Acrobatic Attack

[Lily]

Description: There are mainly two things that don't work as I think they should do when performing an "Acrobatic Attack".

1)   The first issue comes up when it comes to targeting your opponent. Even though you target it miles away your character runs up too close and while your opponent already starts attacking you, you get a message stating you are too close to perform an acrobatic attack. Therefore you cannot do anything else for one more round, except for standing around and getting whacked.
This mostly occurred to me when I wanted to start a battle with an “acrobatic attack”, but I also noticed it happening when the battle was already going on. This occurs when targeting an enemy farther than the distance of an acrobatic attack.

2)   The second issue is about uneven terrain, or fighting on it. This happened to me in locations like the Deep, or on Firesteep. I don’t know how “acrobatic attack” is coded, but if you stand just a little lower than your opponent and want to start performing an attack, you get a message stating you have no line of sight to your enemy. In combat this can be deadly as your character cannot act for a whole round, leaving him/her flatfooted. Been there, experienced that already.

As I am currently at work I cannot bring up and screenshots or logs regarding these two issues. If required I can of course dig them up once I am back home again and post them here. Also if it comes to testing, I don’t mind being your guinea pig under a watchful eye of a GM.

I think akata mentioned experiencing these issues as well.


Location: Like everywhere

Verified: -

Reproducable: Yes

[Dorganath]

Just to throw out some information here...

1) Part of the problem with the "miles away" thing is that when you target something, be it an ability or a spell, that is outside of the designated range of the ability/spell, NWN does exactly what you described...it runs you up to the place or object you targeted and then attempts to use the ability.  Something very similar came up recently regarding the casting of Wail of the Banshee.  This is unfortunately not a behavior we can really control, and yes, I understand it can cause some difficulty in using the feat.

2) This is tricky because it gets into where the "location" of one object is with respect to another.  The uneven terrain issue can make this difficult if the point at which the target creature stands is at all beneath the plane of the terrain at that location or if there is some small nub of landscape along the vector between you and it. The function that determines this is a Bioware function, and I'm unsure how to address this in a way that does not cause further problems.

That said, I have one idea that might help, but if the cure is worse than the disease, I'll pull it back out.

[Lily]

I read and understood what you were saying here, Dorganath and I already assumed it had to do with the game-mechanics itself.

All I can say is I experienced both versions of the Acrobatic Attack. I know the Acrobatic Attack we now have is different from the old one, not only by the way it is performed, also the range which might be related to the two various animations. I can only say with the old animation where you were able to leap over longer distances there was not really the problem with my first point. But hey, we all know the attack itself was heavily bugged.

About the second point, I know it is tricky but might also be related to the animation being used for the Acrobatic Attack. Former to the leaping animation, the take to the air animation, one was able to target opponents on cliffs and the like. Yeah I know it could be abused and maybe was also, but a slight difference in height did not really matter that much as it does now.

However, this is just what I experienced and no idea about the mechanics behind it.

[Dorganath]

We'll see what this slight tweak does for the second point.  On the other, I'm not sure what the changes were for the 3.2 release, from a coding/technical standpoint. I'd have to look back through the diffs and see.