it’s definitely frustrating, especially on a skill so important for CC, but given no one else is having this problem (at least so far in this thread) it might be specific to your setup? I’m on a laptop keyboard with no issues, although this Lenovo does have decent key-action. Although I’m also curious what your attack throwing speed % inc is at.

It definitely is quick to fire off the second charge if you keep the key depressed, but at least for me that’s a pretty significant “on purpose” action, holding the key down like that. But with enough increased throwing attack % I could see that line getting much fuzzier.

I would argue a better solution would be the ability to configure skills (or rather, skill slots on the bar) to be cast on press vs release, similar to some MOBAs variations on quick-casting etc, since increasing the animation time on decoy would be a direct nerf for any build not taking the Backup Buddy node.

That being said it would be a pretty large amount of work for something that doesn’t seem to be too much of an issue for most, so I doubt it would get prioritized even if EHG wanted to add it.

I feel OP’s frustration. I have the exact same issue when using Shield Bash with Double Bash node wich gives Shield Bash two charges.

I often unintentionally used both charges when I only press the key once. I’m pretty sure my logitech keyboard is working just fine since there’s nothing wrong when I’m typing or playing other games.

The projectile can still leave at the start of the animation, and then “lag” a bit.

Ironically I have a gaming setup, but your laptop is ok.

That would make sense for a nuke skill with 2 charges. Why would you want to overlap CC?
24% throw speed.

Update modifier for length of animation from x to y. It would take more to go through the pipeline than the fix itself. It would in a perfect world. Unless you are a dev and you know for sure it is hell to fix.

Btw I found a workaround. I just respecced the node :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

This made me feel understood, thanks @yles9056. It is sooooo frustrating. It could have changed the pace of the game for me and make it more action / less kiting.

You can stack a lot of armour shred with 3x Decoys & the shred nodes.

“Gaming” setup isn’t really what I meant here. I’m speaking more about both the firmware-level behavior of your keyboard + interrupt controller and even more likely about how you configure your key events at the OS level. However there could be further throttling/management of those key events within LE event handlers as well, so they may not be directly relevant.

What I’m saying here is not that I “want” that behavior, but that it simply is not a problem for me with this skill, for whatever reason. I don’t have issues with accidental double-casting pretty much at any time, with any multi-charge skill, including this one.

Apologies I’m referring to my suggestion of adding customizable skill activation on keyPress vs keyUp events. Currently all skills trigger on keyPress (otherwise they would not fire repeatedly while holding the key down), but there are other events that can be handled, and that can be handled in different ways. Here though the real “work” would be the additional configuration management and UI changes + testing to ensure all that is working. Your suggestion would be much easier to implement.

But yes :smiley: I am actually a software engineer, although been working primarily in firmware and large scale data-infra/SRE stuff the past decade. That being said I have a penchant for bug squashing and perf bottleneck hunting, where building up pattern recognition is pretty important.

Oh! That does give me an idea… if LE does no event throttling and is processing windows API events directly you may be able to slow down how quickly a key press event is triggered while holding down a key in the windows settings. Let me look about for it since I don’t really dabble in Windows-land.

(Never mind, reading more on the Unity docs I don’t think this would make a difference. But I did find a rabbit hole…)
EDIT: Look for modifying your Repeat Delay (time before the first repeat iirc) on your keyboard properties. It seems in Win10 you have to navigate via the old control panel interface, damn it annoys me so much how Windows and Apple continually hide more and more user control. In theory this should decrease the time before the next skill activation upon holding the key down, however keep in mind it’ll make it take longer to start repeating characters when you hold down a key for typing etc. (also I just realized it seems discourse doesn’t let you spam exclamation marks, limits to three!!!)

Also note that this will increase the delay for all skills, including those you actually want to spam, so isn’t perfect. Furthermore it may be that Unity circumvents OS key event APIs in some way (I would find this highly unlikely, but I know almost nothing about Unity internals) which would make this idea moot.

Alright I really need to stop thinking about this, but kinda having some fun.

A simpler solution may be to include a toggle-able setting “Require discrete key-press for cooldown abilites”, okay that name is awful but that gist. Essentially when enabled it would require a full keyDown + keyUp sequence before you will re-cast any ability which has a cooldown. You could still trigger on the initial keyPress, just basically a latch til keyUp. This wouldn’t really affect single-charge cooldowns (unless the user is holding the key for the entire cooldown duration and the skill becomes ready again), but would prevent any multi-charge CDs from firing on a single press by accident.

It may break the NumLock auto-cast trick when enabled though, not sure if that’d be an issue. Anyways just a thought.