Hi Snarkie. I was hoping you could shed some light on a battledome mystery.
The onsite battlepedia designates each weapon as either “Close Attack” or “Ranged Attack”. Very few weapons have the Ranged Attack designation, but it was recently discovered that these Ranged Attack weapons don’t follow normal weapon order when used in battle. Rather than switching boxes when you submit your move, a Ranged Attack weapon will always take the first box (and thus take effect first) when used with a normal weapon.
By far the most notable consequence of this interaction is that pets can no longer stack the heals from Wand of the Dark Faerie and Illusens Staff (because WoDF will always heal first). Even though the Ranged Attack designation has existed since the old dome, this priority-hopping behaviour only started happening after the revamp.
Do you have any insight into what Ranged Attack meant in the old dome, or how it’s connected to weapon priority in the new dome? Did the IStaff/WoDF combo ever come up in team discussions as being overpowered, or is it just coincidental that the heal-stacking got nerfed by this new mechanic?
This mystery has been bugging me for a long time, so any info you can share would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Hi! Great questions… that I can’t answer off the top of my head! I’m so sorry. I don’t really remember off hand. I can say with near certainty that that combo being nerfed was not done intentionally because we never had a conversation about modifying any specific weapons and/or combos. We essentially had to reverse engineer old BD to recreate it, and while some changes were intentional, some were just a byproduct of that process (code we missed, features that were actually bugs, etc.). The intention was to keep weapon functionality mostly the same, though, because we didn’t want to nullify the entire existing BD weapons ecosystem.
But as for ranged attack specifically, I don’t remember if we did something intentionally, if it was a result of missing some code, a feature in progress, or something else. I’ll take a look in my BD documentation and ask around!