The card text says it places enemies on a "random" square on the game board. It feel like this isn't true, anecdotally. I will try to do some testing to confirm, but I have a suspicion that it's not completely random....
Yep, it's random. The only restriction is that as each character moves it cannot move to a square currently occupied by another character. Oh, and obviously that it can't move to a square that is Blocked or Impassible. It actually uses exactly the same code as Whirlwind to move things around. The only difference between how the two cards function is that Whirlwind Enemies doesn't target allies.
It can, however, not move a character at all. Quite frustrating in my opinion. I wish the square currently occupied by the character being moved was also excluded from the possible destination list. Happened to me one time when my enemy was sitting on the cap point on koi, not pleasant. It seems pretty random to me though, I haven't noticed any issues with the randomness. I took it out of all my decks because I got tired of that randomness. I can't stand a card which can instantly lose you the game via coin toss, despite it's significant power level. I much prefer the lower power but predictability of winds of war and it aggravates me to no end playing against people who spam whirlwinds.
I have seen this as well. The first time it happened, I was frantically looking for a hidden immovable attachment bug afterwards. Sometimes they just randomly sail straight to where they're already standing.
It would be more strategic if it would consider all spots occupied at start of Whirlwind not valid as final destination, rather then spots occupied at start of individual move. Then you would be sure that if anyone stands on single VP, after Whirlwind noone will end up at that VP.
My recent testing suggests that Whirlwind Enemies is NOT random. I've tracked ~40 trials. Enemies were placed adjacent to the whirlwinding team 27 times (67.5%). If there are 64 "free" squares (there are generally more), and each teammate has, at most, 8 adjacent "free" squares (almost always less), than the expected chance of NOT placing at least one WWE'd enemy adjacent to your team should be (1-8/64)*(1-8/64)*(1-8/64)= ~67%. So 33% of the time, we'd expect an enemy to be placed adjacent to a wwe'ing team. This percent would go up as the map gets smaller and go down as the characters either bunch up or move next to each other or blocking or impassable terrain. But in my (small) dataset, WWE is placing adjacent enemies at about twice the expected rate. I'll continue to track, maybe post more numbers as my dataset increases.
Does that calculation account for the fact that the 8 adjacent squares are usually not the same ones for your three characters? Assuming they are all at least 2 squares apart from each other, there are 24 destination squares on the map which are adjacent to one of your characters.
Given that the chance of a single character NOT being placed next to a single, specific enemy is 7/8; Then, the chance of a single character NOT being placed adjacent to any of three enemies is (7/8)^3 ~= 67%, as you have noted. I assume you were playing 3vs3 though, so the chance of each of your three characters NOT being placed next to an enemy: ((7/8)^3)^3 ~= 30%. Since this number is quite close to the one you got from your trials (100 - 67.5 = 32.5), I assume that this was the case. I am willing to go with the theory that the Devs have decided to skew the results for anyone who has chosen 'emerszi' for an account name though
well seems prety random to me, and had cases chars only changed direction or just landed 2 squares away.
If anyone wants to test this, I've put together a scenario where both sides get lots of WW and WWE. You can go into Options and select Pause Enemy Cards and then grab screenshots before and after to analyze later.
