it’s been a common rumor among the playerbase that at some point the ability for sam to Q, hearth, and image transmission back to where he Q’d was removed, then re-entered into the game. The current PTR patch removes this as a bug, so, I was wondering about looking up the past patchnotes insights on the topic to get some clarity on whether or not it was regarded by the developers as an exploit up to this point, or an intended application of in-game mechanics.
I can find this patch where the behavior of shadow clones and image transmission were changed on Dec. 16th, 2019, where the technique would have been made far harder requiring the use of shift-queueing or very tight timing (as is currently the case). Google searching for key terms involving this topic has not yielded other information directly about this topic.
Mirror Image [Q]
Cooldown reduced from 18 to 14 seconds.
Duration reduced from 18 to 8 seconds.
Does anyone know a rough timeline of when the supposed patch-out and then re-implementation would have occurred? Was it in PTR?
Update:
as per:
the actual (non 3rd party) patch notes from Blizzard on this topic from then is:
which states:
After some consideration, we believe this tactic can make for clever plays and have decided to revert this change.
Samuro:Can no longer swap places with a Mirror Image that is in the allied Hall of Storms.
After some consideration, we believe this tactic can make for clever plays and have decided to revert this change.
The supposed fix in the march 6, 2018 patch notes, aren’t about using queued commands to swap places with a Mirror Image after Hearting.
It’s about using Illusion Master to walk a Mirror Image to the Hall of Storms and then swapping back and forth.
Fixed an issue that allowed Samuro to activate Image Transmission on a Mirror Image directly after his Hearthstone activates.
The only ambiguity I can find is in the wording “his Hearthstone” which can either refer to the real Samuro or the clones Hearthstone (my assumption is that it refers to the real Samuro).
Samuro with Illusion Master can command a Mirror Image to Hearth and then cast Image Transmission on that clone in the Hall of Storms and I don’t see this interaction changing with the patchnotes as written.
Samuro’s Mirror Images are destroyed 1 server tick after successfully Hearthing and while you can do it without queuing commands it is frankly unreliable to do so.