Ever wonder why your channeled spell can not hit Ranged Barrier Elites? Ever wonder why some times your channeled spell hits like a truck and other times it hits like a wet noodle? Ever wonder why your channeled spell doesn’t seem like it is getting buffed from your other CD’s like it should? Well stay awhile and listen.
Evidently you are snap shotted when you start channeling. This means the game takes a snap shot of your current character at the start of your channel and those variables are used through out the channel to calculate damage, etc. This is nothing new for games, and it is a way to boost damage by stacking buffs etc. This design is in-fact ok, when it actually works. The problem here is that EVERY SELF BUFF that happens DURING that channel to your character is actually not taking effect until you stop your channel. This means all shouts applied to your character, all bonuses, etc do not apply to your character until you stop your channel and restart.
But wait there is more! This snapshotting is also what causes things like Edgemaster’s to break in funny ways. Due to the fact the snapshot is not letting other self buffs take effect, those effects keep being applied over, and over and over again thus giving you stupid amounts of damage when the channel completes. This is why that streamer was able to 1 shot the boss. The buff was trying to be applied, but could not be added to the character snapshot, so it was being additive on to the character pending completion of the channel. Which is why they ended up with such a massive bonus after 2 minutes of just spinning in place.
Now you are saying to yourself, Destruction this is pretty bad isn’t it? Well, it just gets worse. The game also snap shots your position at this time. So all of your mods for Close Combat or Distant Combat do not actually work as intended. Since you started your channel away from the mob, you now count as distant, due to where you were snap shotted. This is also the reason when trying to fight a barrier elite, you do no damage when right up on them, also why you will do no damage to those around the elite. This fundamentally breaks EVERYTHING in with regards to distance calculations.
I am sure people can use this information to find more creative ways to exploit this, but at this point, do not use a channeling skill until they fix this. It is a massive ehf up on their end, and also explains why it is taking so long to fix the aspects. It cuts to the core design of all channeled skills which are broken from the ground up on how they work.