In SC2, some units do splash damage, and some of their splash area is a circle around the main target, such as liberator, thor, siege tank, archon and baneling. If the targets are hit by Raven’s anti-armor missile, then use the units with these circle-type aoe damage to attack them, only the main target receives 3 extra damage from AAM, while the rest in aoe area, though show as -3 armor, do not receive any extra damage from the splash.
Test 1: 2 Corruptors with 1 carapace upgrade (for a total of 3 armor) vs 1 Liberator with 3 weapon upgrade (8*2 damage) + 1 Raven.
Hit the corruptors with AAM, then let the liberator to attack them. The targeted corruptor receives 16 damage, and the other receives 10 damage per hit.
Test 2: Several observers stack together in surveillance mode vs 1 Archon + 1 Raven (all without upgrade)
Hit all observers with AAM, then let the archon attack them once, then retreat. One observer has 32 HP left, while all others have 35 HP.
Test 3: Two large group of zergling with carapace upgrades vs 2 Baneling swithout upgrade + 1 Raven
Hit all zerglings with AAM, and all of them show as (1-3) armor. Let one baneling to attack one group of zerglings. None was killed. Let the second group of zerglings to attack the second baneling, also none was killed.
If the attacker’s aoe area is a line, such as colossus, hellion or lurker, the targets all receive bonus damage from AAM.
I just tested in test map. Though all in the guardian shield bubble, only the targeted unit receives 2 less damage, and the rest units all receive full splash damage, which means: the Guardian shield does not decreased damage received from splash damage.
About AAM behavior, someone looked at the trigger in editor. It seems that though it displays as a (-3 armor) debuff, the actually effect is NOT decrease armor, but adding 3 damage received from direct melee or ranged attack, but not splash damage.
Then they could make it for marines and aa bc only. Cause all other t units just dont notice +3 dmg… I actually tried to fight mass corr with aam and libs. Never worked so i stuck to clusters of mines on the map.
Why create ad-hoc rules? Just the definition (range attack) is enough. With marines and BC attacks you can also add Carrier Interceptor attack. If you see a PvP where Mass-Carriers are used, you can be surprised to see payer A with 10 Carriers and 1-2 Sentries beat player B with 16 Carriers.
No.
Any source of damage can be defined as melee, ranged, splash, or spell.
By design, Guardian Shield only affects damage classified as “ranged”.
Most attacks that deal splash damage are defined as either “splash” or "spell. In some specific cases like the Siege Tank, the damage is defined as “ranged” for the primary target and “splash” for AOE targets.
By contrast, AAM is supposed to explicitly reduce armor by 3, so it should affect all damage effects where armor is a factor regardless of the damage type.
Though i would hate to see further terran buffs in this pathetic state of the game, i, compelled by intellectual honesty, am forced to agree with Terranicll!
AAM has nothing to do with range of attack. It says nothing of it in description too. Terrans don’t really care about this, because they have no melee units in the first place.
But if, for example, terran will accidentaly hit his own units with AAM they will take 3 additional damage from enemy zerglings/zealots
I agree with Terrancill. In game, AAM is described as “reduces thearmor and shield armor of affected units by 3”, not increased damaged received from melee and ranged attack by 3.
By the way, I made another test using a 0/0 upgrade mutalisk to attack 3 fully upgrade ultralisks (7 armor total). The mutalisk’s damage is 9-3-1, while the ultralisk’s armor is displayed as (7-3) if hit by AAM. The second and third ultralisks both receive 3.5 damage per hit (7 damage per 2 hits) from mutalisk bounces though they have more armor than the mutalisk’s bounce damage.
I myself also tried to use mass liberators with raven against mass capital ships in team game before without much success.
First Infested terrans AA attacks ignoring armor, now this…
Kinda sad that such ridiculously easy to find (if anybody would actually bother to test this) bugs exist in competitive game of this level for years.
They either need to change the ability or change the ability and update its description. The implementation is currently screwed up whether this behavior is intended or not.
In order to match the current description’s behavior, AAM would only need one behavior to reduce the affected units’ shields and armor for its duration.
Instead it has 3 separate behaviors:
One to reduce armor and shield armor by 3. In order to match the current description, this is the only behavior that the ability would need.
One to increase armor and shield armor by 3. I’m guessing there is some flag to prevent this change from affecting the UI, but I cannot find it.
One to increase damage taken from melee and ranged attacks (specifically) by 3.
If AAM is just supposed to increase melee and ranged damage, then they should change the description and remove the two behaviors that affect armor.
If AAM is actually supposed to reduce armor and shield armor like the description states, then the two extra behaviors that increase armor and increase damage taken should be removed.
In both cases, there are two extra behaviors/buffs that need to be removed.
That is undoubtedly a bug, but it matches what I found.
Good news for Protoss though, this means that Guardian Shield currently affects the Mutalisk’s bounce damage; although this won’t make an actual difference if you already have armor and shield upgrades.
I mean, how many units does it actually affect? Siege tanks, which don’t care about armor much to begin with, Hellions/hellbats, which aren’t paired with ravens anyway, and thors. Of those, only thors are likely to actually even notice this, so I can understand how it took so long to be figured out.
What puzzles me is that this is a silly and unnecessarily complicated way of going about making it work. Somebody had to deliberately set it to reduce armor as intended, then set it to undo that and add the bonus damage instead. Who looks at this and thinks “yes, this is the best way I could have gone about doing this!”?
Well, this game won’t be ruined by balance, but actual bugs. It’s a shame there is no QA working on finding bugs, so those bugs remain hidden until the meta shifts and some units grow more popular. Luckily this bug is much less impactful than the infested terran bug, so I believe devs have reasons (or rather, excuses) to treat it as a feature rather than a bug and maybe “propose” to change it in the future.
Either retracted retracted based on WireBender’s point, or someone who is trying to secretly add buffs/nerfs to units that clearly weren’t decided upon.
That would explain things like the Ignore Armor bug on Infested Terran. It’s kind of hard to “accidentally” reduce the armor factor on a unit to zero when all of the effects you would realistically copy or default it from have that factor set to 1 by default.
It is extremely easy to write a description to state that an ability increases melee/ranged damage taken if that is the intended effect, and most people could understand that like they can with Guardian Shield.
No, because “behaviors” in StarCraft II are actual buff/debuff effects.
There are 3 behaviors, not 2.