For what it’s worth, my interpretation of this has always been that you have to imagine that Ability Accuracy is a separate thing to buff ability accuracy, and instead it’s something called Base Ability Accuracy (I made up that name)
It most definitely is. What we normally refer to as just "ability accuracy" is actually a champion stat. We just don't usually see it, and it is usually 100%. If you have an ability that has a 10% ability accuracy to trigger something, the true chance for that thing to trigger is the ability's ability accuracy multiplied by the champion's ability accuracy. So usually that's just 100% x whatever, and you get whatever. But when you lower a champion's ability accuracy, it is this champion stat that is being lowered. When you reduce it by 20% and it becomes 80%, you then have 80% x whatever. If the ability itself had 10% ability accuracy, the true chance is 80% x 10% = 8%.
Buff ability accuracy is a modifier specific to buffs. But the presumption has generally been that immune to ability accuracy reduction means immunity to all ability accuracy reductions. However, it if only means immunity to champion ability accuracy reduction and not immunity to all ability accuracy reductions, then that should be explicitly stated.
Ability accuracy has always been a little sketchy. Ironically, this particular situation under discussion is one of the few cases where an unusual circumstance is actually working as you would expect it to work given the mechanical descriptions. There are a lot of weird corner cases where things don't work as described, for (currently) unknown reasons. For example, Falcon can suppress Mordo's astral evade. On paper, that should not work, but we all know it does.
Exactly my interpretation.
The easiest solution here where you assume all interactions are working as intended, is to rename ability accuracy so that it’s ‘Base Ability Accuracy’, immunity to AAR should be renamed ‘Immunity to Base Ability Accuracy Reduction’ otherwise we’re gonna see Tigra, Rintrah, Apoc and Wiccan get a rather large hit to their uses. Or, their pro player uses.
Again, the wording in Mysterio’s abilities is not immunity to AAR, it’s “Mysterio’s ability accuracy can’t be decreased”. No mention whatsoever about immunity. So, is Mysterio’s ability accuracy being decreased by the neutralize debuff?
I mean, when you try and reduce mysterio’s with a concussion ability accuracy it says immune. I think it’s just a case of the descriptions not being clear and in reality he is actually just immune to AAR.
The way that fits into my theory is that “ability accuracy cannot be decreased” is referring to what I think is stat 1, or base ability accuracy. So that aspect cannot be decreased, but his buff ability accuracy can be decreased. Because ability accuracy is not the same as buff ability accuracy.
That makes zero sense. How can Kabam hope to explain that “ability accuracy is not the same as buff ability accuracy”? Do we a different layer of functionality in every ability accuracy for each game interaction? What about debuff ability accuracy? Passive ability accuracy? Contact ability accuracy? Which one can’t ever be decreased in Mysterio’s case?
Makes perfect sense in my view. How can Kabam hope to explain that ability accuracy is not the same as buff ability accuracy? I mean, you just did it right there. It's a pretty simple concept. If you can point to any such thing as debuff ability accuracy, passive, contact etc, then I'll address them. Until then, they clearly don't exist.
Again, if you want Mysterio to be immune to buff ability accuracy reduction you have to accept that Apoc will no longer be able to stop Immune to AAR champions shrug off, Tigra will no longer be able to work on Force of Will, Rintrah, Wiccan and everyone else in future with neutralise will no longer be able to work in all these places. Is that worth ripping up how the game works? Is that a pro player move?
Or is it not easier to just accept that there are several different stats, Base Ability Accuracy, Buff ability accuracy and shrug off ability accuracy, and that some champions affect one of them, some affect all of them and some are immune to one of them.
Let’s use your line of thinking then. You still haven’t answered which ability accuracy can’t be decreased in Mysterio’s case. Say a player oblivious to this topic sees a fight in game and decides he’ll use Mysterio because his ability accuracy can’t be decreased. Now, tell me, how do we know 100% this player will be happy because Mysterio actually worked, or ops, it wasn’t the ability accuracy Mysterio’s ability actually worked for?
For what it’s worth, my interpretation of this has always been that you have to imagine that Ability Accuracy is a separate thing to buff ability accuracy, and instead it’s something called Base Ability Accuracy (I made up that name)
It most definitely is. What we normally refer to as just "ability accuracy" is actually a champion stat. We just don't usually see it, and it is usually 100%. If you have an ability that has a 10% ability accuracy to trigger something, the true chance for that thing to trigger is the ability's ability accuracy multiplied by the champion's ability accuracy. So usually that's just 100% x whatever, and you get whatever. But when you lower a champion's ability accuracy, it is this champion stat that is being lowered. When you reduce it by 20% and it becomes 80%, you then have 80% x whatever. If the ability itself had 10% ability accuracy, the true chance is 80% x 10% = 8%.
Buff ability accuracy is a modifier specific to buffs. But the presumption has generally been that immune to ability accuracy reduction means immunity to all ability accuracy reductions. However, it if only means immunity to champion ability accuracy reduction and not immunity to all ability accuracy reductions, then that should be explicitly stated.
Ability accuracy has always been a little sketchy. Ironically, this particular situation under discussion is one of the few cases where an unusual circumstance is actually working as you would expect it to work given the mechanical descriptions. There are a lot of weird corner cases where things don't work as described, for (currently) unknown reasons. For example, Falcon can suppress Mordo's astral evade. On paper, that should not work, but we all know it does.
Exactly my interpretation.
The easiest solution here where you assume all interactions are working as intended, is to rename ability accuracy so that it’s ‘Base Ability Accuracy’, immunity to AAR should be renamed ‘Immunity to Base Ability Accuracy Reduction’ otherwise we’re gonna see Tigra, Rintrah, Apoc and Wiccan get a rather large hit to their uses. Or, their pro player uses.
Either that, or make all abilities that confer ability accuracy modification immunity affect all such modifications. Although I suspect that can't happen for technical reasons (it may prevent them from making special content that bypasses normal immunities for specific design reasons if they eliminate all escape hatches from any ability that says "this always happens with no exceptions ever.")
Unless it’s written “immune” in a champion’s info page, the ability in question shouldn’t function the way you are describing immunity should. As I wrote twice already, Mysterio’s ability is not an immunity, instead his ability accuracy cannot be decreased. Period.
If Mysterio's description was changed to say "immune to AAR" as he currently works in game - see callout of immune when anyone tries to reduce his AAR, see the fact that like other immune to AAR champs he can have his buffs ability accuracy reduced, and his tenacity chance reduced. That is to say, he works exactly like every other immune to AAR champ in the game, do you not think that it's likely that he is actually (as @AverageDesi said "It is in effect [immunity to AAR]") just immune to AAR?
What's the difference in functionality right now between Mysterio's "Ability accuracy cannot be reduced" and any other immune to AAR champion?
For what it’s worth, my interpretation of this has always been that you have to imagine that Ability Accuracy is a separate thing to buff ability accuracy, and instead it’s something called Base Ability Accuracy (I made up that name)
It most definitely is. What we normally refer to as just "ability accuracy" is actually a champion stat. We just don't usually see it, and it is usually 100%. If you have an ability that has a 10% ability accuracy to trigger something, the true chance for that thing to trigger is the ability's ability accuracy multiplied by the champion's ability accuracy. So usually that's just 100% x whatever, and you get whatever. But when you lower a champion's ability accuracy, it is this champion stat that is being lowered. When you reduce it by 20% and it becomes 80%, you then have 80% x whatever. If the ability itself had 10% ability accuracy, the true chance is 80% x 10% = 8%.
Buff ability accuracy is a modifier specific to buffs. But the presumption has generally been that immune to ability accuracy reduction means immunity to all ability accuracy reductions. However, it if only means immunity to champion ability accuracy reduction and not immunity to all ability accuracy reductions, then that should be explicitly stated.
