Zephyr Tornadoes breaking after 500,000~ Damage?

[(PSN)Lunardian]

What causes her Tornadoes to break, is that they have roughly 500k HP. If there is anything, from the Zephyr doing it, to teammates capable of doing that much damage to tornadoes{Or near that amount}, then it's easily able to kill the tornadoes, and render them useless unless recasted. This has been a ongoing issue with Zephyr for years, and never fixed. Don't know if this is a bug, or not, but it makes it so you HAVE to be careful with what you're doing with Zephyr, AND her weapons. As some weapons, such as Nataruk{ESPECIALLY if it's built for Electricity, or Gas, which are her preferred elements}, Strun, etc. are actually WORSE on her, than other frames. I've even instantly took out all 3 tornadoes with a single Alt-Fire from the Ambassador.

So, if this a Bug, and if so, why hasn't it been fixed in all of these years, and if it's intentional, why have the Tornado shared damage, be such much that they can be killed so easily? 

Suggestion? Why not make the Tornadoes be immortal, so Zephyrs aren't having to fork out 75+ Energy{Depending on your efficiency}, every few seconds to maintain the tornadoes?

[Birdframe_Prime]

Yeah, known bug. Not a high priority apparently.

I'm definitely not the saltiest player in the game about it. Not me. Not old Birdframe_Prime.

Problem lies in that, in order to transfer damage taken they can't be immortal objects, they have to be able to take damage in order to know how much to deal out.

[Qriist]

1 hour ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

Problem lies in that, in order to transfer damage taken they can't be immortal objects, they have to be able to take damage in order to know how much to deal out.

There are plenty of abilities that track damage while immortal, though. Nezha's first 3 seconds in Warding Halo (to scale the shield health) and the first phase of Harrow's Covenant (to scale the critical chance). The latter even tracks damage across numerous friendly units at once. 

[(NSW)Greybones]

Haha.

I like hearing these first world problems that overbuilt players have; they provide some interesting stories. “Killing a tornado by shooting it”

[Birdframe_Prime]

On 2023-12-15 at 8:09 PM, Qriist said:

There are plenty of abilities that track damage while immortal, though. Nezha's first 3 seconds in Warding Halo (to scale the shield health) and the first phase of Harrow's Covenant (to scale the critical chance). The latter even tracks damage across numerous friendly units at once. 

I think you're misunderstanding how that works...

Warding Halo takes damage, then calculates the end result. It's Nezha who doesn't take damage during the invulnerability phase. Just like how Tornado works; it generates an 'entity' that takes damage to calculate damage.

[Qriist]

26 minutes ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

I think you're misunderstanding how that works...

No, I'm not. Nezha's shield and Harrow's group-shield both create some kind of immortality layer for several seconds while tracking damage for the explicit purpose of transfering that number elsewhere. The immortality layer cannot be removed through damage while active. We know that the game is capable of dynamic tracking, too, because the damage number on Harrow's display rises in realtime as any protected unit takes a hit.

While the tornadoes might need health to register as a game object, there is simply no reason they need interactable health.

[(PSN)Joylesstuna]

Really annoying bug that has been around for years now. Hoping for a fix.

On 2023-12-15 at 1:40 PM, (NSW)Greybones said:

Haha.

I like hearing these first world problems that overbuilt players have; they provide some interesting stories. “Killing a tornado by shooting it”

It's not really a first world problem when your tornado starts doing a whopping tick damage of 1 and 2 

[(NSW)Greybones]

10 minutes ago, (PSN)Joylesstuna said:

It's not really a first world problem when your tornado starts doing a whopping tick damage of 1 and 2 

When does that start happening, and when would we need to be built to pour 500k damage into them?

[(PSN)Joylesstuna]

28 minutes ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

When does that start happening, and when would we need to be built to pour 500k damage into them?

Well to start with have you played against the new faction and see how much damage they can take before dying?

[Traumtulpe]

On 2023-12-15 at 7:44 PM, Birdframe_Prime said:

Problem lies in that, in order to transfer damage taken they can't be immortal objects, they have to be able to take damage in order to know how much to deal out.

I don't think that's true at all, for example enemies under the effect of Well of Life, Mind Control, or Blood Altar are all invincible, but they are still perfectly capable of tracking incoming damage and using that value in different ways.

Also it would take literally 3 minutes for Pablo to increase Tornado's health from 500k to 50 million. Problem solved. The problem is that Pablo doesn't care.

[(NSW)Greybones]

1 hour ago, (PSN)Joylesstuna said:

Well to start with have you played against the new faction and see how much damage they can take before dying?

Typically it’s not a problem if you do the right damage type against them.

