If this is left alone, the card text should definitely be changed. Perhaps something along the lines of:
No that good, it deals dmg and almost reveals your hand: atacks card and non-atacks, showing enemies blocks, armor or move this way
The problem isn't really with Ouch! as much as it is with Barbed Platemail itself. I don't have nearly enough time to test this thoroughly, but these are some other cards (those I can think off my head, at least) which might potentially result in a similar interaction with Barbed: Backbiting Strike, Predictable Stab, Berserk Spin, Spiked Mail, Reflecting Block, Jarring Block. All very speculative ofc (as I said, I have very little time to test stuff atm, so take this with a pinch of salt), but looks to me like the Spiked Mail + Barbed Platemail interaction might be the most hilarious of them all: Spiked Mail's effect gets activated by one of the above mentioned cards You receive 2 piercing damage Barbed Platemail kicks in, preventing the damage from Spiked You receive 4 piercing/penetrating damage instead!
This is a very annoying interacting at least. We are still waiting for a confirmation whether it is intended or not.
Okay, it's been a month and a half now, why are we still waiting on confirmation on whether or not this is a bug or intentional? Either way, I'd like some sort of ruling on the issue, especially since you put Ouch together with Spiked Mail and Barbed Platemail on quite a few items.
I was playing co-op with @Ed2088 the other day, and his elf warrior drew both Ouch! and Raging Strike. He had Barbed Platemail in his hand and was also under the effects of Unholy Curse. He probably took something like a total of 15-20 damage in a single go (damage from Ouch! + damage from Barbed). He didn't straight-out die, but came very close to it. Guess this doesn't really add much to the topic, but I LOL'd hard when that happened. Just something amusing I thought I would share
I think the bug here at the moment is that Barbed Platemail specifies preventing damage from a Melee Attack instead of stating that it just prevents Melee damage. I think we should change the wording on that card but I don't see a great reason for any other changes at this stage.
Yeah, that's what I meant. I thought Barbed would be expected to only deal damage if the blocked damage was coming from a Melee Attack specifically, rather than any card dealing melee damage. Does that mean Barbed Platemail could potentially make you take additional, penetrating damage if it gets procc-ed by, say, Path Of Knives?
Path Of Knives only states that it does Slashing damage, so I wouldn't expect it to. If it does, then wouldn't Path of Knives also need to be reworded to specify that it does Melee Slashing damage?
I just tested this, after casting PoK on one of my own guys and this is the result: when Barbed was proc-ed by the damage coming from PoK, my warrior did not take the penetrating damage, but the armor's effect still got triggered which is clearly shown in the log So it looks like PoK actually triggers Barbed's effect, but somehow the damage couldn't be delivered to the caster? I guess this was expected, as the damage was coming from an attachment, but still looks more like a quirk than intended behavior
If it is considered magic damage, why did Barbed's effect proc on it then? The fact nobody got damaged by Barbed's effect is secondary, in a way.
Oh wait, that was confusing. Normaly, when an armor rolls preventing damage, you would see something like: Barbed Platemail never actually lists the amount of prevented damage in the log, but you always see the line: And that's regardless the fact that Barbed actually dealt its penetrating damage to the attacker or not. Like in the following I was led into believing that the "Halerdae spikes his attacker." message in the log would only be printed if the damage type of the attack qualified for Barbed to deal its penetrating damage.
Backbiting Strike's backlash damage is not typed as melee, and does not trigger Barbed Plate. Spiked Mail vs Barbed Plate is the same way - The damage is not typed as melee damage. That said, if they were melee damage, that would lead to some very interesting situations where it could be buffed by frenzy and other similar effects. Maybe Spiked Mail would actually see some play then?
Time for some grave digging. Someone was asking about Barbed Platemail & Ouch! interaction on the world chat. Directed them here and noticed that the wording hadn't been changed / clarified back then.