I posted an old thread a year back, asking if War Machine's Prefights are bugged (
here).
Anyway, it's been a year, and there's nothing on the Trello about War Machine. So, presumably, what I'm describing below is all fine...🤪.
Sadly, it would be against Forum rules to bump my own Bugs thread from last year, so I decided to make a new one in General Discussion, and take the risk that posting about this twice in twelve months wouldn't count as spamming...
The problem I saw back then is that War Machine's Prefights don't appear to grant the predicted damage boost. But actually, it's more complicated than that - they
aren't as good as they're supposed to be
for 6* or 7* champions. But they're
amazing for 2* champions...
The headline abilities of the Prefights work just fine. Cleanse, Energy resistance and debuff duration seem to do what they're described as doing. So you can relax, if that's a concern for you.
But the Damage boost?
Well... the damage increase is definitely working a bit weirdly.
Placing
any of War Machine's prefights on a Tech champion is supposed to increase their Attack by 10%.
Placing the
Skirmish prefight is supposed to increase it by 'up to' an additional flat value, depending on the recipient's Armour Rating.
In my original thread (
here), I tried it on different champions having realised the benefits were variable (usually
less than 10%) for
all the Prefights, not just for Skirmish (which is supposed to be the only variable one). But the Damage increase didn't seem to rise consistently with increasing Armour - in fact, I couldn't see a pattern at that time.
Well, now that we've got War Machine in the seven-star pool (and on my roster, tbh) he seems a bit more relevant to the game again, so I got around to doing a bit more testing.
I tried using varied Tech champs with different Armour ratings. Then I tried them in different rarities. The table below shows the damage from a standard non-critical medium attack on RoL Winter Soldier. If you look at the percentage increases in the last two columns, I think the pattern becomes fairly clear:
So, the Damage increase from
all the Prefights (Support, Fortify and Skirmish) appears to rise inversely to the
Attack rating of the champion. Armour doesn't seem to have much impact, and it's not related to their rarity - my (ranked up) 3/30 Warlock gets a much smaller enhancement than my (unranked) 4* Warlock.
But check out the damage scaling for the 2* champions! From +85% to a fairly massive +247%!
Just in case it was a weird interaction just for Warlock, I double-checked this with unranked 2* versions of 1/1 Viv Vision and Lady Deathstrike as well - it works for them exactly the same (both gained +250% Attack with Skirmish prefight), although Lady D's rupture damage doesn't go completely nuts, presumably because it's based on her Armour not her attack.
Other things I confirmed on testing:
- it doesn't matter what rarity the War Machine providing a Prefight is - whether they're a 2* or a 7*, the results are the same.
- Also, the Support & Fortify enhancements always give the same results, whereas Skirmish gives a slightly higher boost.
- And finally, adding multiple Prefights doesn't grant any additional attack.
So, any thoughts on the scaling we see above? Working as intended? Is this a slightly weird but completely fine interaction with Challenge Rating/Diminishing Returns? Or should this perhaps be something for the now-famous Trello board?
It'll certainly be a handy ability to know about, for anyone who hasn't cleared Variant 4, yet 😉