Ability accuracy has always been a little sketchy. Ironically, this particular situation under discussion is one of the few cases where an unusual circumstance is actually working as you would expect it to work given the mechanical descriptions. There are a lot of weird corner cases where things don't work as described, for (currently) unknown reasons. For example, Falcon can suppress Mordo's astral evade. On paper, that should not work, but we all know it does.
Exactly my interpretation.
The easiest solution here where you assume all interactions are working as intended, is to rename ability accuracy so that it’s ‘Base Ability Accuracy’, immunity to AAR should be renamed ‘Immunity to Base Ability Accuracy Reduction’ otherwise we’re gonna see Tigra, Rintrah, Apoc and Wiccan get a rather large hit to their uses. Or, their pro player uses.
Again, the wording in Mysterio’s abilities is not immunity to AAR, it’s “Mysterio’s ability accuracy can’t be decreased”. No mention whatsoever about immunity. So, is Mysterio’s ability accuracy being decreased by the neutralize debuff?
I mean, when you try and reduce mysterio’s with a concussion ability accuracy it says immune. I think it’s just a case of the descriptions not being clear and in reality he is actually just immune to AAR.
The way that fits into my theory is that “ability accuracy cannot be decreased” is referring to what I think is stat 1, or base ability accuracy. So that aspect cannot be decreased, but his buff ability accuracy can be decreased. Because ability accuracy is not the same as buff ability accuracy.
That makes zero sense. How can Kabam hope to explain that “ability accuracy is not the same as buff ability accuracy”? Do we a different layer of functionality in every ability accuracy for each game interaction? What about debuff ability accuracy? Passive ability accuracy? Contact ability accuracy? Which one can’t ever be decreased in Mysterio’s case?
Makes perfect sense in my view. How can Kabam hope to explain that ability accuracy is not the same as buff ability accuracy? I mean, you just did it right there. It's a pretty simple concept. If you can point to any such thing as debuff ability accuracy, passive, contact etc, then I'll address them. Until then, they clearly don't exist.
Again, if you want Mysterio to be immune to buff ability accuracy reduction you have to accept that Apoc will no longer be able to stop Immune to AAR champions shrug off, Tigra will no longer be able to work on Force of Will, Rintrah, Wiccan and everyone else in future with neutralise will no longer be able to work in all these places. Is that worth ripping up how the game works? Is that a pro player move?
Or is it not easier to just accept that there are several different stats, Base Ability Accuracy, Buff ability accuracy and shrug off ability accuracy, and that some champions affect one of them, some affect all of them and some are immune to one of them.
Let’s use your line of thinking then. You still haven’t answered which ability accuracy can’t be decreased in Mysterio’s case. Say a player oblivious to this topic sees a fight in game and decides he’ll use Mysterio because his ability accuracy can’t be decreased. Now, tell me, how do we know 100% this player will be happy because Mysterio actually worked, or ops, it wasn’t the ability accuracy Mysterio’s ability actually worked for?
You may have missed it but I did answer which ability accuracy can't be decreased. I'll remind you that I think that when champions are immune to AAR or cannot have their ability accuracy reduced, it actually means that they cannot have their base ability accuracy reduced.
As a reminder, here is my theory "imagine that Ability Accuracy is a separate thing to buff ability accuracy, and instead it’s something called Base Ability Accuracy (I made up that name)
Imagine stat 1 and stat 2 respectively for base ability accuracy and buff ability accuracy .
Neutralise reduces stat 2 but not stat 1. So when neutralise is active, stat 2 decreases and they don’t get buffs anymore. When a champion cannot have ability accuracy reduced, or are immune to AAR they are immune to alterations in stat 1 (base ability accuracy). But neutralise only affects stat 2."
So you asked "which ability accuracy can’t be decreased in Mysterio’s case"
My answer from a few posts ago that you may have missed is this:
"The way that fits into my theory is that “ability accuracy cannot be decreased (or ability accuracy cannot be reduced)” is referring to what I think is stat 1, or base ability accuracy. So that aspect cannot be decreased, but his buff ability accuracy can be decreased. Because ability accuracy is not the same as buff ability accuracy."
There is no need to understand the technical implementation... the plain text of the descriptions, absent any other knowledge, is enough to resolve this issue...
You're welcome to the perspective that the text is nice and clear. But (and I'd like to be clear: I say this with every respect for the voice of reason and experience that you bring to the forums), is it not possible that the sheer extent of your gaming experience and your professional understanding of game design gives you a significantly biased perspective in this area?
We're on page three of this discussion. I would humbly suggest that the preceding 40 or 50 comments by fairly experienced players suggests that this interaction with Neutralise is not clear, and is going to be misunderstood by the vast majority of players who try to deal with opponents like Wiccan and Rintrah.
Very few experienced players are arguing mechanics. They are arguing intent. They want it work in a particular way, because they believe their interpretation of global intent should override mechanics. But I don't see experienced veteran players actually confused.
These things are not in dispute.
1. When the player has the Dexterity mastery, all of their champs possess an ability that will trigger a buff when dexterity itself is triggered.
2. Champs like SM2099 are immune to buffs that are attempted to be placed upon them.
3. Wiccan punishes attempts to place buffs that fail (due to AAR).
What people are arguing is yes, that happens, but it *shouldn't* happen because I'm supposed to be able to stomp on mystic champs with SM2099. Or they are arguing the slightly more technical "neutralize shouldn't cause buffs to fail that wouldn't have worked in the first place." But that's not confusion. That's arguing the mechanics aren't going my way.
It's a "cheat" imo. Neutralise as a mechanic needs to be neutered to not bypass buff immunity.
This mechanic was introduced not that long ago with Tigra and it would be better to tweak this specific mechanic than, as you say how mechanics interact in general.
For what it’s worth, my interpretation of this has always been that you have to imagine that Ability Accuracy is a separate thing to buff ability accuracy, and instead it’s something called Base Ability Accuracy (I made up that name)
It most definitely is. What we normally refer to as just "ability accuracy" is actually a champion stat. We just don't usually see it, and it is usually 100%. If you have an ability that has a 10% ability accuracy to trigger something, the true chance for that thing to trigger is the ability's ability accuracy multiplied by the champion's ability accuracy. So usually that's just 100% x whatever, and you get whatever. But when you lower a champion's ability accuracy, it is this champion stat that is being lowered. When you reduce it by 20% and it becomes 80%, you then have 80% x whatever. If the ability itself had 10% ability accuracy, the true chance is 80% x 10% = 8%.
Buff ability accuracy is a modifier specific to buffs. But the presumption has generally been that immune to ability accuracy reduction means immunity to all ability accuracy reductions. However, it if only means immunity to champion ability accuracy reduction and not immunity to all ability accuracy reductions, then that should be explicitly stated.
Ability accuracy has always been a little sketchy. Ironically, this particular situation under discussion is one of the few cases where an unusual circumstance is actually working as you would expect it to work given the mechanical descriptions. There are a lot of weird corner cases where things don't work as described, for (currently) unknown reasons. For example, Falcon can suppress Mordo's astral evade. On paper, that should not work, but we all know it does.
Exactly my interpretation.
The easiest solution here where you assume all interactions are working as intended, is to rename ability accuracy so that it’s ‘Base Ability Accuracy’, immunity to AAR should be renamed ‘Immunity to Base Ability Accuracy Reduction’ otherwise we’re gonna see Tigra, Rintrah, Apoc and Wiccan get a rather large hit to their uses. Or, their pro player uses.
Either that, or make all abilities that confer ability accuracy modification immunity affect all such modifications. Although I suspect that can't happen for technical reasons (it may prevent them from making special content that bypasses normal immunities for specific design reasons if they eliminate all escape hatches from any ability that says "this always happens with no exceptions ever.")
Unless it’s written “immune” in a champion’s info page, the ability in question shouldn’t function the way you are describing immunity should. As I wrote twice already, Mysterio’s ability is not an immunity, instead his ability accuracy cannot be decreased. Period.
