https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/497600-Strahd-Circles

someone posted that lotro had the same issue where the circle icons displayed are false and the real area of effect radius is a square, not the circle.

I tested cleaves around 3 years ago or so and learned that they behaved the same way, but never thought about it until i read that post. I posted my findings here in a thread discussing weapon ranges with ffs, though good luck finding it through my thousands of shit posts.

You can test for yourself. So far I just tested both death auras and negative energy burst. And they are actually squared.

If someone could test haste/rage/buffs etc. You would need a person to be the dummy there. I will test the dps spells on the next lama ( fireball, ice storm, energy burst, etc ). Or if i can get a person to sit there. fireball, hellball and ice storm can be cast at your feet to test this.

To clarify, stand with your character facing the dummy. Test until you are put out of range when using cleaves/spells. Then simply imagine a X axis from your character's center. Now turn to the sides where the points of the square would reach ( squaring your left/right arms to the dummy ). The hits/spells should land and trigger the dummy.

screenshots;

directly facing and cannot hit.


same exact spot, but facing to side and arms squared with target = hit


same exact spot, but facing backwards and to the side with arms squared to target = hit



so, yeah, if anyone could be bothered to alert the devs and tell them theyre retarded for using circles, and that theyre ignorant of their very own game that they own.

it's just a square posing as a circle. the square has a larger aoe due to the corners covering more area than the circles would show.

Technomage wrote on Jul 5^th, 2018 at 12:47pm:

It leads me to believe every aoe has a square radius. I have tested warlock aura and es blasts and they too use squares. I dont think these devs even know that a circle radius probably does not exist in this game....

I'm not usually chiming in to defend devs that did sometthing weird/wrong, but in that case I'm going to.

Do you have any idea how much clock cycle it takes to calculate a circle and determinse what's in it and what's not in it ( and I'm just talking 2D here ) compared to calculating what's in a square ( or any rectangle for that matter ) ?

( and I'm talking at the lowest coding level : Assembler )

You do not want to have to deal with circles if you want to avoid performance issues at some point, you really do not want.
Even the simplest algorithm dealing with circle has code that takes hundreds clock cycles to execute when for the same effect for a square/rectangle it takes barely more than ten clock cycle.

The same design exists in DoJ and MoD, and RSO.   All have circular AoE from bosses.  And any number of other places.  It has been that way for a long time.

Realistically how do we use this.

1. It seems that if we attack in squares, that mobs also attack in squares. Take the first boss in Slavers. On r10 he cleaves and it can be a one shot to melee. Any boss with this "half-orc" model has this cleave animation. (Many bosses have no cleave, E.x., Strahd, so you can stand directly on top of the tank.) Just how square is a cleave? Does the cleave align with the Coordinate system regardless of the direction the mob is facing? In this case you would always want to be standing in along the X or Y axis of in game /loc. Geometrically, this minimizes our chances of being hit, since the diagonals are longer than they appear. On the other hand, maybe it doesn't matter... ...if we have a longer diagonal reach then the mob has a longer diagonal reach. You would be able to hit a cleaving boss from further away at a diagonal but he would be able to hit you from further away on a diagonal.

2. It seems that we need to be well outside the radius of a circle since we are unable to determine the actual death zone. This would explain why the circles in the "Heart phase" of Strahd are so deadly. I've seen people die standing outside the circle. Or am I interpreting this incorrectly? 

Basically how it should be visualized, the circle being the apparent hitbox, with the inside border of the square being the actual shitbox. This appears to be static with all circular AoEs, including even the TWF "twirl" at the end of the animation. This is most likely the case for the strahd circles, considering that you can be hit standing around the circle if you're placed at any point in the circumference that's not a cardinal direction from where it's cast. However, as some mobs can hit directly behind them despite swinging forward for some unexplained reason, their shitboxes are probably different. Not in shape, but their "circle-squares" are most likely much larger to avoid players running in circles while swinging, while never being physically hit by the mob they're attacking.

Quote:




Quote:

It makes immediate sense when I square it with my memories of backpedal-strafing. A tight circle never worked unless you kept yourself between the mob's eyes, or square-danced off its shoulder.

If they had made cleaves rectangles, that would've added a pretty nice, dare I say "realistic", touch to an already pretty good combat system. Hit boxes, too. Then you could make yourself a smaller target, and have longer reach, by facing sideways. As it is, you can apply the same principle, just catacorner.

Might also explain how blade traps hit me even though I'm standing just outside the radius of the swing.

That makes a lot of sense. Safe to assume cones are actually rectangles as well.

to clear this up, in case there are any misunderstandings, the area of effect is LARGER than what is displayed by the circle. You can test this using warlock's aura and see that the target can be hit by being outside of the circle.

Munkenmo wrote on Jul 6^th, 2018 at 9:27pm:

It is absurdly detrimental to game play in reaper where damage is lethal. In that strahd video linked in op, the player is in the direct point where both squares meet. I'm pretty sure he took x2 damage. The safe distance is a wide berth, but that isnt always possible and moving to the very narrow zones in the cardinal directions of the mob leaves a very small margin of error and some guess work.

Even less obvious things like how to position spells, auras, and cleaves to not hit things youre not supposed to be hitting. Stealing tank aggro, or getting cleaved, hit by an aoe when you needed to be directly in those cardinal tight spaces. Remembering which way the mob was facing when it cast a circular red colored aoe marker on the floor is not simple in many places due to mobs spawning when no one saw them, or in very chaotic phases of raids/quests. 


Devs will never fix that stupid red circle animation they were so happy to introduce recently.

yw everyone