Transfer effects not disappearing when the target dies

[Wotcha]

There are a few effects in the game, mostly Cipher powers, which inflict a debuff on an enemy or enemies, and a corresponding transfer buff onto the caster which is linked to the enemy debuff.  I thought that in addition to the buff disappearing when the debuff expires, the buff would also immediately disappear when the targeted enemy dies.

Turns out it doesn't, unless the enemy is gibbed (but anybody with sense turns gibs off of course), or destroyed via Disintegrate or other such body-destroying effects.  I haven't tested it specifically, but I suspect that eating the corpse with Flesh Communion or other such after-the-fact body destroying effects would also prematurely end the buff.

I don't know where I got the idea that the buff would disappear with the death of the enemy, but I suspect maybe I noticed such a buff disappearing long ago when I started playing the game but didn't realize I wanted to have gibs turned off.  But having corrected that misunderstanding, I thought I'd mention it in case others had somehow also gotten the same wrong idea.  It certainly made the transfer-mechanic abilities seem a lot less appealing to me for a long time (with exceptions such as Borrowed Instinct or Time Parasite, which are so good as to override such minor concerns).  I still don't entirely approve of them from a min-max point of view, because they can't be extended with SoT.  I assume they could be extended by debuff-extending mechanics against the source of the transfer, but there aren't nearly so many of those.

[Boeroer]

Hm... I'm using Psychovampiric Shield a lot atm and I'm pretty sure that it disappears once the target dies. Maybe some effects just keep on working no matter if the target's dead or alive. I often see visual effects of spells and abilites that keep on showing up on dead bodies.  I suspect in that case the effect component just doesn't check if the target is dead or alive - ot the target component doesn't cancel effects on death (no idea which way it's implemented).

[Boeroer]

Correction: Just tested Psychovampiric SHield again and it indeed does not end when the carrier dies. Funny. I was pretty sure it did in the past.

[3x0du5]

so I have to turn off meat balls effect for cipher powers to last longer ?

[Boeroer]

You should turn it off for several reasons. For example a Corpse Eater can't eat a gibbed enemy. White Worms has no target if the enemy exploded. Death Runes and Urgent Harvest won't work. But the most important one is that it's just ridiculous.

[3x0du5]

Nothing better than your rogue turning enemy wizard into meat balls  but if I decide to use any of those ill turn it off then I think I tried white worms on my first play trough and could not cast it most of the time that I remember haha

[Wotcha]

6 hours ago, Boeroer said:

Correction: Just tested Psychovampiric SHield again and it indeed does not end when the carrier dies. Funny. I was pretty sure it did in the past.

Right? I noticed it when I was specifically testing these effects for other reasons (the ongoing work for my cipher mod), and it was a very obvious and strange thing to see.

It’s a bit limiting that the cipher’s best survivability buffs are attached to this mechanic, which 1) makes them impossible to extend via standard SoT style shenanigans, and 2) makes them easy to lose prematurely in combination with one of the cipher’s best DPS abilities (Disintegration). I don’t have any immediate plans to address this particular weakness, but time and testing will tell if such a weakness is severe enough to prevent cipher-power-oriented tank/solo builds.

I still need to test how things work with multiples of the same transfer effect work when one target expires or drops the effect. The standard longer-replaces-shorter behavior doesn’t seem to apply for transfer effects, or rather the only such duration checking applies on the debuff side only. 

[Boeroer]

On the other hand this mechanic produces pretty long durations without SoT cheese - pretty long base durations (*PL bonus*INT bonus) and also Lingering Echoes (+Strand of Favor).

[Wotcha]

2 hours ago, Boeroer said:

On the other hand this mechanic produces pretty long durations without SoT cheese - pretty long base durations (*PL bonus*INT bonus) and also Lingering Echoes (+Strand of Favor).

It's shorter compared to many wizard tanking buffs, which are additionally much faster to get stacked up due to zero recovery on most of them. Admittedly it also comes with a target debuff which makes it a little more worthwhile, but for these powers the real point is that of the buff, because the debuffs are single-target and not particularly overwhelming.  If it were possible to do within the cipher "unwritten rules of flavor", the cipher would generally be better served with a no-recovery buff-only spell instead of a buff which is chained to the baggage of a mediocre debuff.  But the game fluff of ciphers needing to anchor every power invocation on the mind of somebody else forbids simple self-buffs, and it would be an extremely bad idea to remove recovery from a spell that also inflicts a debuff, otherwise an Ascended cipher (for instance) could debuff the entire board in just a couple of seconds.

A tank-oriented wizard can get fully spun up in the first few seconds of a fight, compared to a tank-oriented cipher who is going to have recovery between each cast, and on top of that has to build up focus to get anything more than one or two of the cheapest things going.  That's pretty damning for a tank, because tanks generally need to be focused on the job of tanking from the very instant that the fight begins, and need their defenses the very most at the very start of the fight, when they are getting pounded on by the most enemies.  Admittedly the wizard tank would have to figure out how to get his spell slots back if he wanted to do this trick multiple times in a fight, while the cipher is going to be getting focus from attacks along the way, but that should be discounted by the tank role rapidly fading in importance as the fight gets underway, the enemy alpha-strike gets absorbed, and the enemies under management dwindle as they get taken out in turn.  I consider the tank's job to be important for roughly the first third of the fight, after that the tank is useful but not essential except when there are REALLY tough hard-hitters that need long term management.

I'm not sure it's possible to make a cipher-powered tank work well enough to succeed at the tank role without either significantly changing the flavor of the class (like by letting them outright self-buff), making them ridiculously overpowered for other uses, or both.  But it's a design goal I'm trying to meet.  I suspect I'm going to fail here, but I'm doing the due diligence to find out.

An additional wrinkle is that after testing, it appears that you can't even overlap these buffs to achieve redundancy.  If you Vamp Shield a second target while the first is still active, the second target gets the debuff, but the buff side gets totally ignored, and the cipher still only has the original buff attached to the first target, even if the time remaining on that effect is shorter than it would be if the second cast's transfer buff overwrote the first cast.  The vamp shield buff is tied exclusively to that first target.  I'm going to experiment with this a bit.  Ideally I would like the caster buffs to both appear alongside each other, each with their own duration attached to their own debuff, but not actually stack in terms of bonus effects (i.e. you could have two Borrowed Instincts buffs on you, originating from different targets, and get the benefit as long as at least one of those targets is still affected, but you'd only get the +20 defenses and +20 accuracy once even while both debuffs were live).  If I can make that behavior happen via standard mod configuration, I'll do that and call it a day with respect to these powers.