[Profit-Taker] AoE weapons haven't dealt damage in the past 1.5 years.

[Iterniam]

Bug summary:

Short bug description: AoE weapons don't deal their AoE damage components to Profit-Taker's shields.
Gameplay impact: The number of weapons that are viable in the Profit-Taker fight is heavily restricted.
Reproduction: Take any AoE weapon with a small radius (<7m) and an element it only deals with its AoE damage. Don't mod it. Fire it at Profit-Taker during the shield phase when Profit-Taker is vulnerable to AoE element. Observe that it deals 0 damage.
Squad type: The bug occurs regardless of being solo, host, or client.
Introduction date: The bug was introduced some time between February 2020 and June 2020.
Presumed cause: AoE weapons compute falloff damage based on the distance to Profit-Taker's head.
Presumed fix: Make AoE weapons compute falloff damage based on the distance to the closest part of Profit-Taker OR make direct AoE hits count as direct AoE hits.
Current workaround: Shoot weapons with a high range closer to Profit-Taker's head (situated in her back).
Workaround viability: Only feasible for speedrunners for high radius AoE weapons, impossible for casuals.

Here are some weapons impacted by this change, as documented on the wiki:

The longer version:
For Profit-Taker, AoE weapons seem to apply falloff damage to their AoE damage components. So far, this makes sense.
The problem stems from the way falloff distance is measured for Profit-Taker. If shots directly impact Profit-Taker you would expect a falloff distance of 0m, but the falloff distance will always be larger. For most weapons (radius <7 meters), this makes it near impossible to deal any AoE damage to Profit-Taker.
The working theory is that the falloff distance is measured as the distance between the place of impact and Profit-Taker's head.
This theory is backed up by a few things:

1. Exodia Contagion normally loses its AoE Viral damage component, but this is often worked around by the speedrunning community using something called the 'ass meta'.
   Since Profit-Taker's head is near its rear, we try to land Exodia Contagion as close to the back of Profit-Taker (while still standing in front, so the elements are visible). Even with dozens of hours of practice, it's still unreliable to hit the precise locations that are close enough to her 'head'. Here is a supercut showing where to aim to try and get the Viral AoE damage component to deal damage. On many clips, it still deals 0 damage because the projectile lands too far away from PT's 'head'.
2. For large AoE weapons like the Bramma, you can still observe that their Blast damage component is only applied sometimes, based again on the distance to the Profit-Taker's 'head'.

[Iterniam]

I did some digging and found a bug report of this on Reddit which links back to reports made on the forums, one of which was posted on 13 October 2019, now 450 days ago.

This post mentions the magnetic explosion from the Opticor not working, but I distinctly recall that up to and including the introduction of the Kuva Nukor, the Kuva Seer was able to deal its AoE damage component. This means that it wasn't a "global" bug back then.

With the introduction of Warframe Revised, however, the bug became global and has since affected all AoE weapons. This is the same update that introduced the shield regen bug which was announced to be fixed for 29.5 but was never documented in the patch notes. (I did confirm that it was fixed in 29.5.4)

 

[uumm]

This bug limits the pt meta drastically, and is by far the worst bug to effect profit taker. A bug that mostly disables a large number of very good weapons should not have stuck around for this long

[TensorAn]

Oh? even this bug is reported from about half an year ago, and still hasn't been fixed. Smh

[--TL--Sui]

maybe one day..

[uumm]

The recent update made this even worse, explosive weapons appear to be capped at limb hp when they do damage, which is rare.

[uumm]

This has combined with the new idle animation bug to make it nigh impossible to reliably do viral damage with exodia contagion. (or any other explosive weapon really, but exodia contagion was the most used beforehand)

 

[mycroft_]

Would be great to know if this is intentional or not.