If Mysterio's description was changed to say "immune to AAR" as he currently works in game - see callout of immune when anyone tries to reduce his AAR, see the fact that like other immune to AAR champs he can have his buffs ability accuracy reduced, and his tenacity chance reduced. That is to say, he works exactly like every other immune to AAR champ in the game, do you not think that it's likely that he is actually (as @AverageDesi said "It is in effect [immunity to AAR]") just immune to AAR?
What's the difference in functionality right now between Mysterio's "Ability accuracy cannot be reduced" and any other immune to AAR champion?
Wording is the difference, and that’s the entire point of this topic. If an ability is written using a specific set if words, we know it works in ‘x’ way. If it’s certain in a different set of way, we would then know it works in a ‘y’ way.
You can’t put two abilities together and say “in effect they are the same” because that’s not how game mechanics should work. If it is working like that, then it’s a big error in game development.
Oh I absolutely agree, that's why I've said that his wording should be changed. If he works exactly like every other immune to AAR champ, and kabam coded him as an immune to AAR champ then his description should match all other immune to AAR champs. These abilities need to be clearer, I've never been advocating that they're all perfectly clear. I've just been advocating my point of view and trying to explain how my theory helps make things make sense. If I am right, then I believe Kabam should change a heap of descriptions to make things clearer to understand.
I'm not saying Mysterio is 100% just an immune to AAR champ, I'm saying it looks that way because he interacts the exact same as all other immune to AAR champ. If that's the case, change his description.
For what it’s worth, my interpretation of this has always been that you have to imagine that Ability Accuracy is a separate thing to buff ability accuracy, and instead it’s something called Base Ability Accuracy (I made up that name)
It most definitely is. What we normally refer to as just "ability accuracy" is actually a champion stat. We just don't usually see it, and it is usually 100%. If you have an ability that has a 10% ability accuracy to trigger something, the true chance for that thing to trigger is the ability's ability accuracy multiplied by the champion's ability accuracy. So usually that's just 100% x whatever, and you get whatever. But when you lower a champion's ability accuracy, it is this champion stat that is being lowered. When you reduce it by 20% and it becomes 80%, you then have 80% x whatever. If the ability itself had 10% ability accuracy, the true chance is 80% x 10% = 8%.
Buff ability accuracy is a modifier specific to buffs. But the presumption has generally been that immune to ability accuracy reduction means immunity to all ability accuracy reductions. However, it if only means immunity to champion ability accuracy reduction and not immunity to all ability accuracy reductions, then that should be explicitly stated.
Ability accuracy has always been a little sketchy. Ironically, this particular situation under discussion is one of the few cases where an unusual circumstance is actually working as you would expect it to work given the mechanical descriptions. There are a lot of weird corner cases where things don't work as described, for (currently) unknown reasons. For example, Falcon can suppress Mordo's astral evade. On paper, that should not work, but we all know it does.
Exactly my interpretation.
The easiest solution here where you assume all interactions are working as intended, is to rename ability accuracy so that it’s ‘Base Ability Accuracy’, immunity to AAR should be renamed ‘Immunity to Base Ability Accuracy Reduction’ otherwise we’re gonna see Tigra, Rintrah, Apoc and Wiccan get a rather large hit to their uses. Or, their pro player uses.
Again, the wording in Mysterio’s abilities is not immunity to AAR, it’s “Mysterio’s ability accuracy can’t be decreased”. No mention whatsoever about immunity. So, is Mysterio’s ability accuracy being decreased by the neutralize debuff?
I mean, when you try and reduce mysterio’s with a concussion ability accuracy it says immune. I think it’s just a case of the descriptions not being clear and in reality he is actually just immune to AAR.
The way that fits into my theory is that “ability accuracy cannot be decreased” is referring to what I think is stat 1, or base ability accuracy. So that aspect cannot be decreased, but his buff ability accuracy can be decreased. Because ability accuracy is not the same as buff ability accuracy.
That makes zero sense. How can Kabam hope to explain that “ability accuracy is not the same as buff ability accuracy”? Do we a different layer of functionality in every ability accuracy for each game interaction? What about debuff ability accuracy? Passive ability accuracy? Contact ability accuracy? Which one can’t ever be decreased in Mysterio’s case?
Makes perfect sense in my view. How can Kabam hope to explain that ability accuracy is not the same as buff ability accuracy? I mean, you just did it right there. It's a pretty simple concept. If you can point to any such thing as debuff ability accuracy, passive, contact etc, then I'll address them. Until then, they clearly don't exist.
Again, if you want Mysterio to be immune to buff ability accuracy reduction you have to accept that Apoc will no longer be able to stop Immune to AAR champions shrug off, Tigra will no longer be able to work on Force of Will, Rintrah, Wiccan and everyone else in future with neutralise will no longer be able to work in all these places. Is that worth ripping up how the game works? Is that a pro player move?
Or is it not easier to just accept that there are several different stats, Base Ability Accuracy, Buff ability accuracy and shrug off ability accuracy, and that some champions affect one of them, some affect all of them and some are immune to one of them.
Let’s use your line of thinking then. You still haven’t answered which ability accuracy can’t be decreased in Mysterio’s case. Say a player oblivious to this topic sees a fight in game and decides he’ll use Mysterio because his ability accuracy can’t be decreased. Now, tell me, how do we know 100% this player will be happy because Mysterio actually worked, or ops, it wasn’t the ability accuracy Mysterio’s ability actually worked for?
You may have missed it but I did answer which ability accuracy can't be decreased. I'll remind you that I think that when champions are immune to AAR or cannot have their ability accuracy reduced, it actually means that they cannot have their base ability accuracy reduced.
As a reminder, here is my theory "imagine that Ability Accuracy is a separate thing to buff ability accuracy, and instead it’s something called Base Ability Accuracy (I made up that name)
Imagine stat 1 and stat 2 respectively for base ability accuracy and buff ability accuracy .
Neutralise reduces stat 2 but not stat 1. So when neutralise is active, stat 2 decreases and they don’t get buffs anymore. When a champion cannot have ability accuracy reduced, or are immune to AAR they are immune to alterations in stat 1 (base ability accuracy). But neutralise only affects stat 2."
So you asked "which ability accuracy can’t be decreased in Mysterio’s case"
My answer from a few posts ago that you may have missed is this:
"The way that fits into my theory is that “ability accuracy cannot be decreased (or ability accuracy cannot be reduced)” is referring to what I think is stat 1, or base ability accuracy. So that aspect cannot be decreased, but his buff ability accuracy can be decreased. Because ability accuracy is not the same as buff ability accuracy."
You’ll have to excuse me, but you still haven’t truly answered my question. How do you know 100% when is Mysterio ability accuracy not going to be decreased then? That’s what I want to know.
If the concept of “ability accuracy” on its own doesn’t encompass all the different ability accuracies you and I mentioned, and there is such thing as base ability accuracy, then what does it encompass?
If Mysterio isn’t supposed to work against neutralize, then why does he work against Domino?
For what it’s worth, my interpretation of this has always been that you have to imagine that Ability Accuracy is a separate thing to buff ability accuracy, and instead it’s something called Base Ability Accuracy (I made up that name)
It most definitely is. What we normally refer to as just "ability accuracy" is actually a champion stat. We just don't usually see it, and it is usually 100%. If you have an ability that has a 10% ability accuracy to trigger something, the true chance for that thing to trigger is the ability's ability accuracy multiplied by the champion's ability accuracy. So usually that's just 100% x whatever, and you get whatever. But when you lower a champion's ability accuracy, it is this champion stat that is being lowered. When you reduce it by 20% and it becomes 80%, you then have 80% x whatever. If the ability itself had 10% ability accuracy, the true chance is 80% x 10% = 8%.
