Description
When Thunder Storm is granted by an item (say a CTA staff with +1 to thunderstorm on the item base) and the player casts Thunder Storm, the spell will only proc so long as that staff is equipped.
As soon as the Staff is unequipped, the visual aura effect, and the periodic lightning flashes that happen on screen still occur. However, lightning no longer strikes any hostile units.
Edit: This also happens if the staff is equipped, but you weapon swap away from it, which expands the scope of when this is potentially an issue.
Additionally, I believe this should be considered a bug, rather than a quick / intended behavior because it shows inconsistent behavior with every other casted character buff skill in the game, including every other buff Sorceress spell (Enchant, Energy Shield, and Frozen/Shiver/Chilling Armor), all of which remain active after unequipping the item that granted you that spell. Instead, Thunder Storm is behaving more akin to the way summoning spells work in this regard (e.g., where say some of your skeletons die if a Necromancer performs a weapon swap away from a wand that granted him +3 to Raise Skeleton).
This bug affects both D2R and LoD.
Reproduction Steps
- Equip staff with +1 to thunderstorm
- Don’t put a hard point in thunderstorm, ensure the spell is granted only by the item
- Cast Thunder Storm
- Observe that it works while item is equipped
- Unequip Thunder Storm granting staff
- Observe that the aura is still present, and occasionally lightning flashes happen (the frame or 2 of the screen turning lightning blue, not the strike that lands on enemies)
- Observe also that no one ever gets struck by lightning
Video Reproduction
It seems I cant directly link to youtube, so paste this at the end of youtube.com : /watch?v=G24nxV2Ino8
In the video I start by showing that my +1 to Thunderstorm CTA staff grants me Thunder Storm (there is no hard point spent). Then I basically do the above steps. The rest of the video is just me repeating the process once more. Done on Battle.net (so current version of D2R).
One thing to note is that re-equipping the Thunder Storm staff after it’s been unequipped does not result in the spell working until casting it is recasted.
Is this bug trivial?
Many would consider this bug to be non-trivial (albeit rare), as it does affect sorc players who actively utilize weapon swap during play and keep their Call to Arms in their cube for when the buff needs to be (re)applied. This cube prebuff playstyle has only risen in popularity with D2R’s quality of life additions such as the shift-click item equipping, as well as the optional key binding which opens the Horadric Cube, both of which make performing “cube prebuffing” faster than ever before.
While this play style is uncommon for most sorceress builds, it is utilized quite often in builds like the Enchanted Exploding arrows PVM (to hit a higher Faster Cast Rate breakpoints) or the Guided Grrows (via Widowmaker bow) / Zeal (via Passion Runeword, or a rare weapon with Zeal cast charges) hybrid build that utilizes both Enchant and Holy Shock aura via the ‘Dream’ Helm/Shield to achieve high amounts of fire and lightning damage to apply to Zeal and Guided Arrows, as well as similar builds like the ‘Bear Sorc.’
Edit: turns out this also happens on weapon swap, so cube Bo isnt the only case this is an issue for. This will affect all sorcs who wish to use Thunder Storm with any sort of prebuff staff on swap.
Thanks for reading 