Potential Rapid Strikes Bug?

NoSoup · February 17

I just had a BG round where one of the opponents seemed to have unlimited range with their rapid strikes. Is there a current bug/exploit where this can happen? With the current state of the servers its a bit hard to tell if its lag or something suss. But solely for perspective, I've been matched against this player at least 10 times in the last week and they weren't even noticable prior to this match, this particular match (domination) he wiped the floor.

Observations. He's/Her rapid strikes would hit me although I was outside their Hurrican radius, His/Her Rapid Strikes would hit me before they were within my Escalating Runes range. Was hard to tell with LOS, sometimes getting hit behind pillars sometimes not. At first I was thinkig it was a desync on my end but he literally smoked everyone on the team with them, again a player I have played many many times that generally finishes last in his group and never seen on leaderboards. Last match was the first time seeing anything like this.

buzzclops · February 17

Do you have a clip ?

NoSoup · February 17

buzzclops wrote: »

Do you have a clip ?

Unfortunately not, but it was enough for me to finally finish setting up nvida overlay so that I can start recording if I see it happening again.

Turtle_Bot · February 18

IIRC, rapid strikes was changed a while ago to essentially track it's target to help get all 4 hits in (otherwise it becomes an extremely terrible spammable option if the individual hits of a single target, non-projectile based, melee targeted ability can be avoided just by walking out of it's range after it was cast, especially with positional desync and server/client delay).

My guess is that the opponent was in range for their initial cast of the ability, then with the cast already being marked as landing according to the servers, it applied the 4 hits to your character even though on your end you were likely moving away from the opponent who cast the ability over it's 0.8s channel duration.

I highly doubt there is an exploit with the ability and more likely it's the way the ability was coded this way to ensure it actually is useful in more mobile encounters (which are very common in PvP), otherwise it would literally be one of the worst abilities in the entire game and completely unusable.

Unless they are somehow casting the ability on you from outside the recently extended melee attack range (which would need a clip from both the casters and targets perspectives to compare and see if there was positional desync in play or not), I'd say what I've explained above would be the reason it seems to have more range.

TL//DR:
likely explanations are either positional desync or the ability was made to "track" a moving target when cast so it actually is usable.

It's similar to snipe (bow ability), hard cast frags, necro skull or templar solar/dark flare and how their projectiles track their targets as long as the projectile is launched (and not dodge rolled) making for some very wonky projectile arcs sometimes (I have seen some that literally did a 90 degree turn mid air lol).

Turtle_Bot · February 18

Also want to double check, was it hurricane (stam morph) or boundless storm (mag morph), because boundless still has the old 5m radius (technically hurricane has only 5m at base, so for the first 2-4 seconds) so a melee attack such as rapid strikes will outrange hurricane during the first few seconds and will always outrange boundless storm because lightning form (and morphs) were never updated to reflect the new 7m melee range.