Buff ability accuracy is a modifier specific to buffs. But the presumption has generally been that immune to ability accuracy reduction means immunity to all ability accuracy reductions. However, it if only means immunity to champion ability accuracy reduction and not immunity to all ability accuracy reductions, then that should be explicitly stated.
Ability accuracy has always been a little sketchy. Ironically, this particular situation under discussion is one of the few cases where an unusual circumstance is actually working as you would expect it to work given the mechanical descriptions. There are a lot of weird corner cases where things don't work as described, for (currently) unknown reasons. For example, Falcon can suppress Mordo's astral evade. On paper, that should not work, but we all know it does.
Exactly my interpretation.
The easiest solution here where you assume all interactions are working as intended, is to rename ability accuracy so that it’s ‘Base Ability Accuracy’, immunity to AAR should be renamed ‘Immunity to Base Ability Accuracy Reduction’ otherwise we’re gonna see Tigra, Rintrah, Apoc and Wiccan get a rather large hit to their uses. Or, their pro player uses.
Again, the wording in Mysterio’s abilities is not immunity to AAR, it’s “Mysterio’s ability accuracy can’t be decreased”. No mention whatsoever about immunity. So, is Mysterio’s ability accuracy being decreased by the neutralize debuff?
I mean, when you try and reduce mysterio’s with a concussion ability accuracy it says immune. I think it’s just a case of the descriptions not being clear and in reality he is actually just immune to AAR.
The way that fits into my theory is that “ability accuracy cannot be decreased” is referring to what I think is stat 1, or base ability accuracy. So that aspect cannot be decreased, but his buff ability accuracy can be decreased. Because ability accuracy is not the same as buff ability accuracy.
That makes zero sense. How can Kabam hope to explain that “ability accuracy is not the same as buff ability accuracy”? Do we a different layer of functionality in every ability accuracy for each game interaction? What about debuff ability accuracy? Passive ability accuracy? Contact ability accuracy? Which one can’t ever be decreased in Mysterio’s case?
Makes perfect sense in my view. How can Kabam hope to explain that ability accuracy is not the same as buff ability accuracy? I mean, you just did it right there. It's a pretty simple concept. If you can point to any such thing as debuff ability accuracy, passive, contact etc, then I'll address them. Until then, they clearly don't exist.
Again, if you want Mysterio to be immune to buff ability accuracy reduction you have to accept that Apoc will no longer be able to stop Immune to AAR champions shrug off, Tigra will no longer be able to work on Force of Will, Rintrah, Wiccan and everyone else in future with neutralise will no longer be able to work in all these places. Is that worth ripping up how the game works? Is that a pro player move?
Or is it not easier to just accept that there are several different stats, Base Ability Accuracy, Buff ability accuracy and shrug off ability accuracy, and that some champions affect one of them, some affect all of them and some are immune to one of them.
Let’s use your line of thinking then. You still haven’t answered which ability accuracy can’t be decreased in Mysterio’s case. Say a player oblivious to this topic sees a fight in game and decides he’ll use Mysterio because his ability accuracy can’t be decreased. Now, tell me, how do we know 100% this player will be happy because Mysterio actually worked, or ops, it wasn’t the ability accuracy Mysterio’s ability actually worked for?
You may have missed it but I did answer which ability accuracy can't be decreased. I'll remind you that I think that when champions are immune to AAR or cannot have their ability accuracy reduced, it actually means that they cannot have their base ability accuracy reduced.
As a reminder, here is my theory "imagine that Ability Accuracy is a separate thing to buff ability accuracy, and instead it’s something called Base Ability Accuracy (I made up that name)
Imagine stat 1 and stat 2 respectively for base ability accuracy and buff ability accuracy .
Neutralise reduces stat 2 but not stat 1. So when neutralise is active, stat 2 decreases and they don’t get buffs anymore. When a champion cannot have ability accuracy reduced, or are immune to AAR they are immune to alterations in stat 1 (base ability accuracy). But neutralise only affects stat 2."
So you asked "which ability accuracy can’t be decreased in Mysterio’s case"
My answer from a few posts ago that you may have missed is this:
"The way that fits into my theory is that “ability accuracy cannot be decreased (or ability accuracy cannot be reduced)” is referring to what I think is stat 1, or base ability accuracy. So that aspect cannot be decreased, but his buff ability accuracy can be decreased. Because ability accuracy is not the same as buff ability accuracy."
You’ll have to excuse me, but you still haven’t truly answered my question. How do you know 100% when is Mysterio ability accuracy not going to be decreased then? That’s what I want to know.
If the concept of “ability accuracy” on its own doesn’t encompass all the different ability accuracies you and I mentioned, and there is such thing as base ability accuracy, then what does it encompass?
If Mysterio isn’t supposed to work against neutralize, then why does he work against Domino?
I believe I have answered the question, but I can see I’m not being clear enough so I’ll try a different approach.
I’m saying that it when you see “ability accuracy” in mysterio’s abilities, it should actually say “base ability accuracy”, because what Mysterio is immune to is the stat 1 that I refer to in my post.
Mysterio is not immune to buff ability accuracy reduction. He is not immune to shrug off ability accuracy reduction. He is immune to ability accuracy reduction (which is a completely different stat than buff ability accuracy and shrug off ability accuracy, remember, add base in front of it if it helps you conceptualise it as a different stat). That’s why buffs can be prevented. And tenacity can be prevented.
Mysterio works against domino, because she tries to reduces his base ability accuracy, but he’s immune to it. If domino reduced buff ability accuracy then it would work, because Mysterio isn’t immune to that.
As for the question of what does base ability accuracy encompass, that’s a question that kabam would have to answer. And that’s why I agree with you and anyone else saying that it’s not clear enough, and should be explained in full so we know what’s going on in the game.
For what it’s worth, my interpretation of this has always been that you have to imagine that Ability Accuracy is a separate thing to buff ability accuracy, and instead it’s something called Base Ability Accuracy (I made up that name)
It most definitely is. What we normally refer to as just "ability accuracy" is actually a champion stat. We just don't usually see it, and it is usually 100%. If you have an ability that has a 10% ability accuracy to trigger something, the true chance for that thing to trigger is the ability's ability accuracy multiplied by the champion's ability accuracy. So usually that's just 100% x whatever, and you get whatever. But when you lower a champion's ability accuracy, it is this champion stat that is being lowered. When you reduce it by 20% and it becomes 80%, you then have 80% x whatever. If the ability itself had 10% ability accuracy, the true chance is 80% x 10% = 8%.
Buff ability accuracy is a modifier specific to buffs. But the presumption has generally been that immune to ability accuracy reduction means immunity to all ability accuracy reductions. However, it if only means immunity to champion ability accuracy reduction and not immunity to all ability accuracy reductions, then that should be explicitly stated.
Ability accuracy has always been a little sketchy. Ironically, this particular situation under discussion is one of the few cases where an unusual circumstance is actually working as you would expect it to work given the mechanical descriptions. There are a lot of weird corner cases where things don't work as described, for (currently) unknown reasons. For example, Falcon can suppress Mordo's astral evade. On paper, that should not work, but we all know it does.
Exactly my interpretation.
The easiest solution here where you assume all interactions are working as intended, is to rename ability accuracy so that it’s ‘Base Ability Accuracy’, immunity to AAR should be renamed ‘Immunity to Base Ability Accuracy Reduction’ otherwise we’re gonna see Tigra, Rintrah, Apoc and Wiccan get a rather large hit to their uses. Or, their pro player uses.
Again, the wording in Mysterio’s abilities is not immunity to AAR, it’s “Mysterio’s ability accuracy can’t be decreased”. No mention whatsoever about immunity. So, is Mysterio’s ability accuracy being decreased by the neutralize debuff?
I mean, when you try and reduce mysterio’s with a concussion ability accuracy it says immune. I think it’s just a case of the descriptions not being clear and in reality he is actually just immune to AAR.
