Malice damage amp not proccing Improve Burst

[Decoy11]

I'm having issues in sandbox mode with Lady Geist's 3rd skill Malice not calculating the damage amp into activating the item Improve Burst. I would use Malice on the dummy and stack the damage amp to get over 125 spirit damage and it will not cause the activation of Improve Burst. The reason i believe this is a bug is that the dummy has approximately 3000hp and 0 resist. that would add at least 300 damage however the damage from Malice never goes over 200.

Method to reproduce bug is as follows

Enter Sandbox mode with Lady Geist.
Buy Improve Burst
Skill Up 3rd skill Malice
Use skill and stack the damage amp.
Watch the spirit damage number go from under 125 to over 125.

 

[Time-Girl™]

This is happening because Malice only deals 81 damage in your example. The other 60 of the 141 damage total are the 75% bonus damage from the Malice stacks. These are are a separate damage instance, even if the floating damage number seems to indicate otherwise (as that is a sum of all the Spirit Damage that happened in the last 1.05 seconds). You can see what's going on when you disable summing up of Spirit Damage with citadel_damage_text_batching_window_ability -0.1:



It works fine as soon as you bring the number Malice does by itself above 125 by having ~74 Spirit Power.


The way the sum is displayed for Spirit Damage can be confusing in these cases, there's quite a few examples of that happening. See this:

The wording is accurate by saying these items triggers if an ability deals 80 damage or more in a single it. What makes it unclear is how the Spirit Damage is currently summed up, making at appear as if this is a single hit done by Kinetic Carbine.

It can be changed how this behaves by setting citadel_damage_text_batching_window_ability -0.1 in the console. Then it shows both numbers, though they awkwardly overlap:

View attachment 15963


I personally think the best way to make it clear what's going on in such instances is changing the Spirit Damage text to behave like the Bullet Damage text, where it shows semi-transparent numbers for the prior five damage instances that went into the sum:

View attachment 15964



Ergo, something like this, where it's very clear that 75 is smaller than 80.

View attachment 15966

Malice should probably call it "bonus damage" rather than saying that the stacks "increase your damage". That's what items where this behaviour applies tend to call it when it's a separate instance of damage that's added on top (as a bonus) and not something that modifies the damage of an ability/active.

 

[Decoy11]

That would explain the issue. As it currently stand I would say this is still a bug as the description is stating it is increase the damage and the effect is suppose to be damage amplification. Ability should be increase damage to each instance of damage.

 

[Time-Girl™]

That would explain the issue. As it currently stand I would say this is still a bug as the description is stating it is increase the damage and the effect is suppose to be damage amplification. Ability should be increase damage to each instance of damage.

The description is misleading/wrong, but I'm pretty sure it is intended and not a bug considering it behaves the same for other skills that cause similar damage increases, like Infernus' Catalyst, Paradox' Pulse Grenade, and Pocket's Barrage.


However further testing revealed two exceptions to this: Mo&Krill's Scorn and McGinnes Spectral Wall. These do not cause a separate damage instance but essentially seem to lower the enemy's Bullet and Spirit Resist for your attacks only, including the blue damage number for Spirit Damage. Notably the extra damage for those is part of an upgrade and not an inherent feature of the skill.
But it's 2vs4, so I'd call those two outliers the buggy behaviour.

Either way, the wording for the Damage Amp / Bonus Damage across these skills is pretty inconsistent and doesn't really represent what's happening with them.

 

[Decoy11]

Soul Shredder Bullets is an item but is doing exactly as state which is amplifying spirit damage.

In any case i still believe that the description and the mechanic should match as that is for the best. Also matching the description will not affect the player as that is the stated effect(bug fixing). If you change the description to the mechanic I would classify that as a balance change as you have now changed the effect even if that was already the effect in the past iteration of the game.

I would also argue that a little bit of standardizing mechanics to keywords would make those that like to theory-craft or break the game life better.