What role is Zephyr’s tornado supposed to serve that it’s not doing it with the new faction?

edit: I’ll do some testing to see how this shakes out

Edited December 17, 2023 by (NSW)Greybones

[(XBOX)Tucker D Dawg]

On 2023-12-15 at 1:44 PM, Birdframe_Prime said:

Yeah, known bug. Not a high priority apparently.

I'm definitely not the saltiest player in the game about it. Not me. Not old Birdframe_Prime.

Problem lies in that, in order to transfer damage taken they can't be immortal objects, they have to be able to take damage in order to know how much to deal out.

interesting theory - but what about octavia's mallet? it's indestructible and dishes out damage according to how much it takes - haven't seen it break.

[Birdframe_Prime]

3 hours ago, Traumtulpe said:

I don't think that's true at all, for example enemies under the effect of Well of Life, Mind Control, or Blood Altar are all invincible, but they are still perfectly capable of tracking incoming damage and using that value in different ways.

Again, just generates an 'entity' that can take damage and calculate the result as an output, the 'entity' stores up the number and then the 'entity' is what deals the damage to the original enemy, rather than our weapons or abilities.

I'm not working from guess work here, there's been literally years of testing for this, along with the small bits that DE have told us when they talked about the actual known bugs with abilities like Tornado and Well of Life.

The new Tornado (the stationary cast that was implemented) had a bug before this that could cause enemies to be able to deal damage directly to Zephyr if they happened to clip through Tornado with their line of fire, too. At the time it's because, as Pablo told us, it's an entity that takes damage in order to calculate the damage dealt out. It takes modded and crit-adjusted damage in order to pass it on to enemies, and that's what can cause the bug we're getting now.

2 hours ago, (XBOX)Tucker D Dawg said:

interesting theory - but what about octavia's mallet? it's indestructible and dishes out damage according to how much it takes - haven't seen it break.

Octavia's Mallet only takes enemy damage. Enemy damage is calculated by taking just a base, then scaled by Level to create the final result. Mallet works the same way; it takes the base damage dealt and then scales it using the same equation as enemy damage scaling, which means that Mallet itself only takes its damage in values of 1-100 (approximately, a Heavy Gunner's Gorgon only deals 25 per shot, and even a Bombard rocket only deals 100) and is able to deal it back infinitely because it scales it to the level of the enemy that it's then hitting.

We know this one because of the Self-Irradiating Immortal Trinity build that players used to make Mallet deal damage to a Radiation proc'd Trinity, who was made immortal by Loki's Augment, while Link dealt the 'received' damage back out to enemies at the higher base damage that we deal (weapon damage before mods), scaled for Enemy Level by Mallet, resulting in much higher damage numbers than the Enemy could achieve with their basic weapons. The testing even showed that it was most optimal to use the Gram Prime (at the time the highest base-damage Melee weapon) and Heavy Attack to get the full 1800 base damage to scale from to the enemy, resulting in a counter to even the Armour Scaling that we had at the time. Mallet's Duration would cut out before we could deal enough to break it (according to the math, we would have had to deal 5 Heavy Attacks per second in order to break even 500k damage in a minute), but if Mallet took Modded damage, it would have broken just like Tornado does.

It was fully tested by players who were doing long-run Defense missions for farming, and then removed from the game by DE in yet another self-damage Trinity nerf we got after the Castanas remote explosions exploit we had just before that.

Tornado breaks because it calculates modded damage. We can deal that modded damage in the hundreds of thousands range, and Tornado even calculates Crit, so of course it breaks when Mallet didn't/doesn't.

Again, this is based off testing (because it's been a bug for two years now) and based off what DE have actually said on the matter.

So, yeah. It's a pretty good theory, and something players that are far more intelligent than me have looked into for a while now.

[Traumtulpe]

18 minutes ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

[...]

That's a lot of words to say nothing really.

The game can make a target that has Well of Life cast on it invincible, and at the same time still correctly record modded damage done to it - which is then both used to heal the player, and stored to be dealt to the target once Well of Life ends.

If Well of Life can do it, so can Tornado.

And even if for some arbitrary reason it was impossible, DE could increase Tornado's 500k health by simply adding more zero's. There is *no* excuse that could possibly prevent this. Lots of enemies have way more than 500k health.

[(XBOX)Tucker D Dawg]

3 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

 

So, yeah. It's a pretty good theory, and something players that are far more intelligent than me have looked into for a while now.

cool -thx for explanation - my "interesting theory" was not meant in a negative context...hope you didn't read it that way.. it was generally interesting to me.

 

[Birdframe_Prime]

13 hours ago, Traumtulpe said:

The game can make a target that has Well of Life cast on it invincible, and at the same time still correctly record modded damage done to it - which is then both used to heal the player, and stored to be dealt to the target once Well of Life ends.

If Well of Life can do it, so can Tornado.