The way that fits into my theory is that “ability accuracy cannot be decreased” is referring to what I think is stat 1, or base ability accuracy. So that aspect cannot be decreased, but his buff ability accuracy can be decreased. Because ability accuracy is not the same as buff ability accuracy.
That makes zero sense. How can Kabam hope to explain that “ability accuracy is not the same as buff ability accuracy”? Do we a different layer of functionality in every ability accuracy for each game interaction? What about debuff ability accuracy? Passive ability accuracy? Contact ability accuracy? Which one can’t ever be decreased in Mysterio’s case?
Makes perfect sense in my view. How can Kabam hope to explain that ability accuracy is not the same as buff ability accuracy? I mean, you just did it right there. It's a pretty simple concept. If you can point to any such thing as debuff ability accuracy, passive, contact etc, then I'll address them. Until then, they clearly don't exist.
Again, if you want Mysterio to be immune to buff ability accuracy reduction you have to accept that Apoc will no longer be able to stop Immune to AAR champions shrug off, Tigra will no longer be able to work on Force of Will, Rintrah, Wiccan and everyone else in future with neutralise will no longer be able to work in all these places. Is that worth ripping up how the game works? Is that a pro player move?
Or is it not easier to just accept that there are several different stats, Base Ability Accuracy, Buff ability accuracy and shrug off ability accuracy, and that some champions affect one of them, some affect all of them and some are immune to one of them.
Let’s use your line of thinking then. You still haven’t answered which ability accuracy can’t be decreased in Mysterio’s case. Say a player oblivious to this topic sees a fight in game and decides he’ll use Mysterio because his ability accuracy can’t be decreased. Now, tell me, how do we know 100% this player will be happy because Mysterio actually worked, or ops, it wasn’t the ability accuracy Mysterio’s ability actually worked for?
You may have missed it but I did answer which ability accuracy can't be decreased. I'll remind you that I think that when champions are immune to AAR or cannot have their ability accuracy reduced, it actually means that they cannot have their base ability accuracy reduced.
As a reminder, here is my theory "imagine that Ability Accuracy is a separate thing to buff ability accuracy, and instead it’s something called Base Ability Accuracy (I made up that name)
Imagine stat 1 and stat 2 respectively for base ability accuracy and buff ability accuracy .
Neutralise reduces stat 2 but not stat 1. So when neutralise is active, stat 2 decreases and they don’t get buffs anymore. When a champion cannot have ability accuracy reduced, or are immune to AAR they are immune to alterations in stat 1 (base ability accuracy). But neutralise only affects stat 2."
So you asked "which ability accuracy can’t be decreased in Mysterio’s case"
My answer from a few posts ago that you may have missed is this:
"The way that fits into my theory is that “ability accuracy cannot be decreased (or ability accuracy cannot be reduced)” is referring to what I think is stat 1, or base ability accuracy. So that aspect cannot be decreased, but his buff ability accuracy can be decreased. Because ability accuracy is not the same as buff ability accuracy."
You’ll have to excuse me, but you still haven’t truly answered my question. How do you know 100% when is Mysterio ability accuracy not going to be decreased then? That’s what I want to know.
If the concept of “ability accuracy” on its own doesn’t encompass all the different ability accuracies you and I mentioned, and there is such thing as base ability accuracy, then what does it encompass?
If Mysterio isn’t supposed to work against neutralize, then why does he work against Domino?
I believe I have answered the question, but I can see I’m not being clear enough so I’ll try a different approach.
I’m saying that it when you see “ability accuracy” in mysterio’s abilities, it should actually say “base ability accuracy”, because what Mysterio is immune to is the stat 1 that I refer to in my post.
Mysterio is not immune to buff ability accuracy reduction. He is not immune to shrug off ability accuracy reduction. He is immune to ability accuracy reduction (which is a completely different stat than buff ability accuracy and shrug off ability accuracy, remember, add base in front of it if it helps you conceptualise it as a different stat). That’s why buffs can be prevented. And tenacity can be prevented.
Mysterio works against domino, because she tries to reduces his base ability accuracy, but he’s immune to it. If domino reduced buff ability accuracy then it would work, because Mysterio isn’t immune to that.
As for the question of what does base ability accuracy encompass, that’s a question that kabam would have to answer. And that’s why I agree with you and anyone else saying that it’s not clear enough, and should be explained in full so we know what’s going on in the game.
Sorry man, but I strongly disagree with you there. For starters, Mysterio isn’t immune to AAR, his ability accuracy can’t be decreased. Now, if this is the same thing, then we already have big problem number 1 in the game mechanics.
When you explain what Domino does, you are saying Mysterio is allowed to gain a buff, even though Domino is trying to reduce his ability accuracy to gain said buff. For your explanation to work, the game sees Domino trying to interfere with Mysterio’s ability to gain a buff by reducing a non-buff ability accuracy stat (the so called base ability accuracy, that if truly a thing that exists, no one knows what is encompasses), which makes no sense. Why would there exist 2 different ways to interfere with the ability accuracy of gaining a buff (that for all intents and purposes have the same exact conclusion - buff failing to trigger), one like Wiccan’s and a second one like Domino’s?
For what it’s worth, my interpretation of this has always been that you have to imagine that Ability Accuracy is a separate thing to buff ability accuracy, and instead it’s something called Base Ability Accuracy (I made up that name)
It most definitely is. What we normally refer to as just "ability accuracy" is actually a champion stat. We just don't usually see it, and it is usually 100%. If you have an ability that has a 10% ability accuracy to trigger something, the true chance for that thing to trigger is the ability's ability accuracy multiplied by the champion's ability accuracy. So usually that's just 100% x whatever, and you get whatever. But when you lower a champion's ability accuracy, it is this champion stat that is being lowered. When you reduce it by 20% and it becomes 80%, you then have 80% x whatever. If the ability itself had 10% ability accuracy, the true chance is 80% x 10% = 8%.
Buff ability accuracy is a modifier specific to buffs. But the presumption has generally been that immune to ability accuracy reduction means immunity to all ability accuracy reductions. However, it if only means immunity to champion ability accuracy reduction and not immunity to all ability accuracy reductions, then that should be explicitly stated.
Ability accuracy has always been a little sketchy. Ironically, this particular situation under discussion is one of the few cases where an unusual circumstance is actually working as you would expect it to work given the mechanical descriptions. There are a lot of weird corner cases where things don't work as described, for (currently) unknown reasons. For example, Falcon can suppress Mordo's astral evade. On paper, that should not work, but we all know it does.
Exactly my interpretation.
The easiest solution here where you assume all interactions are working as intended, is to rename ability accuracy so that it’s ‘Base Ability Accuracy’, immunity to AAR should be renamed ‘Immunity to Base Ability Accuracy Reduction’ otherwise we’re gonna see Tigra, Rintrah, Apoc and Wiccan get a rather large hit to their uses. Or, their pro player uses.
Again, the wording in Mysterio’s abilities is not immunity to AAR, it’s “Mysterio’s ability accuracy can’t be decreased”. No mention whatsoever about immunity. So, is Mysterio’s ability accuracy being decreased by the neutralize debuff?
I mean, when you try and reduce mysterio’s with a concussion ability accuracy it says immune. I think it’s just a case of the descriptions not being clear and in reality he is actually just immune to AAR.
The way that fits into my theory is that “ability accuracy cannot be decreased” is referring to what I think is stat 1, or base ability accuracy. So that aspect cannot be decreased, but his buff ability accuracy can be decreased. Because ability accuracy is not the same as buff ability accuracy.
That makes zero sense. How can Kabam hope to explain that “ability accuracy is not the same as buff ability accuracy”? Do we a different layer of functionality in every ability accuracy for each game interaction? What about debuff ability accuracy? Passive ability accuracy? Contact ability accuracy? Which one can’t ever be decreased in Mysterio’s case?
