Pernicious Cloud (Rogue PL 7) always friendly fire

[Boeroer]

Hello,

Pernicious Cloud has a huge base radius (5m) centered on the Rogue - and deals really nasty DoT in an AoE. It is not foe-only.

Like all AoEs with friendly fire (for example Fireball), Pernicious Cloud shows its AoE indicator with a red circle (the friendly fire part) and a yellow, bigger circle which usually indicates the foe-only part.

However, with Pernicious Cloud - and that's the only ability I know of that behaves this way - the yellow circle also does friendly fire. 

Since the AoE can be very big this makes Pernicious Cloud quite bad if you play with a party or anywhere near neutral bystanders (city etc.). Bit sad given how many ability points you have to invest to get there. 

Because this behaviour is totally not in line with the rest of the game I call the current implementation faulty.

To fix it there are two variants:

• make the whole AoE indicator red (like for example Storm of Holy Fire . this wouldn't fix the problem that the ability is difficult to use if you're not alone - but at least it will communicate its effect in the proper way)
• make the yellow area foe-only

I would like to propose one of those fixes for the Community Patch. @MaxQuest@Phenomenum would that be something to consider?

Others please chime in, too! Maybe I missed something or this was discussed before.

Edited March 14, 2021 by Boeroer

[thelee]

This is also a problem with Smoke Cloud and Smoke Grenade - that trio of abilities just has weird targeting behavior. ISTR that even confusion doesn't interact with it properly. In all cases only the rogue is excluded from the targeting. (add this to the sap upgrade in how it has messed up targeting). As a result, I prefer using Smoke Grenade even if pernicious cloud can do a lot of damage; simply being able to target it makes it a lot more useful.

 

I think it would be reasonable to make all of them foe-only. I don't even know why it's the way it is right now - I bet the (probably buggy) targeting is an artifact of them trying to make a friend-and-foe effect that somehow still ignores the rogue, but in terms of systems design making them friend-and-foe makes the non-smoke grenade effects quite weak (esp smoke cloud given its guile cost) and hard to use.

 

edit: i would also argue that in practice pernicious cloud doesn't do enough damage. it has like 9 PEN by default (7 + 2 scaling) which is very low and they don't really have good ways to increase that without very specific help. for spellcasters, 7 PEN base is a "low pen" effect, and spellcasters also have +1 PEN passives and spellshaping [which sometimes help] and several spellcasters can buff their inherent pen (cipher with +1, furies get +1, priests can buff with tenacious, chanters can buff with energized) or have enough effects to try and target vulnerable AR (druids and wizards especially). in PotD you could go through a lot of effort to carefully position your rogue and use the ability only to do piddling amounts of damage.

Edited March 16, 2021 by thelee

[Elric Galad]

18 minutes ago, thelee said:

This is also a problem with Smoke Cloud and Smoke Grenade - that trio of abilities just has weird targeting behavior. ISTR that even confusion doesn't interact with it properly. In all cases only the rogue is excluded from the targeting. (add this to the sap upgrade in how it has messed up targeting). As a result, I prefer using Smoke Grenade even if pernicious cloud can do a lot of damage; simply being able to target it makes it a lot more useful.

 

I think it would be reasonable to make all of them foe-only. I don't even know why it's the way it is right now - I bet the (probably buggy) targeting is an artifact of them trying to make a friend-and-foe effect that somehow still ignores the rogue, but in terms of systems design making them friend-and-foe makes the non-smoke grenade effects quite weak (esp smoke cloud given its guile cost) and hard to use.

 

edit: i would also argue that in practice pernicious cloud doesn't do enough damage. it has like 9 PEN by default (7 + 2 scaling) which is very low and they don't really have good ways to increase that without very specific help. for spellcasters, 7 PEN base is a "low pen" effect, and spellcasters also have +1 PEN passives and spellshaping [which sometimes help] and several spellcasters can buff their inherent pen (cipher with +1, furies get +1, priests can buff with tenacious, chanters can buff with energized) or have enough effects to try and target vulnerable AR (druids and wizards especially). in PotD you could go through a lot of effort to carefully position your rogue and use the ability only to do piddling amounts of damage.

There's something weird about PEN then. It should get +3 by default as a Tier 7 and scale as a Tier 5 since upgraded abilities win on both side. 

[thelee]

45 minutes ago, Elric Galad said:

There's something weird about PEN then. It should get +3 by default as a Tier 7 and scale as a Tier 5 since upgraded abilities win on both side. 

upgraded abilities get both more generous ability scaling and more generous lower-base treatment for PL scaling? didn't know that.

 

either way, the numbers seem too low to me. I used 7 PEN mostly as a baseline comparison to how spellcasters handle PEN. Even when I'm futzing around with a test level 19 char in The Hole of all places, I'm under-PENing with pernicious cloud. Either the effect needs to be much easier to use or its PEN needs a buff. It either should be a really great interrupt/distraction tool that incidentally does damage, or it should be a high-risk high-reward weapon. Currently it's neither.

[Elric Galad]

Yeah it's true for all upgraded abilities bar Leap upgrades and Mule kick for some buggy reasons.

I personally handled it by giving it interruption Graze. Near instant interrupt on Graze in an AoE with additional effect sounded good enough.