Edit: After further testing and discovering that this also applies to The Dread, now I see the pattern: this affects all enemies with Cadence attacks. And it’s deadly
Original Post:
Sometimes, randomly, the Loghorrean applies his sunder with a regular melee attack that does not have the regular animation of his sunder bite, nor the sunder warning symbol.
At 2 sec in the video you can see the sunder melee bite animation being executed normally, I dodged it
At 10 sec in the video he does a bugged attack that somehow applies the sunder from a melee bite
It’s the first skill in here: Loghorrean, the Voice of Ch'thon - Grim Dawn Monster Database
You can tell because at 10 sec he actually heals a little bit after hitting me with the sunder, revealing it’s the only 10000% ADctH attack he has.
He did perform 3 regular attacks in between each sunder bite, so the charge levels seem to be correct. But the animation and sunder warning bugged out.
Tested with 1.3.0.8 in Ascendant difficulty, not sure if it happens in other difficulties.
Upon further testing, same issue happened with Kra’vall.
He did 3 normal attacks getting him to 3 charges which would be enough for his sunder bite attack to trigger next. But instead, Kra’vall chose to do another attack (lateral arm swing) which applied the sunder instead, with no warning or sunder animation.
Maybe this problem affects more bosses that have the “X charges to sunder next” mechanic.
Ok, this bug just got seriously dangerous. This also applies to The Dread, and she can insta-kill characters without warning with her cadence which sometimes plays the wrong animation.
Combat analysis video:
Just like the Loghorrean’s and Kra’vall’s cadence attacks, The Dread applies the effects of her fully charged Cadence attack without playing the special Cadence attack animation. She just does a regular auto-attack swing, and the player gets insta-killed with no warning.
In the video above, a regular auto-attack from her is doing 9k damage, which is manageable for my build. But suddenly she does a 28k+ damage attack without warning. There’s no way the player can know that a surprise TRIPLE damage attack is coming.
It feels like this is “just” an animation bug (with big consequences). It doesn’t happen all the time. It seems to happen randomly. I’m not sure exactly how to reproduce it consistently, but having fought the Dread dozens of times now, this has already happened to me at least 4 times before.
Hardcore players… beware…
I would seriously recommend you don’t fight The Dread at all until this gets fixed.
Regardless of the bug, I wish the game communicated those cadence/savagery-like charge attacks from enemy more clearly with sound/visual for both charging and maxed out attacks. It’s impossible to know how it works until you go to GT. Maybe it’s too late for the game but I hope it’s addressed in Grim Dawn 2.
wonder if this has/had any relation to that insta death at 30meter distance/“a screen away” people experienced too either mixed up charge animation, or straight up cadence chomps animation bugging out so much it just got “infinite” reach
I had this very thing happening to me just yesterday and also felt very weird about it. The only reason I didn’t make a thread about it is that I wasn’t 100% sure that I didn’t get debuffed from some other mob and simply didn’t notice. But it looked exactly the same as in your video. A visually regular attack - that I’d naturally just tank - just insta-killed my character at full health (19k).
was the lifesteal “cadence” charge swipe changed at some point btw?
Because i’m positive i’ve tanked it before, so much so i made note of it/joked about its high lifesteal and healing dread up, causing extra despair from failing to evade it and making the sweaty fight reset
Or mebe it’s just the difference in maxed altar vs not causing that bit of survival difference on single hit rng?
They did nerf the massive lifeleech swipe, yes. For good reason, imo. The healing was just too much. The Dread can be very punishing for melee players while casters and pet players sit back and just shit on it like it’s nothing, melee players deserved a little bit of relief
sry i meant dmg wise (didn’t get killed vs now risk insta kill if not telegraphed), atleast according to GT it still has 10.000% lifesteal attached to it - which was the number i made fun of on release
Basically, if that swipe always carried the risk of insta killing from dmg, “how did i survive prior” - when it was telegraphed, is my confusion, because i’m positive i did survive enough to even notice the 10k% lifesteal in teh first place.
I also tank the lifeleech swipe on a Witch Hunter with 18k health and ~2200 Armor/40% phys res with no issues. It often doesn’t even trigger Prismatic Rage. I share your confusion in that regard because the seemingly regular attack in the video obviously hits way harder. But the whole “this is might be a not-telegraphed cadence attack” is just a theory anyway. Something is certainly wrong, though.
Finally, an explanation for what has been annoying me for a couple weeks now. Thank you.
Is this also the reason why even though this has repeatedly killed a character of mine in one hit that has over 24k hp yet has a value for greatest damage received of 18k?
Huh. That might explain why the one time I got hit by Dread’s regular attack for testing purposes, it broke through 9K barrier and dealt about 12K extra health damage out of my 19K. Without Menhirus active, it’d have been a lethal b*tchslap.
3K armor and 23% Phys res too.
I see that one of the monster modifiers was Frenzied. Could the extra attack speed be breaking some timings?
My suspicion is that there’s an irregularity caused by the sequencing of multi-hit attacks. Just as these sorts of attacks interact oddly with our Cadence, it stands to reason such oddities should reflect for enemies; they are, after all, using the same skill template.
Dread’s Sunder combo and Loghorrean’s Tentacle Slaps seem the culprits to me. They both occur in the videos between the initial Cadence charge being gained and the “finale” (template is called chargedfinale.tpl).
Ceno said somewhere ascendant had enemy animation speed increase, Beronath is too much - #81 by Ceno but unsure if that only applies to Beronath for now
I could explain Loghorrean/Kraken due to their double tentacle hit, and that can be addressed with a cooldown on the Cadence charges, but the Dread I just don’t see how it could generate a Cadence hit outside of the special animation. The sunder channel does Not build charges and does not interact with the Cadence attack in any way.
Definitely can’t repro this under similar conditions (Ascendant, Attack Speed mutator, replicating the attack pattern/etc).
either mixed up charge animation, or straight up cadence chomps animation bugging out so much it just got “infinite” reach 