Makes perfect sense in my view. How can Kabam hope to explain that ability accuracy is not the same as buff ability accuracy? I mean, you just did it right there. It's a pretty simple concept. If you can point to any such thing as debuff ability accuracy, passive, contact etc, then I'll address them. Until then, they clearly don't exist.
Again, if you want Mysterio to be immune to buff ability accuracy reduction you have to accept that Apoc will no longer be able to stop Immune to AAR champions shrug off, Tigra will no longer be able to work on Force of Will, Rintrah, Wiccan and everyone else in future with neutralise will no longer be able to work in all these places. Is that worth ripping up how the game works? Is that a pro player move?
Or is it not easier to just accept that there are several different stats, Base Ability Accuracy, Buff ability accuracy and shrug off ability accuracy, and that some champions affect one of them, some affect all of them and some are immune to one of them.
Let’s use your line of thinking then. You still haven’t answered which ability accuracy can’t be decreased in Mysterio’s case. Say a player oblivious to this topic sees a fight in game and decides he’ll use Mysterio because his ability accuracy can’t be decreased. Now, tell me, how do we know 100% this player will be happy because Mysterio actually worked, or ops, it wasn’t the ability accuracy Mysterio’s ability actually worked for?
You may have missed it but I did answer which ability accuracy can't be decreased. I'll remind you that I think that when champions are immune to AAR or cannot have their ability accuracy reduced, it actually means that they cannot have their base ability accuracy reduced.
As a reminder, here is my theory "imagine that Ability Accuracy is a separate thing to buff ability accuracy, and instead it’s something called Base Ability Accuracy (I made up that name)
Imagine stat 1 and stat 2 respectively for base ability accuracy and buff ability accuracy .
Neutralise reduces stat 2 but not stat 1. So when neutralise is active, stat 2 decreases and they don’t get buffs anymore. When a champion cannot have ability accuracy reduced, or are immune to AAR they are immune to alterations in stat 1 (base ability accuracy). But neutralise only affects stat 2."
So you asked "which ability accuracy can’t be decreased in Mysterio’s case"
My answer from a few posts ago that you may have missed is this:
"The way that fits into my theory is that “ability accuracy cannot be decreased (or ability accuracy cannot be reduced)” is referring to what I think is stat 1, or base ability accuracy. So that aspect cannot be decreased, but his buff ability accuracy can be decreased. Because ability accuracy is not the same as buff ability accuracy."
You’ll have to excuse me, but you still haven’t truly answered my question. How do you know 100% when is Mysterio ability accuracy not going to be decreased then? That’s what I want to know.
If the concept of “ability accuracy” on its own doesn’t encompass all the different ability accuracies you and I mentioned, and there is such thing as base ability accuracy, then what does it encompass?
If Mysterio isn’t supposed to work against neutralize, then why does he work against Domino?
I believe I have answered the question, but I can see I’m not being clear enough so I’ll try a different approach.
I’m saying that it when you see “ability accuracy” in mysterio’s abilities, it should actually say “base ability accuracy”, because what Mysterio is immune to is the stat 1 that I refer to in my post.
Mysterio is not immune to buff ability accuracy reduction. He is not immune to shrug off ability accuracy reduction. He is immune to ability accuracy reduction (which is a completely different stat than buff ability accuracy and shrug off ability accuracy, remember, add base in front of it if it helps you conceptualise it as a different stat). That’s why buffs can be prevented. And tenacity can be prevented.
Mysterio works against domino, because she tries to reduces his base ability accuracy, but he’s immune to it. If domino reduced buff ability accuracy then it would work, because Mysterio isn’t immune to that.
As for the question of what does base ability accuracy encompass, that’s a question that kabam would have to answer. And that’s why I agree with you and anyone else saying that it’s not clear enough, and should be explained in full so we know what’s going on in the game.
Sorry man, but I strongly disagree with you there. For starters, Mysterio isn’t immune to AAR, his ability accuracy can’t be decreased. Now, if this is the same thing, then we already have big problem number 1 in the game mechanics.
When you explain what Domino does, you are saying Mysterio is allowed to gain a buff, even though Domino is trying to reduce his ability accuracy to gain said buff. For your explanation to work, the game sees Domino trying to interfere with Mysterio’s ability to gain a buff by reducing a non-buff ability accuracy stat (the so called base ability accuracy, that if truly a thing that exists, no one knows what is encompasses), which makes no sense. Why would there exist 2 different ways to interfere with the ability accuracy of gaining a buff (that for all intents and purposes have the same exact conclusion - buff failing to trigger), one like Wiccan’s and a second one like Domino’s?
As I said before, this is all predicated on the assumption mysterio’s inability to have his ability accuracy decreased is the exact same as immunity to AAR, unless you have any examples of it acting differently in game?
I’m not really following what you’re saying about Domino if I’m honest.
As I’ve said before, it would be great if kabam confirmed how it worked. I’ve spoken about this quite a lot and I’m kinda mentally checking out a bit if I’m honest. I’ll probably just leave it with the request for Kabam to confirm how it works.
The buff triggered is being neutralized before immunity kicks in. But there is no buff to neutralize.
It's same thing if we compare this to Maschocism, putting a bleed on a bleed immune. Etc Conflictor: same thing, putting poison on poison immune. Etc
This is a misconception off what neutralize does. Neutralize does not remove buffs that exist. That’s what nullify does. Neutralize *prevents* buffs from coming into existence, by reducing their chance to exist. If neutralize takes effect, no buff exists to be “neutralized.” Neutralize is a prevention mechanism. Ability accuracy is the way it does it’s thing. Which is specifically what Wiccan is watching over. If a buff wants to come into existence but it fails because it fails its ability accuracy roll, Wiccan sees that and applies an incinerate.
To be really honest, I already had accepted this when I saw the thread. The way I structured my comment I already knew what interaction is taking place. And I had a strong feeling that it was not a bug according to cap murdocks early statement. It was coded taht way. I accept every step taken by kabam, good or bad. I can only disagree, but in the end it is what they want and I accept it anyway.
I was and still is against the word 'buff Immune'. And I would suggest they remove the word buff immunity from s99's basekit if it is not coded as real immunities. Like a bleed immune champ can never get a bleed, the same thing should be applied here too. Domino is failing Dex buff. Okay cool. It looks right. Domino doing domino things, she can do anything but she can never apply bleed to a bleed immune. The word immunity should not be used for s99. Immunities are absolute. This is not.
The buff triggered is being neutralized before immunity kicks in. But there is no buff to neutralize.
It's same thing if we compare this to Maschocism, putting a bleed on a bleed immune. Etc Conflictor: same thing, putting poison on poison immune. Etc
Same thing happens with Masochism. Masochism has a chance to apply a bleed debuff. It rolls this chance whether the target is bleed immune or not. If it fails, there’s no bleed effect. If it succeeds, there is a bleed effect. If the target is immune to bleed, then that bleed effect which came into existence is then blocked by that immunity.
I beg your pardon, but I don't understand this paragraph. Masochism don't apply debuffs it removes them from defender. It's a defender node. Does not effect attacker.
Since we are on masochism. The effect gives defender a hidden regen 'buff'. How it is coded I don't know, but morningstar copies that 5% regen and gains a 'buff' for herself. This is also a hidden description which is mentioned nowhere.
One more example where description does not align with the buff/debuff ability is Mystic Conditioning with it's hidden active debuff.
Next time someone comes on the forums questioning a champs abilities or interactions, lets not jump down their throats and pretend like everything is crystal clear ("just read the nodes" or "just read the champs abilities").
The mental gymnastics that people have to do to understand some of this is way over the top.
There is no need to understand the technical implementation... the plain text of the descriptions, absent any other knowledge, is enough to resolve this issue...
