Searing Bond + Fire Penetration?
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I wouldn't say it's a wall of text, it's just a few extra words. My main complaint is that "on hit" doesn't appear anywhere on the gem even though it applies and is in fact very relevant to the gem's functionality. I imagine, for example, Fire Penetration won't increase any burning damage done by a skill (such as Herald of Ash's overkill burn damage, or any skill with Chance to Ignite on it) nor would it help the damage dealt by Molten Shell. This is an even greater problem because tooltip DPS never increases with penetration gems, so a player (such as myself) could be playing with a gem that does absolutely nothing and have no way to tell save for actually testing the skill with and without the gem (and with no other support gems attached) or reading the wiki (which, though helpful, should never be necessary).
It's just needlessly confusing and could be fixed with a few extra words of description. Last edited by TheMongrel#3988 on Jun 16, 2015, 4:28:09 PM
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I agree completely with OP. But I'm relatively new too, so I may have different expectations than veterans do. When people tout that PoE has 'very precise wordings for a reason', I have actually believed that. Mostly, anyway. This lack of "on hit" is not very precise at all. (Not that I'm sure it would've helped me, because it seems to me that the searing bond has to 'hit' the enemy for them to start burning. But there you go.)
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" There is zero implication that it does not work with Molten Shell, which is a straight-up Fire Damage Hit; no different from a burning axe or a fireball. :/ |
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" Well there's the confusion I was talking about. What exactly constitutes a "hit?" Certainly it isn't just "something that does damage" or else Searing Bond would "hit." It's not as cut and dry as you seem to think it is. For instance, does Fire Trap hit? Well, yes it does, but most on-hit effects won't be triggered because it's the trap that hits, not the player. If you put Fire Penetration on Fire Trap, then as I understand it the initial hit will penetrate fire resistance, but the burn effect will not. This is pretty unintuitive, and going back to Molten Shell its properties are Fire, Spell, Duration, and AoE; no "hit" is referenced in the skill itself at all with one exception: quality on the gem gives it +1.5% Chance (per 1% quality) to Ignite enemies on hit with Fire Damage. If, however, you are like most people and don't have a quality Molten Shell there will be absolutely no indication as to whether or not it's a hit or, like Searing Bond, just does damage. How about Shield Charge, does that hit twice? Does Lightning Strike/Shot hit multiple times, one for the initial hit and one for each other projectile? If a projectile pierces, does it "hit" everything it comes in contact with? Does a Decoy Totem's taunt "hit?" Does Detonate Dead "hit?" Is the explosion resulting from killing something with Infernal Blow a "hit?" What about the explosions from Explosive Arrow, are those hits too? Many of those questions probably seem obvious, but I assure they are anything but to new players. Some of them even I, who have been playing this game for years, am not sure of (namely the Inferal Blow one and to a lesser extent the pierce one, though I assume everything it touches is a "hit." I could see an argument made otherwise though). Last edited by TheMongrel#3988 on Jun 18, 2015, 4:57:56 PM
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A Hit deals flat Damage. Simple as that.
(assuming an unmodified state; Ancestral Bond only prevents the Damage component of a Hit) Fire Trap's explosion deals flat Damage, it Hits all targets in the AoE. Shield Charge deals flat Damage once. It's one Hit. If five Lightning Arrows deal Damage to the same target, you Hit that fellow five times. Decoy doesn't deal Damage. The explosion from an Exploding Arrow deals Damage. Damage over Time does not apply flat Damage, it's degeneration (drain, siphon, whatever you want to call it). There is no Hit, only an ongoing effect. When you punch someone, you hit them. With your fist. Pretty obvious I'd say? If you grab someone by the neck, would you say you hit them with your hand? --- I cannot see how a Projectile that physically connects with an enemy and passes straight through it would not be a Hit (Evasion and Dodge prevent physical contact and thus prevent Hits!). So, do tell what argument you had in mind? I'm curious. Last edited by Vipermagi#0984 on Jun 18, 2015, 6:41:46 PM
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The question with pierce is whether each different monster it passes through is considered hit, or if it's just the initial target that is "hit" and the pierce effect is something separate. This is also be the thought behind questioning whether each projectile from Lightning Strike/Shot is a hit or if it's just the initial attack that hits with the spawned projectiles not counting. Again, this is probably obvious to you but it's not as clear to newer players as you might think.