No, it can't, you're literally conflating two separate systems within the game's Engine. Pablo has talked about this when the bug with Tornado originally was found.

[Traumtulpe]

2 minutes ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

No, it can't, you're literally conflating two separate systems within the game's Engine. Pablo has talked about this when the bug with Tornado originally was found.

I don't believe it.

Anyhow, what's your excuse for not increasing Tornados HP, since 500k is laughably low?

[Birdframe_Prime]

1 minute ago, Traumtulpe said:

I don't believe it.

You don't have to believe, it is exactly what I've said it is.

There is no excuse for the laughably low 500k. That's why I mentioned that I'm 'definitely not' a salty Zephyr player in my original comment in the sarcastic fashion that I used.

The facts are this: When the game has a system for counting damage it gains an 'entity' that takes damage.

There are two uses for this 'entity': 1. An unspawned one that counts damage taken for a simple calculation of the resulting effect, or 2. A spawned one that can interact with the other 'entities' on the map, such as you, the enemies or environmental objects.

Any time you see a player or enemy turn 'invulnerable' and have a persistent effect on them, which can include Rhino's Iron Skin, Nezha's Warding Halo, Well of Life, Gaze and so on, the invincible item has gained an unspawned 'entity' which takes the damage in order to calculate the effects, then, when the duration of that 'entity' is finished, it does the final calculation and applies the effect. This can include dealing damage out as the entity expires, applying Overguard, or even weirder stuff. The key thing about the unspawned entity is that it can take its damage as a 'before calculations' number, using base damage from the weapons without mods or enemy scaling, and then use an equation to apply the effects with any kind of equation for scaling the game devs decided.

Any time you see an object that appears on the map that both the player and the enemies can see and both the player and the enemy can damage it and be damaged by it (even if you have to radiation proc a player for them to take damage), that's a spawned entity for interaction. This is a separate thing as must have a 'health' pool that can take damage in order to deal real-time calculation for instant application. Unlike the others that store up the damage and apply it later, it must take the damage live and calculate live. Otherwise it can't do things like Tornado does, such as take a projectile with infinite punch through, which can damage the enemies in the effect, then the funnel, and even another funnel all in the same shot, or have an AoE weapon damage both the enemies and all three funnels to amplify the damage. It certainly wouldn't be able to do the Electric proc trick, where the enemies take an Electric proc, the first tick deals damage radially, which hits the Tornado funnels, then procs on all of the enemies in range, which repeats the damage quadratically scaling it. Tornado definitely wouldn't have the Crit Inherit bug, either, where it always uses the Crit Chance of the primary fire mode, making it sub-par for Incarnon weapons, but amazing for weapons that have low-crit alt-fire modes compared to high-crit primary modes.

These spawned entities even include projectiles from weapons or abilities, believe it or not. The new Tome, for example, uses a spawned entity from its alt-fire to deal out its damage in a continuous radius as it travels.

So here's a question that I've posed myself on the bug discussion:

Why don't we just have Tornado function similar to Mallet, where it only takes the base damage from weapons, but then applies it out based on the modded stats or the enemy level? That way, just like Mallet, the 500k health wouldn't matter because we couldn't deal enough damage to break it before the Ability Duration ends. Meanwhile, the damage would still be immense, as it currently is, in fact it would probably scale more fairly overall.

If they don't want to increase the Tornado base Health of 500k, then fix the ability.

Which is also why I said that it appears to be 'not a high priority'.

Because DE knows the bug exists, but just... haven't done anything about it.

I'm upset about it, too, Traum.

[Traumtulpe]

7 minutes ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

Which is also why I said that it appears to be 'not a high priority'.

This was reported immediately after Zephyrs rework, just as the bug where Tornado kills Zephyr was reported (in fact I've reported both of it together). And it takes literally 3 minutes of time to add a couple zeros to it's health pool.

Clearly DE (Pablo specifically, since he is responsible for both the rework, the bugs, and the fixes Zephyr *did* receive) *chose* to not fix Tornados ridiculously low health, lower health than the enemies it's supposed to kill, in fact.

And since it wasn't fixed when the bug was fresh and Zephyr got attention, it is *never* going to get fixed. Like many, many other things in this game.

All it would take is 3 minutes. 3 minutes, Pablo.

[Birdframe_Prime]

43 minutes ago, Traumtulpe said:

All it would take is 3 minutes. 3 minutes, Pablo.

Heh...

On 2023-12-15 at 6:44 PM, Birdframe_Prime said:

I'm definitely not the saltiest player in the game about it. Not me. Not old Birdframe_Prime.

I understand the problem. Because I understand the problem, I'm even worse off than people who do not.

[Tom_MLXvi]

Please fix DE, this happens everytime.