You're welcome to the perspective that the text is nice and clear. But (and I'd like to be clear: I say this with every respect for the voice of reason and experience that you bring to the forums), is it not possible that the sheer extent of your gaming experience and your professional understanding of game design gives you a significantly biased perspective in this area?
We're on page three of this discussion. I would humbly suggest that the preceding 40 or 50 comments by fairly experienced players suggests that this interaction with Neutralise is not clear, and is going to be misunderstood by the vast majority of players who try to deal with opponents like Wiccan and Rintrah.
Very few experienced players are arguing mechanics. They are arguing intent. They want it work in a particular way, because they believe their interpretation of global intent should override mechanics. But I don't see experienced veteran players actually confused.
These things are not in dispute.
1. When the player has the Dexterity mastery, all of their champs possess an ability that will trigger a buff when dexterity itself is triggered.
2. Champs like SM2099 are immune to buffs that are attempted to be placed upon them.
3. Wiccan punishes attempts to place buffs that fail (due to AAR).
What people are arguing is yes, that happens, but it *shouldn't* happen because I'm supposed to be able to stomp on mystic champs with SM2099. Or they are arguing the slightly more technical "neutralize shouldn't cause buffs to fail that wouldn't have worked in the first place." But that's not confusion. That's arguing the mechanics aren't going my way.
It's a "cheat" imo. Neutralise as a mechanic needs to be neutered to not bypass buff immunity.
This mechanic was introduced not that long ago with Tigra and it would be better to tweak this specific mechanic than, as you say how mechanics interact in general.
It is a cheat only because it doesn't do what you want it to do. Also, Neutralize does not bypass buff immunity. Neutralize does not in any way affect buff immunity. Nothing that is buff immune loses that immunity to buffs when Neutralize is present.
The buff triggered is being neutralized before immunity kicks in. But there is no buff to neutralize.
It's same thing if we compare this to Maschocism, putting a bleed on a bleed immune. Etc Conflictor: same thing, putting poison on poison immune. Etc
Same thing happens with Masochism. Masochism has a chance to apply a bleed debuff. It rolls this chance whether the target is bleed immune or not. If it fails, there’s no bleed effect. If it succeeds, there is a bleed effect. If the target is immune to bleed, then that bleed effect which came into existence is then blocked by that immunity.
I beg your pardon, but I don't understand this paragraph. Masochism don't apply debuffs it removes them from defender. It's a defender node. Does not effect attacker.
Since we are on masochism. The effect gives defender a hidden regen 'buff'. How it is coded I don't know, but morningstar copies that 5% regen and gains a 'buff' for herself. This is also a hidden description which is mentioned nowhere.
One more example where description does not align with the buff/debuff ability is Mystic Conditioning with it's hidden active debuff.
I misspoke while catching up on a lot of posts. Yes, Masochism removes debuffs that are triggered on the target. In fact, I'm not sure in what way masochism is relevant to the topic of Neutralize at all. Neutralize reduces buff ability accuracy. It prevents buffs from triggering. Masochism does not prevent debuffs from triggering. It removes debuffs that are actually triggered, as they are triggered.
Sorry man, but I strongly disagree with you there. For starters, Mysterio isn’t immune to AAR, his ability accuracy can’t be decreased. Now, if this is the same thing, then we already have big problem number 1 in the game mechanics.
Actually, this is true, to an extent. As far as I know, it has never been explained how Mysterio's "cannot be decreased" is implemented as an actual game mechanic. There is no such mechanic called "cannot be decreased." So we know that statement is colloquial. There are many such colloquial statements about game mechanics in the game, because it would be impossible to state them all with both precision and clarity.
There will always be the need to make reasonable assumptions about how the abilities in the game works, because the devs are never going to go the route of placing technical descriptions in the game. 99.99% of the players wouldn't understand such descriptions if they did. The important thing to note is that the "reasonable" interpretation has to be free from wishful thinking bias. If something is stated to be immune to buffs, the reasonable interpretation cannot be "he's immune to buffs because he's supposed to be my wonderful counter to everything that punishes everything that has anything to do with buffs period."
The game is run by a computer. The computer is told to execute a set of instructions based on the way the game engine is constructed. It isn't necessary for a player to understand how the engine works. but it *is* necessary to learn how game engines work in general if someone is going to tackle the question of how things "should be." When you see "cannnot be decreased:" you can take that at face value, with the awareness that your understanding is going to be simplified and incomplete and that's just life, or you can attempt to learn how game mechanics tend to work and realize you can't just tell the game engine "this thing cannot be decreased" without adding specific mechanics that the game engine can enforce to do that. It is likely going to be by some kind of immunity mechanic because that's just the algorithmic translation of immunity - you were going to use this to touch that, but if this flag is on then don't.
Maybe there's some weird downside protection mechanic that is only used for Mysterio, but I suspect it is more likely they are using some other more general mechanic and that's how it was written in the game. Because "cannnot be lowered" implies "can be increased" and a game mechanic where only positive value changes are allowed would be highly suspect to add to a game engine.
As I understand this interaction, it is working as described.
Neutralize does something very specific. It reduces the ability accuracy of buffs.
Immunity also does something very specific. It blocks effects from happening that otherwise would happen.
Now, when you dex with Red Guardian, the dexterity mastery gives him a 100% chance to gain a buff. When that buff triggers, it should place a buff effect on RG, but RG’s immunity blocks it. However, the buff still *triggered*. That’s important.
Wiccan does not care if a target is immune to buffs or not. He doesn’t care if the buff “wouldn’t have worked anyway”. His ability states if an ability fails *because of reduced ability accuracy* he applies his incinerate. If he neutralizes his opponent, buffs will start to fail to trigger because of reduced AA, and that includes the precision buff from Dexterity.
It doesn’t matter if the target is immune to buffs, nor should it matter. Champs like Red Guardian do not exist in a separate universe where buffs don’t exist. They still exist. Their immunity just blocks them. IF they are triggered in the first place.
Colossus is immune to bleed. That does not mean his ability magically rewrites opponents so their bleed abilities no longer exist. They still exist. They still trigger. And then his immunity block them. Dexterity still exists. It still can trigger buffs on *any* champ with Dexterity. *Some* champs have an immunity to those buffs. Which kicks in *if they trigger*. But immunity doesn’t magically prevent triggering.
I understand some people think immunity to buffs means they can pretend buffs just don’t exist for that champion. But that’s not how the game works, nor how it is described or implied to work. Immunity doesn’t rewrite the laws of physics of the game. Immunity blocks things that actually exist. It prevents them from taking effect. It doesn’t magically change history so they never happened. The game first decides if a buff comes into existence, and then decides if the target is immune to it.
If immunity prevented effects from even triggering, then champs Like Colossus could not gain benefits from his immunities preventing an effect. Because if immunity to bleed meant that all bleed effects just didn’t even attempt to be triggered, they would never exist for his immunity to protect him from.
I don't quite agree with this assessment though, Immunity SHOULD matter, because this isn't a case where a buff would fail due to reduced ability accuracy. It's failing because they're intrinsically immune to the buff - there is a zero percent change for the buff to trigger. Their ability accuracy wasn't reduced, because it's non-existent. If this isn't the case, then that's actually poor development. Same with if the precision from dex is something that can be brought to below 0.
Wiccan is neutralizing and reducing an ability accuracy that doesn't exist? That doesn't quite line up. Yeah, S99 and RG don't exist in a world where buffs don't exist - but they do exist in a game where there shouldn't be a negative ability accuracy for dexterity. If we were to give their AA% for dex to trigger, it would be 0%. So... what exactly is Wiccan (or anyone for that matter) reducing this to?
S99/RG dex back - trigger buff - it fails (due to reduced AA) - Wiccan applies incinerate..? Because he reduced their non-existent chance to gain a buff?
Also - notice how I said gain and not trigger? Because you ARE right in the sense that the buff would still trigger - however, due to their immunity it fails. So it fails because of THEIR immunity and intrinsic 0% ability accuracy. Not because of Wiccan or him reducing their Ability Accuracy.
