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"Stabbing Blast" not causing Umbral Blades to behave as seemingly intended

Bug Reports
#1

Greetings all!

Was messing around with the various Umbral Blades nodes and when I tested “Stabbing Blast” I noticed that none of the blades were flying in the direction of nearby enemies when recalled. This seems contrary to the tooltip description.

Bear in mind that I’m also using “Precision Cuts”. Not sure if that has any bearing but thought I should mention it as it also modifies the behavior of the blades a bit.

And to be more specific, I was testing this by throwing the blades into the ground in front of the intended and very stationary target and then recalling them. Upon recall they flew in all directions but that of target’s.

Thanks!

#2

Was the target an enemy or was it the training dummy at the end of time (which isn’t an enemy)?

#3

Hey there…

Two things just to clarify what you are experiencing?

  1. Did you test this against normal enemies in play? Or against the Dummy in the EoT? That particular dummy is not marked as an enemy so it will not work. The dummies in Champions’ Gate do have enemy ones…

  2. The Stabbing blast will only allow 1 blade per enemy, so if there is only a single target, the rest of your blades will fly off randomnly…

#4

Negative. It wasn’t the training dummy - just a regular mob in the Wraith Dunes.

#5

And sorry, to answer your other question… no blades were hitting the mob. It’s like I mentioned, they were flying in every direction but the mob’s. The one thing I don’t recall is which exact mob it was.

Let me retest after I put the point back into the skill.

#6

Ok, went back into the Wraith Dunes and tested a bit more on the spiders and “Desert Skullen”.

This is reproducible. Bear in mind that because of the wording the expectation is that when I launch these into the ground in front of the mob in question that at least one of them will hit the mob without fail when recalled.

To be clear I’m placing the blades roughly about an inch to maybe an inch and half in front of the mob. This is on a resolution of 3440x1440.

Out of 20 throws a blade hit the intended target 7 times.

I typically saw one of three things happening:

  1. A blade heading in the direction of the mob and striking it.
  2. A blade heading in the direction of the mob and mysteriously vanishing as it’s traveling.
  3. No blades heading in the direction of the mob.

That last point makes it seem like the behavior of blade isn’t modified to “home” in enemies but rather just pick a random direction. Or perhaps it’s only homing in some of the time.

Point 2 prompts me to question if there’s some sort of randomness to the distance in which the blades travel or perhaps there’s some terrain collision going on that I’m not expecting due to the terrain between the mob and the point where the blades are stuck appearing “level”.

Hope this helps.

#7

Ok…

Will have to see if I can replicate it myself… Think I have a lonely rogue somewhere…

Can you upload a screenshot of your UB skill tree (use imgur with a link) or link your build (using Dammit’s build planner https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/ upload top left)… That way if we cant get it to work, we can see exactly what setup you are using - problems like this can sometimes be caused indirectly by other things like passives or gear too… i.e. a combination of something…

has happened before but lets see …

#8

Here ya go: UB Tree

#9

If you read the text of the node, it says

So I wouldn’t expect them to home in on mobs (& even then “homing” in LE is more of a gentle change in direction like the projectiles from the Imperial Eyes rather than significant changes in direction like one might expect). I would expect all blades to be fired in the direction of an enemy (unless there are more blades than enemies, then the “excess” blades just go wherever) & if the enemy moves perpendicular to the direction of the blade’s travel then they may well miss.

It’s entirely likely that #2 is because of some terrain collision issues with the level which would/should affect all projectiles attempting to travel over that section of ground & that’s a separate issue. The Sentinel’s Hammer Throw certainly suffers from this.

All of the blades should have the same range when being “recalled” & that might be effectively infinite, as the recall range is on blades without that node.

#3 definitely shouldn’t be happening at all, might possibly be a targetting issue if the mob was outside of the blade’s targetting range but should also be fixed.

1 Like
#10

I suppose “homing” might not have been the correct choice of word - or rather used a bit too loosely.

1 Like
#11

Ok… With your exact tree…

When testing against the enemy tagged dummy, it always hits on the return but this is only one enemy.

When testing against mobs:

  • in an ideal situation it behaves as I understand it to… i.e. a blade shoots off to a different enemy.

  • however, the phrase “nearby” seems to the issue…

    • If you are within nearby range of a mob - i.e. your character, NOT where you planted the blades, then the return always seems to hit the mobs. For example, I used Bastion of Honour to provide a visible indication of how far a mob was from me… if the mobs were within the bastion of honor range, then the blades always hit, even if you planted them outside the range, behind the mobs or to the side. When they return, they pick off a mob.
    • If however, the mobs themselves are outside the range, then the blades, even if planted right next to the mobs, fly off at random… sometimes hitting a mob, sometimes not… even if there were sufficient mobs to attack (i.e. one blade per mob).

I am able to reproduce this nearby issue without fail every time…

So my assumption would be that either the description of the skill is incorrect because nearby refers to a mob nearby the PLAYER not nearby the planted blade… Or the skill isnt working as intended…

What say you Mr @Llama8 ?

2 Likes
#12

Pretty sure there’s another skill that functions like that though I can’t remember what it is for the life of me. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were using distance-to-player to check whether a mob is “nearby”/in-range rather than distance-to-blade-stuck-in-the-ground, though hopefully they can change that so it works as one would expect it to.

Edit: Sacrifice’s chaining node (Catalyst of Horror) used to have this issue, where it would only chain to minions that were close to you rather than close to the minion you just Sacrificed.

1 Like
#13

Ah yeah… I was definitely interpreting “nearby” as “nearby to where the knives are” and not nearby to me.

Pardon if that was an “oops” on my part.

But yeah, I would definitely love it if it was relative to the planted blades and not myself - it’s a ranged play style after all. XD

#14

No problem… There are lot of issues with interpretting the skill descriptions and sometimes they highlight a bug or at least something that should be changed to be more like the intention of the skill… E.g. I would most definitely have interpretted this stabbing blast to be nearby to the blade not the player…

@Llama8 Sacrifice fix… Cool, glad you found it… Maybe the devs will consider a similar change to UB when they see this…

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#15

That’s the logical reading of it and a reasonable assumption of how it should work.

1 Like