In this (glitchy) video, you can see that one of Medreth's followers has a Greatsword and goes to open with the Knock Down ability on my Wizard. He casts the ability from outside immediate melee range, misses and engages my BB Wizard. The Cowled Monk interrupts my Wizard's spell with a fist attack, and then after the spell is cancelled the Wizard follows the engagement auto-attack clause of attacking the first engaged melee enemy. 

As you can see, he was engaged by the Cowled Man with the Greatsword who is out of immediate melee range and has to move to get in range to attack him, and thus suffers a disengagement attack from the Cowled Monk.

 

The Knock Down cast range probably needs to be reduced to melee range so that if the attack misses, the engaged unit does not have to move forward to attack their first engager, and thus suffer potentially multiple disengagement attacks from nearby enemies.

 

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The Knock Down animation does not begin playing immediately anymore when a Knock Down occurs because of the introduction of non-interrupting hit reactions, which play before the Prone animation takes effect. The non-interrupting Hit Reaction needs to be removed from the Knock Down ability and other abilities/spells so that the intended status effect/animation plays immediately upon impact. Not only does this look silly, but it actually increases the total time that characters are disabled by the ability by the time of the hit reaction animation (I think, anyway).

 

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If you initiate combat with the Knock Down spell, you can see that after casting Knock Down and successfully hitting an enemy, the prone animation never plays and the Cowled Man instead goes into the combat stance and queues up his next action. His recovery time is paused though, so it is possible that he is actually effected by prone afflction on the data side, but something is preventing the prone animation from playing, possibly something to do with when the combat state is actually initiated after the spell has been cast? 

 

The Duration of the Knock Down status effect is also always the same regardless if the attack is a graze, hit (and probably crit too, but haven't tested). The default duration for BB Fighter is 5.3 seconds and if you cast it on anyone and graze on the attack, the duration is still 5.3 seconds.

bumping a few priority bugs that haven't been answered

This wil actually be a problem with any two combatants where the range of one is higher than the other. For example, anyone holding a pollaxe (which I think has a higher range) and engaging will probably get a disengagement attack off on someone. I actually think that the knockdown range is fine but that the AI targeting clause should include something like,

 

When engaged:

IF (target == in range)

THEN

target the person who engaged you

ELSE

target closest person

 

Or that moving in closer to your engager should not get a disengagement clause.

Pollaxe doesn't have increased range, it's Pike and Quarterstaff. A disengagement attack will be scored if the target is not currently targeting the engager and is not pathing directly toward the engager ie. moving past them and yep they will get hit by a disengagement attack.

 

It is the Knock Down range that is the problem in this instance. It's not a weapon-based attack.

Edited January 13, 201511 yr by Sensuki

Hello,

 

Thank you for the feedback and videos. I see three issues here and they are all now in our database. The first is that using Knock Down on a friendly NPC to begin combat does not cause the Prone affliction.

 

The second is that Knock Down, which triggers an AI response from the victim to attack their attacker, is usable at a range that seems excessive. Normally attacks from a range do not trigger this response. However, since this ability is classified as melee, it is somewhat a unique case.

 

The last is that the duration of Knock Down's Prone effect is not properly scaling on Grazes and Crits. This issue spans to many spells and abilities throughout the game and is in the hands of our programmers already. It should be one global fix so it shouldn't be necessary to report other abilities that are behaving in this way.

 

I will update the known list with all of these issues.

 

Thank you for your support!