Path of Knives triggering on Fire Spray

By now, no one should be surprised that I'm testing Path Of Knives like crazy.

Anyway, I accidentally got it on my own Wizard thanks to the Enlarge card. Then I cast Fire Spray. The log:

Kelmelm moved.
Kelmelm reacts!
Path of Knives damaged Kelmelm.
Kelmelm took 0 Slashing damage.
Kelmelm shoots a tiny cone of flames

Yeah. In case it isn't obvious, "Kelmelm moved" is referring to "Kelmelm played a card," not that I actually played a move.

 

Your chance to pivot when you cast Fire Spray is a move according to the game.

 

Intriguing. It is perfectly true, of course. But that's a problem since ANY of your attacks cause you to turn and face your target: it's not obvious to the player why this one should be different (and, of course, dealing 0 damage looks silly). Hopefully, when they improve the targeting system for cone attacks, they'll catch this.

 

I played a fire spray while halted once... wouldn't let me pivot so I sprayed my own team instead of the enemy.

 

same but acid spray... what a mess

 

Which makes facing so much more important. Working as intended I would say.

 

To respond, I'd pretty much have to repeat my prior post.

As we've discussed in various places (from November up to beta), the game is using the facing system to determine how your cone attack works as a temporary measure. Its utility is next to nonexistent for telling the player where the cone will strike, as it shows you the cone highlight before you play the card but not during targeting.

Eventually, Blue Manchu will implement a real "show you the area of effect" mouseover for cone targeting. When they do that, I hope they bring cone attacks into line with other attacks to prevent excess card animations, damage animations, grunts of pain, and "0 damage" declarations.

 

Ah, there's the tricky and confusing bit.

Staci Iceborn strikes Singe​

Staci Iceborn moved.​

Singe took 4 Crushing damage.​

Singe moved.​

Singe shoots a tiny cone of flames​

Staci Iceborn reacts!​

Mail failed!​

The non-movement auto-facing comes after the attack is played whereas the pivot on cone attacks comes before the attack portion of the card is logged -- it seems like an undisclosed Step 0 rather than conventional targeting. Which explains why the anti-movement stuff is triggering. I don't have the equipment to test but I suspect that something like Clumsy that counteracts normal targeting doesn't work on cone cards.

The fix could be to let the card target a tile rather than a direction. When you mouse over the card in hand you would only see the four squares around your character in the red targeting overlay, but then you "play" the card and when you point the cursor at the potential targets you can see the yellow AoE and you may still cancel the action. Just my thoughts.

 

That sounds just right, though perhaps mousing over the card in your hand should behave as it does at present: a quick representation of the cone for quick understanding.

 

I second and third and fourth this... Alternately, the mouseover auto shows the four tiles and the cone zones for all the four tiles would also work <3

 

Unfortunately, no. (Unless you were joking around.) Given how the cone is defined, your character would just be surrounded by a solid "burst"-style glow: you need to show one cone at a time for it to be clear.

 

use colors ! which wouldn't work if you were color blind tho