What about Infernal Blow? The way I understand the skill, it puts a debuff on enemies you hit with it which causes them to explode if they die within a certain time limit. Is that debuff spawned explosion a "hit" for the skill? Because I could easily see the argument that Infernal Blow only places the debuff on the creature, which would mean its explosion is an effect of the skill rather than an extension of it. Molten Shell has a similar question, since casting the spell is not what makes the explosion, so it's not so obvious that that counts as a hit. For an example of how this confusion works in reverse, consider that the mana drain for Arctic Armor is not affected by Reduced Mana. It's as much a part of the skill as Molten Shell's explosion is to Molten Shell, but while on-hit effects apparently will affect the Molten Shell explosion there is no way to affect Arctic Armor's mana drain. I for one did not expect Reduced Mana to work with Arctic Armor, but many new players were confused, probably because it just isn't clear for some skills what is and is not affected by certain support gems unless you check the wiki or the forums. |
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If you stick a pen through a piece of paper, it's still a pen on the other side. It doesn't somehow change by having pierced some paper. The same goes for a Projectile that Pierces an enemy. It's the exact same Projectile that applies the exact same effect to whatever it encounters on its path.
To be perfectly honest I can only see your Pierce argument as madness. It doesn't make any amount of sense to me, it runs entirely counter to what Piercing implies. --- You're overthinking the word "Hit" so much. It's literally what it says it is; it's not that hard. The explosion from Infernal Blow is a physical effect (a force rippling outward) that collides with a solid entity. It hits the entity. You don't get hit by the heat from the sun, the heat exists around the sun and you are within that area. The sun doesn't have to physically connect to transfer its warmth. Molten Shell has to (quoting the description) "explode outwards" to deal Fire Damage. Searing Bond just has to be nearby to deal Fire Damage over Time. Yes, there are people that overthink the implications of a given term (whether Hit, Pierce or w/e). There is nothing GGG can do to prevent that. This also has nothing to do with new players versus experienced players; there will be just as many new players that get these questions right as there are experienced players who get them wrong (you brought yourself as an example testament to this). It depends entirely on how many seconds the person in question spends thinking about it; none, three, six, or more than sixty. Somewhere around three to six seconds will probably get you the correct answer. "What constitutes a hit?" "Hitting things with your fist means making direct contact from fist to face. An explosion/arrow/sword makes direct contact too!" "Why does Searing Bond not Hit?" "Searing is usually a term applied to heat; I don't have to hug the fireplace to keep warm either." Do you have to touch a burning building to suffer? No. Similarly, Burning Ground doesn't Hit. It just exists and being too close to it sucks. --- Arctic Armour + Reduced Mana has exactly nothing in common with Molten Shell hitting or not. Because it's irrelevant I will ignore it as part of the discussion. For the curious: Reduced Mana has a Mana Multiplier which applies to the initial resource consumption (as Mana Mults always do)(for Arctic Armour, 0 Mana Reserved, listed on the Skillbar tooltip last I checked), and its Quality bonus explicitly only applies to Costs. That is why it doesn't apply to the Mana drain part of the Buff. Last edited by Vipermagi#0984 on Jun 18, 2015, 8:53:08 PM
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" The question here is not what logically happens, it's what the coding allows for. In the real world arguing whether something "hits" or not is mere semantics; it doesn't matter if you get punched or fall into a fire, you still get hurt and there aren't any "bonus effects" for that fire "hitting" you. This game has keywords, and those keywords matter. " Hit is a very relevant keyword to this game, so much so that it apparently affects things even when it isn't specifically referenced, such as with Fire Penetration (which requires a hit even though the gem says nothing to that effect...) " Oh really? It seems to me that all they need to do is add a few words to gem descriptions to clarify. Why exactly would the following changes not work: Molten Shell: Hits for x–y Fire Damage Base Duration is 10.00 seconds Shields break after x Total Damage is prevented x additional Armour Infernal Blow: x% increased Physical Damage 50% of Physical Damage Converted to Fire Damage Deals 125% of Base Damage Base duration is 0.5 seconds Explosion hits for base Fire Damage equal to 25% of the corpse's maximum Life And the one I'm honestly surprised you don't seem to to agree is a problem: Fire Penetration: Penetrates x% Fire Resistance for supported skills on hit Simple enough, especially for Fire Penetration, which IMO is a much needed and very simple change. I see no good argument against including necessary information in the skill description. " So...experienced players are just as likely to misinterpret how skill gems work as new players? Ignoring for the moment that this seems like a hugely false statement, wouldn't that mean that the gem descriptions are indeed flawed and need revision? After all, in a good game there shouldn't be confusion such as this. Diablo 3, for example, never had any ambiguities of this nature in it. Of course, I consider D3 a far inferior game to PoE, which is why it irks me that there's such an easily correctable mistake in PoE. " Funny, I probably spent less than ten seconds thinking about the interaction between Fire Penetration and Searing Bond, and look what happened there... " I never questioned why Searing Bond doesn't hit. I never thought it did. I questioned why Fire Penetration did not work with it when it had no reference to "hit" in its description, and only by looking on the wiki was it possible to know that a hit was required. I'm not sure why it's even an argument that this is poor wording. Imagine if the Life Gain on Hit gem was simply "Life