seeking arrow
 

getting spammed, stopped an advance cold. is there any defense vs this, or do you just have to send out a ton of commanders?

Re: seeking arrow
 

Anyone correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't it work off the mechanics of regular arrows, thus having high hp to take the hit and survive or high armor to absorb the hit will save a commander.

Not sure if things like equipped shields or the Clock of Missile Deflection help. Lets try searching....

Yay!

Ok so some great testing done by the knowledgeable Calahan, the key point for this discussion being:

"The end results show that out of 300 'Seeking Arrows' cast at....

300 Bare Scouts --- 151 died, 45 received afflictions.
300 Scouts equipped with a Small Shield (Parry 4) --- 150 died, 39 received afflictions.
300 Scouts equipped with a Tower Shield (Parry 8) --- 145 died, 57 received afflictions.
300 Scouts equipped with a Lucky Pendant --- 67 died, 25 received afflictions.
300 Scouts equipped with Robe of Missile Protection --- 14 died, 9 received afflictions."

So it seems shields do nothing, Lucky Pendants seem to stop 50% (as you would expect if they did anything) and Robes of Missile Protection are awesome. CBM changes Rings of Warning to have I think 50% missile protection so they may be an option. If you have an air bless then Shrouds of the Saint may be an option too.

Realistically....

Put these items on those you really want to protect (mages with cool names and the like :) ) and spam indy commanders to protect the rest.

Re: seeking arrow
 

it's an armor negating attack, so armor isn't too helpful.

what's wierd is, it does 8 damage, and it killed one of my commanders who had 12 HPs, which i find odd.

Doo, where did you do this search? i can't find the data bases for that. thanks for your research.

Re: seeking arrow
 

According to the linked Calahan post, the spell does 0-24 damage, with an average of 8.2. That's probably how it killed your commander :)

Re: seeking arrow
 

The underlined part of a post often means it will go to another webpage when clicked on ;)

Re: seeking arrow
 

Thinking about this....

Its interesting that the Robe of Missile Protection seems to give a 90% chance to avoid being hit and not 80% as it should.

From the no protection and two shielded tests roughly 150 die, which says that 50% will die and 50% survive. Thus with the Robe of Missile Protection with 14 dieing we can conclude that roughly 30 scouts were hit. As 30 is 10% of 300 therefor the 90% protection.

I wonder how statistically robust 300 test are (sounds pretty good) and do we have some abnormal but possible result?

Interesting...

Re: seeking arrow
 

for the record, my commander that got killed was actually hit with 2 attacks, i just misread the messages.

and thanks for he heads up on the link. whoops.

Re: seeking arrow
 

Doo,
If you have time... What about 300 scouts with an S9 (twist of fate) shroud?
-ssj

Re: seeking arrow
 

If the casters are wearing Sacred Shrouds and have a death blessing does that affect seeking arrow???

Re: seeking arrow
 

From the linked post, death bless does nothing to increase affliction chance.

Actually I heard of a mod that makes testing so much easier to set up. I tried looking for that mod but without knowing its name I'm at a bit of a loss. If somebody can point me in the right direction for that mod I'll offer my services to do some testing.

*edit* Debugmod 1.07 :)

Re: seeking arrow
 

Ok, I did 10 tests of 10 Seeking Arrows cast at 10 Scouts wearing Shrouds of the Saint conferring an S9 bless (thus Twist Fate)

Thus from 100 casts 25 resulted in hits and 7 deaths. Of notice was that Calahans testing showed that 50% of scouts die but with my test only 28% of those hit died, but given I only tested the equivalent of 100 Seeking Arrows vs Calahans 300 this could account for it. The testing gave an average of 2.5 hits per round with a standard deviation of 1.08, perhaps further testing could be done to lower the error but I can't be stuffed.

Those not hit received this message:

"Suddenly an arrow appeared out of the sky and headed straight for X's heart. But for some reason X managed to escape his deadly fate and got away with only a scratch."

The take home message is that Seeking Arrow cast at a unit wearing a Saint of the Shroud conferring an S9 bless (Twist Fate) will ignore the Twist Fate effect 25% of the time.

Test save game attached, it needs the DebugMod.

Re: seeking arrow
 

Moar tests!

:)

Doubting that Twist Fate gives 100% protection to the first damage a unit takes I tested it in a battle. I could have done it more simpler in hindsight but...

