.com.unity Forums - Better Know a Pretender: The Oracle

Quote:

Originally Posted by Micah (Post 709619)

I'm pretty sure that's not how it works in practice because of defense penalties, actually.

From what I've seen mirror images and (I think) other defensive buffs cancel out the attack entirely, negating the multiple attack penalty and thus making images + high defense much more effective than a single negation since the mirror image gets to negate not just hits, but misses as well. This is based on anecdotal evidence of watching units with mirror images lose the images and die quite quickly, whereas they had been able to go for multiple rounds previously without a single hit, but I haven't done extensive testing.

I did try to test this once, with an F9A9 Phoenix with Def 150 or something and a bunch of regular units that were modded to have dozens of attacks (0 AN, capped at 1 damage). The results weren't entirely clear, but I remember my post-analysis conclusions were that Body Ethereal and Luck have a multiplicative effect on the number of attacks required to hit (thus indicating that they negate the attack before defense penalties accumulate) and Mirror Image has an additive effect on the number of attacks required (thus indicating that the defense penalty still gets added even if the attack is negated). In other words, in that test, it appeared that the sequence goes Luck/Body Ethereal ==> Roll attack/defense, calculate defense penalty ==> Check Mirror Image? ==> Roll Dmg/Prot ==> Check Mirror Image?/Twist Fate. Mirror Image falls in one of the two places indicated but I don't know which.

Now that I know more, if I re-tested this I'd do it with the debugger log turned on. Bottom line is, I don't know for sure either.

-Max