75% reduction in boop effectiveness on D.va and Orisa

So a friend of mine who is a Lucio main noticed a strange interaction between his boop and D.va and Orisa.

Whenever D.va and Orisa are firing their primary weapons the distance they can be booped is reduced by roughly 75%.

Intentional or not?

Can provide a vid but I am in the middle of editing the tests so you do not have to watch 9 minutes of footage.

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It’s been stated before that this is a known bug with both heroes. Boops of any kind don’t affect them as much as they should. It was a while ago so I don’t have a statement on hand but I can try to track it down.

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Weird arbitrary bug.

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Tested him. He is unaffected by his charge speed.
Rein and Brig as well.

It seems to have to do with however they programmed the reduced speed while shooting mechanic. As these two are the only character’s who have that as a trait. If they are not shooting they get booped like any other hero but when are these hero’s NOT shooting their guns? lol.

I even checked Hanzo since he use to be slower while shooting just to see if they removed this coding from him or just changed a value but left it there. He is unaffected as well.

Posted on occasion of commenting Doomfists rocket punch interaction:

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It does affect doomfist as well, actually (but not nearly as much, either because his formula is different or because of the way his rocket punch tries to ‘snap’ the person into a wall to get the kill). They both work on the same mechanical principal of boop = added direction inertia x character speed. Orisa and D.Va both receive penalties to their movement speeds, thus a reduction in the second portion of the formula. It’s a bug with the physics engine in general and has been around since beta.

Edit: Thanks Feromon!

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Can prove that it does not. It may have at some point but I performed some testing and he is still booped the same distance in or out of his punch charge up time.

It’s a side-effect of the fact that those two get their movement speed reduced while firing: All their movement is reduced. The game doesn’t differentiate between character movement and knockback movement.

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I’m not talking about Doomfist GETTING booped during his rocket punch. I’m talking about his Rocket Punch doing the booping.

To get a bit more indepth with it, every character in the game has a base speed. Normally this is 1.0, but it’s a bit higher for Tracer and Genji. Now, the physics engine caps the maximum boop distance (which is why you won’t boop a swift striking genji halfway across the world) but when it comes to minimum cap, that portion of the formula doesn’t work with the physics engine. Thus, you get the issue of D.Va and Orisa not getting booped as far as they should.

Does that clear things up a bit?

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Ah, now that makes more sense. As I do recall having issues getting wall slams out of both of them. Thanks for the clarification.

Doesn’t Rein walk slower with shield? If so, surely this would reduce his boop magnitude as well.

As would any target being slowed by a Mei or Orisa grav?

This bug probably screws over Doomfist more than any other one thing.

Nope. He is booped the same regardless of if he is shield out or shield in. Same with brig.

No problem. Although, to compound on that, I have no idea what is different about Doomfist charging Rocket Punch (and getting slowed) vs. Orisa and D.Va
firing their primaries. Logically, if they were programmed in similar ways, it SHOULD affect doomfist getting booped as well. But I suspect it’s something to do with either Rocket Punch being an ability, OR that Rocket Punch doesn’t affect his character speed in the same way that the Tanks’ primary fire does.

Same as above. The physics engine does something janky when Orisa and D.Va are firing vs. other’s using abilities or having external slows applied to them.

Unfortunately it’s not something that you can pinpoint directly without being able to look at the source code.

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Which may mean the solution could be to rewrite d.va and Orisa’s slowing functions to work similar to doomfists perhaps? Because when testing i cancel my punch in midair after the boop and kept landing in the same spot as when I was not charging at all.

Perhaps it has to with the fact that punch cannot be aimed in any other direction but horizontal where as Orisa and D.va have full range of motion.

This is not the only bug associated with their slowdown during the shooting. The speed of Orisa’s movement remains slowed even if she does not fire but uses any channeled ability immediately after shooting. For example, a melee or her Ultimate. I’m not sure if these two bugs are connected, but it seems to me that their cause is the same.

the whole Air Movement Patch has ruined Lucio for me

Ya know, if Blizzard cared about these bugs they could have them all fixed in a month. Here we are 2 years later and D.va still has that eject bug where you get launched into the stratosphere only to fall to your death.

Don’t even think about holding your breath till these are fixed.

On paper it sounds like it’d work, but in reality it could cause a ton of other issues elsewhere.

And I’m not sure about the RP point. Technically, you can still move in all four directions while channeling RP, its only during the release that you lose (some) control of lateral movement.

Physics engine bugs are honestly some of the hardest bugs to fix when it comes to programming because changing a formula can have huge (and hilarious) effects elsewhere.

Rocket Punch is definitely affected by the change of the character’s speed. If you increase the base speed in the custom game, DF will practically teleport to the other end of the map if he uses his punch.

Nah, not what I was talking about. Sorry, should probably phrase things a bit clearer. Programatically, there is a difference between Base Character Speed and say, something like External Character Speed. External is things that don’t directly modify the Base Speed but instead reduce or increase it by a certain value. Base Character Speed never changes in that scenario.

Which loops back around to Orisa and D.Va primary fire. It could affect their BASE character speed and not their External Speed like Mei’s freeze does.

Changing the speed in a custom game likely does the same thing, merely adds this modifier in. It is why Genji and Tracer will still move faster than most anyone else.

Of course, without being able to see how it’s all programmed this is more conjecture than anything. There are a hundred ways to handle speed of characters in a multitude of situations in any physics engine you could possibly name.

For all I know, the Doomfist (and by extension Mei freezing, etc) formula and the Tanks’ formula could be exactly the same, and that’s why this bug hasn’t been fixed yet because Blizzard is staring at it all going WTF?!