I took a Markata scout and equipped it with Shroud of the Saint conferring the Twist Fate effect. I equipped a Son of Niefel with a Rod of Death and set him to Attack Closest. I then sent them to battle each other. I tested 26 times and 5 times from watching the battles I saw this occur:

The Markata would be hit for 1 damage (with no floating number to indicate this but with a red "hit" splash) but the Twist Fate effect was still on the Markata. See the attached files for the 5 replays. Replay 5 in particular is good because the Markata loses one hp, gains an affliction and retains the Twist Fate effect. The replays require the Dogfight map. The game name is simply "gh".

I know there is an effect with the battle replay being silly but I don't know enough about it to say if this is what I'm seeing. I think it happens in MP games and results in different results in the battle to whats reported.

If what I'm seeing is true then it seems Twist Fate works more like this:

Twist Fate gives roughly 75-80% immunity to ritual damage, but with no limit to damage taken if it fails. In battle 20-25% of the time 1 hp of damage will bypass the Twist Fate effect (and allow for afflictions) without removing the Twist Fate effect.



Poor test Markata fighting a Son of Niefel, however twice out of the 26 tests he the Markata took non-lethal damage, fled and survived to gain entry into the Hall of Fame! Totally worth it :)

Re: seeking arrow
 

Just checked your SA vs TF tests, and you can't test Twist Fate by having all the Scouts in the same province because there is no guarantee that each Seeking Arror will target a separate Scout (in fact the odds say it's pretty much a guarantee that they won't). And since (from the tests, see next) it appears the TF effects does get removed after the first successful hit it negates, the next SA that targets the same unit will be without TF in the equation. (so becomes just a normal SA vs Scout test)

Just ran your test game. Only 1 Scout died, and of the 10 SA's cast at those 10 Scouts the two most important message results to take notice of are... (Orivade is the name of the Scout)

"Suddenly an Arrow...yadda yadda... but for some reasons Orivade managed to escape his deadly fate and got away with only a scratch"

then a later message in the message log

"Suddenely an arrow...yadda yadda... struck Orivade straight in the heart. He died instantly"

I interpret this as the first SA got negated by the TF, and the second SA killed him because he didn't have TF anymore.


If you want to run TF tests you need to put 10 Scouts in 10 separate provinces, as the moment you double up any then the tests become invalid. (the same slight concern as this does in theory exist over the Death bless tests I did, but there I was only looking for any evidence of the Death Bless having an effect, and I was not testing for the exact percentage.)

Re: seeking arrow
 

With regards to the markata vs jotun, I'm 99% sure that is due to the giant parrying the markata's attack. Twist fate is not negated by damage from parrying, so that would explain it neatly.

Re: seeking arrow
 

The Markata has TF, not the giant. Just checked and the Markata has no shield.

I had trouble logging in here so I put my next test here.

Unfortunately that forum wouldn't let me upload so here is the file for that test.

Re: seeking arrow
 

Thanks all.. Was always curious as to whether twist fate "reconciled" a hit in the ritual hase. Good to know it does.
ssj

Re: seeking arrow
 

Just tested Seeking Arrow vs Ethereal (Black Servants).

100% of Seeking Arrows hit out of a sample size of 10.

Ethereal offers no protection.

Re: seeking arrow
 

Yes, I understand that it was the markata with twist fate. However, I said parry instead of what I actually meant, repel. In any case it looks like calahan mentioned that the damage was from repel and strange 1 damage results on the other forum anyway, so my comment is a bit unnecessary now :P I have noticed many times in playing that a result of 1 damage would not pop twist fate, but I've always attributed this to being a special factor of either the repel mechanic or poison, which are the two most obvious ways you'll see 1 damage being done to a given unit.

Re: seeking arrow
 

Having never used the ROBE of missile deflection, I didn't initially think this was a typo, and was super excited to try wishing for the CLOCK of missile deflection!

Re: seeking arrow
 

Flavor Flav, one of the very few hip hop masters never to be shot. True story.

Re: seeking arrow
 

one wonders if our good friend Flavor might have been better off being shot, though...

Re: seeking arrow
 

That is one of my go-to items, the clock of missile protection.

Re: seeking arrow
 

Better than Clock of Missile Pinata

Re: seeking arrow
 

That would wreck havoc on the machinery, it seems :P

Re: seeking arrow
 

Fought against Caelum once...
Anything that gives you airshield. Shield of valor, silver hauberk, amulet, robe.... Or just buy a ton of scout decoys.