[3.02] Bugs and Problems with Infestation of Maggots

[Bubbles]

I have no clear idea how Infestation of Maggots is supposed to work. Its damage doesn't show up in the combat log, but when I observe it in combat (against enemies in the Temple of Eothas, save game attached), I absolutely cannot get it to go above 3 damage per tick, with approx. one tick per 3 seconds. If the enemy is near full endurance, I do 1 damage per tick, if they are near death, I can hit 3 damage per tick.

 

If I interpret the description of "10 damage per percentage of endurance lost over [28] sec" correctly, then an enemy at half endurance should take 500 damage over 28 seconds from the spell; that doesn't wash with the 2 damage every ~3 seconds it actually does.

 

There are a number of improvements I would like to see here; show each tick of damage in the combat log, make the description clearer (I know from testing that each tick is calculated based on the target's current endurance when the tick occurs, but there are a number of other possible interpretations that could be clearly ruled out), and increase the damage to a level where the spell is actually useful.

 

I realize that the spell working "as advertised" might deal too much damage for a level 3 spell, but a high Might character (does Might even affect IoM damage?) dealing about ~30 total damage in half a minute to a Near Death enemy - or 10 total damage to a barely injured one - is just pointless. That's less than half of the damage output of the level 2 DoT spell Insect Swarm, which also only takes 14 seconds to complete.

 

I also don't know what happens when I graze or crit with the spell. In one case, I grazed a spiderling who was at "Badly Injured" with IoM. The combat log read "10 damage per percentage of Endurance lost over 13.5 seconds", which should have been a huge amount - hundreds of damage, dealt very quickly. Instead, IoM ticked for 1 damage every ~3 seconds. It's beyond my understanding how this happened, since even a graze shouldn't be able to convert 500+ damage into a total of 4 damage.

 

Save game:

 

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/i98l0ht4o435vqu/67c5419fad4745c3ac4b721bd0b4b631%207844429%20TempleofEothas.savegame?dl=0

Edited April 17, 2016 by Bubbles

[prodigydancer]

I think IoM is indeed bugged. I don't have a druid to test it right now but I remember it being a rather nasty spell in vanilla because even on Hard I was forced to pull Pŵgra by sending my main tank forward and keeping the rest of my party out of sight just to avoid IoM hitting everyone. It ticked for some crazy damage. Now in 3.0x (on PotD) it's nearly harmless.

 

They probably nerfed the spell at some point and in the process they probably broke its damage formula. As always.

Edited April 17, 2016 by prodigydancer

[Sking]

Hey Bubbles,

 

After a little bit of love, I've decided you are correct. The spell is not functioning as intended. It is just doing 10 damage no matter what endurance the enemy is at. My bet is it is trying to pull from the health values (which will always be almost full or not exist). I've put a bug in, hopefully we can get a fix in a future patch.

 

I got your back

-Sking

[Bubbles]

Still bugged. Maybe 2017 will bring a positive change.

[Loren Tyr]

The odd thing is, the behaviour seems to be intentional. The ModifiedStat this uses is DamageBasedOnInverseHealth, which is clearly named for and implemented as doing tick damage proportional to the ratio of Health lost, ie. 10 x (1 - current / total Health) Raw damage per tick. The original idea must thus indeed have been to base this on Health rather than Endurance. This should be just a straightforward matter of adding a new ModifiedStat DamageBasedOnInverseStamina and setting the various versions of Infestation of Maggots to use that instead, though. Assuming that the intent would now ineed be to change it to Endurance-based rather than Health-based.