Bob the Vastness..... Dead to rights?

[Kadelake]

Originally Posted by Nauquan

The guys that you had weapons of sharpness died much faster. That was obviously due to by-passing etheralness

No, weapons of sharpness does not make the weapons magical or bypass BE in any way. (I actually tested it to be sure, sometimes the game mechanics can surprise you)
Weapons of sharpness must make them die faster in some other way.

[thejeff]

Does it just mean that when the damage is applied to them its AP so is more likely to get through their armor? Or does BV not work like that? I've never been quite sure.

[Finalgenesis]

Well since these are iron corpse we'll talking about, they have high prot, so I guess... the reflected damage retains the AP property and went through their own armor faster?

[Kadelake]

Did the Vastness have any protection buffs cast on him?

I did some testing and log diving . The way blood vengeance seems to work is:
1. The damage that penetrated the protection of the vengeful one is negated.
2. As retaliation the attacker is hit by a AN attack with damage equal to the negated damage. This attack is subject to DRN rolls like any ordinary attack. (Which is why you sometimes see the little blood cloud effect on the attackers but no damage. Blood vengeance was activated but the damage roll was less then 1.)

This severely reduces the usefulness of BV. Building a strategy around BV would require low protection, inviting heavy damage from anyone with decent MR.

There are many other interesting things to test but no more testing for me today

[thejeff]

Interesting. I haven't played with BV much.
So it's always a normal AN attack? Does that apply to other types of damage? Spell, elemental weapon attacks, etc?
I'm pretty sure I've seen BV stop Frozen Hearts and kill the caster. Can't remember if the caster had CR or not.

[Kadelake]

I know very little about BV myself. Maybe all this is already known, but it's not in the wiki at least.

It seems likely that it works the same way for all types of damage but I only tested with physical attacks.

[Baalz]

I believe your description is a bit off Kadelake. When blood vengeance triggers the attacker is hit by whatever attack was just negated, including all it's properties. That means if, for instance blood vengeance negates a hit from pillar of fire, then if the attacker is fire immune then he will never take damage. If the attacker has weapons of sharpness active, then he's hit with AP damage. So, weapons of sharpness is quite detrimental in this scenario.

[Baalz]

To clarify, BV triggers when a "hit" occurs, so high defense/awe/vine shield, etc. will make BV not trigger that much. High protection, mistform, & regeneration is what you want for maximum BV triggers, basically you want to get "hit" a bunch with the hits not doing that much to you. Not sure about luck & etherealness (my guess is they keep a hit from occurring), but it seems like BV triggers when mirror images are hit.

[Kadelake]

No, I believe that you're mistaken.

I tested with attackers with 5 damage and 20 protection (black hawks with army of gold). Against targets with 5 protection, BV was killing hawks left and right. But against targets with 30 protection it never even triggered. I even tested with "naked", protection 0, hawks against 30 protection enemies and BV never triggered. (Only the defenders had BV. There where no other effects or damage shields on the units. Fatigue was kept at 0 for the defenders.)

My conclusion is that my previous description was correct. The part about DRNs comes from reading the log. (Log diving isn't as fun as it sounds )

I don't know how BV handles elemental damage or mistform. I wanted to test it but didn't have the time I guess BV will handle BE the same way as mistform, since both BE and mistform activates after the damage has been dealt.

[thejeff]

I just played around with BV and Frozen Heart and the results weren't what I expected. When BV triggered, the Skratti casting Frozen Heart took the damage, despite being cold immune.