WarcraftPets Forum

My initial testing was to do this: Use a level 25 lantern (I use [pet]Enchanted Lantern[/pet] with these 3 abilities - [ability]Beam[/ability],[ability]Flash[/ability],[ability]Soul Ward[/ability] against Dusty (Whispering Pandaren Spirit's 1st pet).

Open with Flash, as long as you are not slept by Moth Dust it will reduce his hit chance by 50% for 2 rounds. And if you use an add-on to show enemy moves the tooltip even shows that Moth Balls has a 0% hit chance and Cocoon Strike has a 50% hit chance. Now you Beam (hits his cocoon) and check the tooltips again and Moth Balls still has a 0% hit chance. Yet he still hits anywhere from 2-4 times every time.

If the mechanics actually worked you should be able to do Flash > Beam > Beam > Soul Ward > repeat. And the only attack you should take damage from is the 50% hit chance cocoon strike. Instead of the massive destruction by 0% hit chance moth balls.

Additional testing has shown that in PvP pet battles (with a guild mate) that other abilities reduced to a 0% hit chance still hit far too often (Moth Balls being the best test, hitting 2-4 times out of 5 shots, with a 0% hit chance). Going to have to update my bug report since this is more than just Dusty being a PITA (which is why I was trying other methods in the first place).

Maybe I misunderstood how it works but I had assumed the 50% reduction wasn't based off 100% in total, but off the current hit chance. So if Moth Balls has 50% hit chance normally, a 50% reduction would put it at 25%. Or have I been calculating this wrong all along?

Well if that is the case then Blizzard has every tooltip wrong when your pet has the debuff. Because it lists as 0% when you are hit with a 50% reduction and 40% when you are hit with a 10% reduction. <- That is assuming you had a 50% hit chance in the first place, of course. Considering the basic, straightforward mechanics of pet battling, I believe it is meant as I described - a flat reduction, not a multiplier.

Has Blizzard responded to your bug report in any way?

After being playing wow since 2008 i can tell u something.. never trust anything blizzard says.

Anasa wrote:Has Blizzard responded to your bug report in any way?

They generally aren't going to respond. They just look into things and fix them if need be. That's not to say they never respond, but its not likely -- no matter what the issue is.

I also think that hit reduction is subtractive, not a multiplier.

However hit and not hitting is always a little odd. I missed a laser beam shot yesterday, when it had a 190% chance to hit due to a 10% chance to hit reduction. How does that work?

Rendigar wrote:And if you use an add-on to show enemy moves the tooltip even shows that Moth Balls has a 0% hit chance and Cocoon Strike has a 50% hit chance. Now you Beam (hits his cocoon) and check the tooltips again and Moth Balls still has a 0% hit chance. Yet he still hits anywhere from 2-4 times every time.

Are you sure it's a bug in how hit chance works and not just a bug in what the addon displays? There could be some kind of cap on how low hit chance can go (say 50%), and this could all be working as intended. It would be undocumented functionality, but not a bug.

Sanzul wrote:

Rendigar wrote:And if you use an add-on to show enemy moves the tooltip even shows that Moth Balls has a 0% hit chance and Cocoon Strike has a 50% hit chance. Now you Beam (hits his cocoon) and check the tooltips again and Moth Balls still has a 0% hit chance. Yet he still hits anywhere from 2-4 times every time.

Are you sure it's a bug in how hit chance works and not just a bug in what the addon displays? There could be some kind of cap on how low hit chance can go (say 50%), and this could all be working as intended. It would be undocumented functionality, but not a bug.

Normally I'd have no problem accepting this - but it displays 0% for my opponent in their actual interface as well. So it's NOT due to an add-on. Now it COULD be that Blizzard has decided to just ignore reality and tell us nothing useful when it comes to hit chance and modifiers related to it. It could be just a mistake. It could be that it's been broken and nobody has bothered to report it or even look at it this closely (I doubt that, I am far from unique). Perhaps we'll see a change in a future patch, or perhaps not. But until and unless they fix this "bug" or update us on this "undocumented feature" (who are they, Microsoft? LOL) you cannot use hit chance reduction abililties with any reliability. Might save others from some serious frustration dealing with Dusty and the like.

Rendigar wrote:Normally I'd have no problem accepting this - but it displays 0% for my opponent in their actual interface as well. So it's NOT due to an add-on.

So it's an interface bug. It would hardly be the first time a listed pet hit chance was incorrectly displayed. There are a couple of pet abilities with damage or hit chance listed as "DATA ERROR". That still doesn't mean that hit chance itself is bugged.

Hit chance reduction seems to work fine unless you're trying to bring things down to exceptionally low hit chances.

Also... has anyone run into the bug where curse of doom misses when it goes off, even though it has been correctly applied?
Had that happen to me just now, my crawling claw applied the curse, enemy switches in a Wisp, blinds me, and as curse of doom explodes it misses. or is this a known feature?

Delayed attacks like CoD always seem to use the current Hit chance of the pet and not the Hit chance when they where applied. I've always thought this was a feature, rather than a bug, but only Blizz knows for sure.

Xon wrote:Had that happen to me just now, my crawling claw applied the curse, enemy switches in a Wisp, blinds me, and as curse of doom explodes it misses. or is this a known feature?

DoTs work differently than delayed damage debuffs like CoD (even though intuitively they seem very similar). DoTs always do their damage once successfully applied, even if a hit debuff or dodge effect happens later, and the damage is always exactly what the tooltip indicates (ie no random +/- 10% damage range). Delayed damage debuffs (CoD, Geyser, Elementium Bolt, etc) will be applied regardless of blind/dodge/etc., but they are affected by dodge/blind/etc. when they go off. This is why you can howlbomb ChiChi, for example -- because Ethereal does not prevent the application of Geyser/Whirlpool, it only prevents the detonation. Haunt or Agony on the other hand would have their application prevented by Ethereal, but once it's applied, Ethereal would not prevent the damage from ticking.

Sanzul wrote:

Rendigar wrote:Normally I'd have no problem accepting this - but it displays 0% for my opponent in their actual interface as well. So it's NOT due to an add-on.

So it's an interface bug. It would hardly be the first time a listed pet hit chance was incorrectly displayed. There are a couple of pet abilities with damage or hit chance listed as "DATA ERROR". That still doesn't mean that hit chance itself is bugged.
Hit chance reduction seems to work fine unless you're trying to bring things down to exceptionally low hit chances.

Exactly - either they need to fix the display error or fix the "bug", I don't care which, I just want accurate information from what is a very simple system. If a raid boss and his crew of adds can properly calculate the miss / block / dodge / parry chances when 25 players are trying to tear their faces off I think it shouldn't be outside the realm of possibility that Blizzard can make a turn-based pet-battle game properly display what happens when a -50% hit buff is applied to a 50% hit chance attack. My post is to make sure people are informed as to what is going on so they wont be surprised when their hit chance reduction abilities are completely useless in these situations. My hypothesis may be wrong, but my findings are not.

Thanks for the post, Rendigar.

I yelled at my computer more often than I care to admit when Dusty would do back to back 4/4 hits with his 30% hit chance Moth Balls when I had him under Sandstorm while my 70% Crush's would miss over and over and over... I understand that my small data set is not enough to draw any conclusions about the real vs the indicated hit chance, but it is comforting to hear that a more complete analysis is yielding similar results.

I ended up switching tactics after Dusty became a Flyer and no longer rely on hit reduction.