Before the Season 1 launch, the ice shards missing very short/low to the ground creatures was well documented. Bug posts such as ‘shards just fly right past overhead’.
Now the new unique has the bug on sending the player ‘under ground’. So the unique item shows very clearly that there is in fact a Y axis dimension to the hit box calculation. Since the unique item is supposed to be a random location calculation and is pulling in all coordinates, I find this super interesting to see how the Y-coordinates are interacting to the range of possible outcomes.
So I simply wonder if what is happening behind the scenes is like design team says (yes resistances broken, work in progress). But their math output score shows much higher damage by sorcs than in real game play because the the QC department misses or has not fixed all of these Y axis calculation issues as the real bug in sorc play? Maybe our damage is actually 4x higher and supposed to be in game design but our spells literally miss 80% of the time because of the height bug?
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It’s possible, but I suspect Blizzard is too mature an organization to not have validated their data. At some point in their testing they have videos of a development character doing damage, logs of same in-game and whatever metric tracking QC is using, all to compare.
In short, I’m sure the data collection system is validated.
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I mean, but it’s pretty clear they didn’t test all phases of game play (esp late game) to see the issues.
I can imagine being assigned the QC role, I’m trying to hit KPI’s as fast a possible, manager doesn’t play the game either. So I run out into open world outside of Kyoshad, (flat terrain) fire off the spells, verify everything works and then sign off on the QC.
In this case the large mature organization structure actually works against the final product.
Anyways, whatever the cause (and yes I’m as surprised as you on final product), but it’s so interesting at an organizational level to see the unique item expose what part of the code may be causing sorcerers inherently so much problems.
e.g. I don’t think Barb WW has any part of the code that needs to factor in creature height since it will hit all heights as part of the skill.
I happen to know a guy that was in Blizzard’s QC group. I have some inside insight as a result. And I dont think they were insufficiently thorough or that they would miss an issue like this. Admittedly, it’s possible it’s different now than when my friend worked for Blizzard but I think it’s more likely that outsiders like us dont understand how this works at ALL.
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The clearest you can see the Y-axis affect targetting is when using Teleport. Find a ramp or a staircase or a hill, and try Teleporting up or down it. Click on the spot on the screen where you want your character to go and watch what happens: if you’re lucky you teleport into the wall. If you’re unlucky you don’t move at all but still go into cooldown.
Where you actually need to click is the spot underneath (if moving up) or above (if moving down) where you want to go. It requires you to create a 3D picture of the world in your mind and trying to guesstimate what the right spot to click is.
This bug(?) was already present in Diablo 3 at launch time and as far as I know was never fixed. The stairs to the left of Asmodan is one location I remember vividly as being severely affected. Now it’s in Diablo 4 too. 10 years from now I expect to see it pop up in Diablo 5. Our grandchildren will consider it a traditional feature of ARPGs when they play Diablo 8.
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