Gain," and its wording was "+x Life gained for supported skills." I'm sure you'd have plenty of people wondering why DoT effects weren't working with it. I'm fairly confident, too, that you'd agree with me that that would be poor wording for that gem. " I will illustrate the parallel for you: Molten Shell is a skill that gives you an armor buff when you cast it. It also has a secondary effect: if you block/prevent enough damage while it's active, it explodes, dealing damage in an AoE around you. Even though that explosion is not an initial effect of a spell, but rather an effect of the buff the spell gives you, it can still be enhanced by support gems that affect damage. Arctic Armor is a skill that gives you a damage prevention buff when you cast it. It similarly has a secondary effect attached to its initial effect: a mana drain that increases if you move. This secondary effect, however, cannot be affected by support gems like the secondary effect of Molten Shell even though there are support gems that affect mana costs just like there are ones that affect damage. The description of Reduced Mana is as follows: "This support gem reduces the mana cost and the mana reserved of linked skills, hence the lower than 100% mana multiplier." To be clear, I'm not arguing that Arctic Armor should work with Reduced Mane; I think it's fine as is. I'm merely pointing out that it would be easy for a player, especially a new one, to see the mana drain effect attached to Arctic Armor as a "mana cost" of the skill (after all, it is attached to the skill and costs you mana) and, thus, be surprised that the gem doesn't work with it, especially when the secondary effects of other spells (such as Molten Shell) can be affected by support gems. " Here you're applying game knowledge that you as an experienced player have, but that newer players might lack. From the simple description it is not outlandish to assume that the mana drain effect on Arctic Armor is a "mana cost." You must admit that a new player who isn't immersed in the wording of this game could easily make that misconception. One needs only to search for "Arctic Armour Reduced Mana" in Google to see that there are people who have, and indeed even people who insist that the two gems should work together based on how they are worded. tl;dr all I'm saying is that some of the gems, particularly the penetration ones, could use an update on their wording for clarity. You yourself admit that even experienced players can misinterpret how the gems work. I think this can be remedied by a few extra words here and there on the gem descriptions. |
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" A punch is a one-time thing and fire hurts you more and more as time goes by. The whole reason I keep drawing real-life analogies is because that is the simplest way to understand what is a Hit and what is not; it's an analogy that works. There is actually a "bonus effect" of fire hitting you (but it's not FPen); you start burning and take "damage over time", which is resultant of a Hit but not a Hit in and of itself, similar to how a Fireball Hits you and Ignites you but the Ignite is not a Hit. Going back to Pierce: Computers are built on logic. If the exact same thing happens to two different objects, if the same arrow hits two different monsters, there is no logical explanation for it having a different definition on both objects. By drawing a real-life analogy, one can determine the function of Piercing and Hitting. As such, the question is what logically happens, because what logically happens actually helps understand what happens internally. These analogies allow you to define those ever-important keywords on your own. There is no real-life analogy for Fire Penetration however, and on that note: " There are a lot of people who have no idea that Ancestral Bond causes your Fireballs to deal zero Damage even when you have no Totems out. I do not disagree with changing Fire Pen's description, at all. Remember, this back-and-forth started on you questioning whether Molten Shell's explosion is a Hit or not. You said there was no cut-and-dry definition of what is a Hit and what is not. I explain how that is definitely actually the case. That is the core discussion we're having here. I do think it's a decent idea to add the "Hit" definition to Fire Pen's description - that way, it is more consistent with other on-Hit effects. I don't see it being terribly important on the Molten Shell description though, because the definition of "Hit" is so simple. " " Why do you initially say that even experienced players don't always understand what is a Hit and what is not, and then go on to say you believe it's "hugely false", exactly? It's clearly true here. " Yes, it's something people have to learn. Not disagreeing on that; that is why I actually described what does happen, so people who read this and are unaware might learn. However, it's still irrelevant to the discussion of "what constitutes a Hit". Still ignoring it. Last edited by Vipermagi#0984 on Jun 19, 2015, 6:10:28 AM
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" Alright then. How about if instead of falling into a fire, I shine a high powered laser beam capable of burning on you. Do I hit you with that laser beam? Because that's pretty similar to how Searing Bond operates; a continuous beam of damage, but Searing Bond does not hit. " Well good. That's really all I care about here, I just took issue with you saying that what constitutes a "hit" is obvious, I don't think it is, especially to newer players. Some things obviously are hits (no one's going to think that whacking a monster with Heavy Strike isn't a hit) but others are not (like Infernal Blow's explosion). " I misinterpreted what you were saying. I thought you were referring to all game mechanic ambiguity questions rather than this specific one, and logically someone who is playing longer has a greater chance of getting those questions right. " You can ignore it, this discussion is pretty much over anyway, but it wasn't completely irrelevant. It was an example made to illustrate the point that it isn't always obvious what gems work with what, and specifically that it's completely understandable that players might not know that they can affect Molten Shell's damage with gems. |
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