Recently I’ve noticed that enemies can interrupt their attacks mid-animation. This is most pronounced with enemies that are supposed to be locked in place for a lengthy period of time, giving the player opportunity to dodge and do some DPS safely. The most noticable example of that that I’ve noticed is N’erfatal, but I’ve seen it happen with others such as Callagadra’s/Grava’s wing flap or the Dread’s sunder.
Example below, taken from one of my streams (so there’ll be commentary, apologies):
I don’t remember this happening before, or at least not as much. Could be that some enemies now simply have longer animations to make this more noticable, but it certainly doesn’t feel intended.
To help reproducing this bug, here’s a video where I just ran across 4 mutators that made Nerfatal animation-cancel 100% of his sunder attacks in a fight.
00:06 - 1st sunder, canceled
00:33 - 2nd sunder, canceled
01:00 - 3rd sunder, canceled
01:26 - 4th sunder, canceled
01:52 - 5th sunder, canceled
Each time he instead decides to cast the big meteor attack.
The mutators include attack speed and cooldown. Probably has something to do with that.
I died, teleported back, and restarted the fight. Exactly the same thing happened. Seems to be consistent to reproduce.
This is not a bug. Ner’fatal will always prioritize casting the meateor, even if it means interrupting another ability, due to an independent timer on it.
Maybe not with Ner’fatal but he’s not the only one doing it.
Here’s Calla cancelling its sunder animation after one wing flap.
Seen Grava do the same (also sometimes fakes out his dispell projectiles) and I’m sure I’ve seen others, but can’t say who off the top of my head, would have to look through VODs. I think maybe some of the Watchers/Lucius changed their minds mid-animation but can’t be sure.
Same here, outside of Nerfatal, it’s happening with pretty much any boss.
90s vid compilation with examples from yesterday:
0:04 - Dread interrupts her charge animation to stomp the ground instead
0:34 - Dread interrupts her sunder to charge at me instead
0:56 - Nyarlathon interrupts his sunder to perform a regular auto-attack instead
1:08 - SR42 Sentinel interrupts his sunder to spit green fire instead
