LRD on door frames


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Post Sunday, 21st February 2021, 12:57

LRD on door frames

In the old days, using door frames to administer LRD was always a good idea to maximise the damage. But now I have more and more experiences where LRD on doors results in no damage at all, even on very susceptible enemies, although sometimes it does. Has there been a recent change that is responsible for that? If so, then something needs to be done about the automatic targeting of LRD, because that still consistently picks available doors near the next enemy as the automatic place, and so results in wasted attempts, when the adjacent wall would have had a much better effect.
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Post Sunday, 21st February 2021, 19:01

Re: LRD on door frames

Majang wrote:In the old days, using door frames to administer LRD was always a good idea to maximise the damage. But now I have more and more experiences where LRD on doors results in no damage at all, even on very susceptible enemies, although sometimes it does. Has there been a recent change that is responsible for that? If so, then something needs to be done about the automatic targeting of LRD, because that still consistently picks available doors near the next enemy as the automatic place, and so results in wasted attempts, when the adjacent wall would have had a much better effect.

Afaict from the code Damage from LRD on a door frame is exactly equal to LRD on a regular adjacent wall, particularly shatterable things are, themselves, shattered rather than the door frame, which bypasses AC, and might change the damage type.

The code in question was largely rearranged to be clearer and easier to read in December (and to allow for the damage dice to show) and if critters *never* took damage I'd be inclined to look for a bug, but if sometimes they take damage and sometimes they don't, I'd probably write it off as "randomness sucks sometimes"
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Post Sunday, 21st February 2021, 22:03

Re: LRD on door frames

Also of note, LRD always destroyed doors back when it was capable of destroying walls, and destroying a door or wall tile increased LRD damage at that time. Since that doesn't happen anymore, there's no reason to default target doors. In the most general case, you want to target the tile next to the monster that also hits as many out-of-los tiles as possible, but since there are other considerations wrt monsters the player might know about that aren't onscreen (and ofc LRDable monsters or wall types that give extra damage or radius) it's not super easy to come up with an autotargeting solution that provides good default targeting while being intuitive.

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Post Sunday, 21st February 2021, 22:12

Re: LRD on door frames

Well, it seems that it may be time to search for a bug. I'm running through Zot 5 right now, so I have to be a bit careful with experiments, but I used a few shots on doorframes. The very first one is this attempt here:
LRD1.jpg
Draco has a good day.
LRD1.jpg (118.97 KiB) Viewed 1951 times

With the next LRD (placed on a wall) I got this draconian annihilator to almost dead - they shouldn't have much protection against LRD powered to 89%. He certainly shouldn't be unscathed.
The next shot on the same door frame slightly injured two more draconians ('lightly wounded' and 'moderately wounded'). The next shot on a wall kills one and leaves the other 'severely wounded'. The next shot on the doorframe leaves the severely wounded draconian without further damage and brings another one to 'severely wounded'.
The next shot comes off a wall again - now this one kills one of the severely wounded ones, and does not do any damage to the other one - so this can also happen from a wall. Well, this one has icy armour, so he should be better protected against LRD damage. He even survives another two shots off the wall, with slight further damage. In the end I have to dispatch him with Zero.
Another shot from the door frame heavily injures two draconians. They get killed with a further shot from the wall.

A final test on two more draconians coming through the door:
LRD2.jpg
One hit, one miss.
LRD2.jpg (128.97 KiB) Viewed 1951 times

One of the guys is hit heavily by the same shot that leaves the other completely unscathed. This one is a purple draconian storm caller, with a +1 robe of preservation, certainly nothing to protect you reliably against LRD damage.

So, as a resumé, I placed 4 LRDs on the doorframe, and two of them left at least one monster unscathed - both draconians that shouldn't have any kind of special protection. The funny thing is that in both cases of non-damage I did not get any message that no damage was done. In the case of the draconian with the Ice Armour, there was a message that no damage was done when it was hit from the wall ('You feel a surge of power! The wall shatters! The blast of rock fragments hits the white draconian knight but does no damage').

Well, I guess if this is not intended behavior I need to submit a report on Mantis.
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Post Tuesday, 23rd February 2021, 11:27

Resolved: LRD on door frames

It turned out to be a bug, and it's now fixed.
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