Much like me Entangling Roots someone in the path of the horse-back Light’s Hope guards and watching them get murdered…
Also faction-guards don’t act like the low-level city guards do and chase down any hostile NPC nearby.
The intended behavior of neutral town guards is to ruthlessly kill anyone engaged in PvP, with varying degrees of hostility based on reputation with said guards. In this particular case, a unique NPC is spawned (the Infernal) that is PvP-flagged (because Vanilla-era Warlock flavor) that causes anyone damaged by its initial summoning to take PvP-combat damage (thus flagging them) but crediting that damage only to a mere NPC (who go unnoticed by these kinds of guards).
If we make town guards nuke NPCs, you solve only the problem of penalizing the Warlock partially, as it may still fail to flag them after the fact.
If we make the Infernal changed, outside of altering the PvP flag portion, I’m not sure an easy hotfix is available since so much of it is Vanilla-like.
The guards are acting exactly as they’re supposed to, virulently hostile on a hair-trigger to any PvP-combat regardless of how it starts or is participated in. Reputation with said guards has some seeming Vanilla-flavor balance on this as well, but I couldn’t give a crap to dig further on this. The possibly easiest fix is the Infernal itself, but given the wonky order-of-operations and Vanilla-intent of summoning such an entity around “civil” folks, I’m not sure that’s actually true.
This is as Vanilla-like as MC-ing Mattingly to reset Ony and a host of other weird, probably unintended, but otherwise true to Vanilla quirks. I couldn’t care less about something that is incredibly niche and avoidable and find the angst over it pretty funny, notably when the OP is a multi-boxer who regularly ruins someone’s day.
oh, you wanted to argue in bad faith. my mistake for engaging.
if this is intended, why can a player stand in a safe spot in CH, aoe players, and the players being aoe’d arent attacked by the guards? They’re taking damage, they’re engaged in pvp per your definition. But the guards dont care. Only damage from one specific infernal ability causes this to occur.
Don’t waste time answering, we already both know the answer: its a bug.
Are we still talking about the Infernal summon AoE? Because the player doing the summoning isn’t credited with the damage, the Infernal is, who isn’t yet flagged as a pet of the summoning player when the damage arrives. I thought that much was very clear in the thread already…
Again, slowly and with bullet points:
Warlock summons Infernal
Infernal lands dealing Inferno damage to anyone it lands on
Damage dealt by Inferno is credited to Infernal like any other pet
Unlike any other pet, the Inferno is summoned in a hostile state and auto-Enslaved.
Because the Infernal does damage all on its own without actually crediting the Warlock as far as the game is concerned, the Infernal is for all intents and purposes no different than a world NPC dealing AoE damage to people, so the guards ignore it
HOWEVER because the Infernal’s damage is auto-flagged for PvP because Vanilla-era flavor, anyone damaged by it is now also flagged for PvP, which the neutral faction guards hate, and thus murder anyone flagged in combat
Much like the guards being chained into the nearby Silithid hive and just straight murdering anyone in the region, the guards have a very twitchy reaction to just about everything. However, because of a quirk of the order of events with summoning an Infernal, Warlocks get to have their cake and eat it too without needing to strip down naked to screw with people.
This isn’t a bug, this is a feature. Time will tell if Blizzard can actually patch in a meaningful change that doesn’t break the guards, Infernals, summoning, PvP flagging, or something else entirely.
No video handy, but I can try to make one I guess. Never have.
There’s also this regarding reputation and quirks with Light’s Hope:
I know that I’m just shy of Exalted and the only people I can ever Entangle in the path of the mounted guards (the others do jack and crap) are usually lowbies or clearly undergeared folks. I guess I can try stripping and harassing some of the former High Warlords that like the lurk in the area between their queues.
If CH guards work like LH guards are presumably working (reputation has an impact), might be worth seeing what you can get away with when you’re Honored/Revered/Exalted with CH. That’s a no-go on my server for now, we JUST got the damned gates open.
EDIT: Ah found an actual source:
So with this official word from Blizzard:
We know neutral folks are SOL if attacked. A lot of folks in CH could very well be neutral if the gates aren’t open, and/or the victims haven’t done any AQ20.
The more willing to assist language is very vague. Is this a ramping thing based on level of reputation? It also implies that Exalted Warrior attacking Neutral Druid should just be given free reign, but maybe less so if attacking a Friendly or Honored Druid?
The thresholds for each reputation and how it relates to other player reputations is entirely unknown.
So maybe I get away with far more because I’m picking on Neutral folks? Or I’m picking on folks with much lower reputations than me? I wonder what happens if an Exalted player fights another Exalted player? Does it just affect aggro radius? So many questions.
You can tell this is really an issue when warlocks are saying its an issue. Thank you Dot and any other warlocks that say this is a bug, cause it is. I had this happen to me one time during the gate opening event and thought it was just a weird occurence, but apparently it is more than that.
I am worried about this as well considering Blizzard’s extremely poor level of communication with their customers as well as confirming last week that they have zero development staff for Classic and instead they borrow developers from Retail rarely.
Lets just hope they don’t bother with excessive batching or leeway in TBC. I don’t want bespoke recreations of technical limitations from 15 years ago.
My guildie thinks this is hilarious and keeps doing it. It does seem like a bug - and it should be fixed - but it’s close to PVP on a PVP server kind of stuff.
Depends on your reputation actually, as per Blizzard’s own post:
Given it is an combination of order-of-operations flagging with the unique PvP flagging behavior of an Infernal, a fix is unlikely and it really isn’t much of an exploit.