Edit to add: This also brings into question what "the tree" looks like. Does Neutralize trump Immunity?
So let's say BWCV had a Neutralize and Buff-Immunity placed on someone (I know...it's a hypothetical) and they would trigger a buff. What stops the buff? In this case with Wiccan it seems like Neutralize "activates" first... which would explain the Wiccan interaction, but I stand by saying it shouldn't. Feels like an oversight tbh..
I don't quite agree with this assessment though, Immunity SHOULD matter, because this isn't a case where a buff would fail due to reduced ability accuracy. It's failing because they're intrinsically immune to the buff - there is a zero percent change for the buff to trigger. Their ability accuracy wasn't reduced, because it's non-existent. If this isn't the case, then that's actually poor development. Same with if the precision from dex is something that can be brought to below 0.
The way you’re describing ability accuracy would be broken everywhere in MCOC except in this one situation. If immunity to an effect meant all abilities designed to convey that effect simply disappeared or behaved as if they didn’t exist, many other things players rely upon would fail with no real way to fix them. I’ve mentioned them a couple times already.
The way it works here is pretty much the way I’ve seen it work in every game engine with comparable effects. This isn’t just a weird Kabam thing. It’s just how things ordinarily work. I could explain why, but I’m not sure the explanation would be meaningful to most people. It has to do with initiator-target semantics. Immunity is a property of the target. Triggering chance is a property of the initiator. So the natural way to implement is for initiator checks first, target checks second. Not coincidentally, this matches people’s intuitive notions of immunity most of the time in neutral settings. Bulletproof doesn’t mean no one shoots at you. It means when people shoot at you, the bullets don’t hurt you. That’s the conceptual basis for calling attribute modifier effect blocking “immunity”. Usually, but not always, a bool that’s quick for the engine to check.
Although thinking about it further, there might be a possibility that could work, although I’m not sure yet if it does what I think it should do.
Immunity *does not mean* zero ability accuracy, nor can we change the mechanics to make it mean that. That’s both nonsensical and problematic in the wide general case. But while we can’t change the mechanics, we might be able to change the champions. When someone says they expect a champ like SM2099 to have zero buff ability accuracy because they feel immunity should convey that behavior as well, nothing stops us from simply declaring that SM2099 and other similar champs have zero buff ability accuracy *as well as* buff immunity as a conceptual package. Buff immunity doesn’t mean zero buff AA, but SM2099 could simply have both. We could do this by setting the stat to zero somehow, or by adding a passive ability that confers -100% buff ability accuracy (and maybe buff AA modifier immunity). This would mean Dex would fail to produce a precision buff, and it would fail because buff AA was zero, but it would *not* fail because of reduced AA.
Would this make SM2099 and other buff immune champs avoid Wiccan’s incinerate? Not sure. It would depend on precisely how the game engine decides what “reduced ability accuracy” is. Reduced from what? This is an esoteric mechanical question. But I’m going to try to find out.
Also, whilst we're discussing Neutralise: it's always described as acting by reducing Ability Accuracy:
Well, several champions are meant to be immune to Ability Accuracy modification. Their abilities state that their Ability Accuracy can't be reduced: Mysterio Archangel Old Man Logan
And, predictably, whilst a player might have thought Wiccan's Neutralise would be a harmless source of Willpower for them, it seems to work on them normally. Is it supposed to?
Again, a casual player might well try to bypass Wiccan using one of the above champions; meeting the same results as trying to use Red Guardian or Spidey 2099, above.
By way of contrast, another Mystic ability, Soul Imprisonment also works by reducing Buff Ability Accuracy. As you can see, OML's Immunity to AAR works just fine against Mephisto's Soul Imprisonment:
So... Is it worth taking a look at Neutralise? And making a few pro-player adjustments to how it works? Or working on the description, at the very least.?
Ok this is what I don’t get, why does pro player only ever mean “what is pro player right now in this one situation”
If you changed neutralise to not work against immunity to AAR, you’re making Tigra, Rintrah and Wiccan not work against mysterio, old man Logan, archangel, force of will etc. How is that pro player? At the moment, neutralise works against force of will. Your pro player move would change that.
You’d also have to change Apoc’s reduction in tenacity, which is a reduction to shrug off ability accuracy. Do you think it’s a pro player move to make immune to AAR champs no longer be countered by Apoc? No more masochism counter against any champ immune to AAR. Can’t think of many pro player situations Apoc no longer working there would create.
You’ll get a lot of players thinking that’s a pretty anti-player move right there. Just so you don’t have 2 champions that it doesn’t work in favour of?
Well, ultimately I think the pro-player move is towards clarity and consistency.
Personally I do think that Neutralise shouldn't work against champions immune to AAR. Any champion (Tigra, Apoc, etc) made less effective on Attack by this will also be made less effective on defense; giving us more options when fighting them.
But my personal preference really isn't particularly important: consistency and predictability is important. These game mechanics need to not be a barrier to new players/non-forum users playing the game.
I'm the proud owner of a r3 Mephisto (hey, you do what you have to, for that TB rank-up, right?). He predates Neutralise by a long way, but his Soul Imprisonment ability is worded almost identically:
Now I've known for years that Mephisto's AAR to prevent buffs doesn't work on OML and the others. Since they're described as immune to AAR, I always accepted this as intentional.
With Neutralise defined as acting through AAR it's surely reasonable for me/us to think it would work the same way?
Sadly, in many ways the easiest solution to bring a lot of clarity to this is just a bit of text change:
If this infographic was just changed to: "Decreases buff ability accuracy by the stated amount. This effect bypasses Immunity to Ability Accuracy Reduction" that would clear up a lot of confusion.
It'd leave my boy Mephisto hanging out to dry, but at least it would be clear and consistent; and I'd accept it as a solution.
It still leaves the RG/SM2099 issue unresolved. Whilst both you and I understand the explanation we've been provided now, we didn't at the start of this thread.
Given that we're both reasonably intelligent people who are active in the forums, and have been playing the game for seven years apiece, I think that's good evidence that the Neutralise/Buff Immunity interaction is essentially unexpected and counter-intuitive; even if it's 'right'. For me, unexpected and counter-intuitive doesn't make for 'accessible' or 'enjoyable'.
But it is what it is. We've talked, we've raised the issue, we've offered solutions. The Kabam team can take from that what they will (or won't) in for time.
Although thinking about it further, there might be a possibility that could work, although I’m not sure yet if it does what I think it should do.
Immunity *does not mean* zero ability accuracy, nor can we change the mechanics to make it mean that. That’s both nonsensical and problematic in the wide general case. But while we can’t change the mechanics, we might be able to change the champions. When someone says they expect a champ like SM2099 to have zero buff ability accuracy because they feel immunity should convey that behavior as well, nothing stops us from simply declaring that SM2099 and other similar champs have zero buff ability accuracy *as well as* buff immunity as a conceptual package. Buff immunity doesn’t mean zero buff AA, but SM2099 could simply have both. We could do this by setting the stat to zero somehow, or by adding a passive ability that confers -100% buff ability accuracy (and maybe buff AA modifier immunity). This would mean Dex would fail to produce a precision buff, and it would fail because buff AA was zero, but it would *not* fail because of reduced AA.
Would this make SM2099 and other buff immune champs avoid Wiccan’s incinerate? Not sure. It would depend on precisely how the game engine decides what “reduced ability accuracy” is. Reduced from what? This is an esoteric mechanical question. But I’m going to try to find out.
Okay that made far more sense to me and I appreciate you talking it out.
I understand that my stance of 0% chance was flawed, I didn't really know how to explain what I was thinking from a game mechanics standpoint but with the combination of your two posts I do think you understood what I was trying to say.
As mentioned in my edit, I'm now even more certain that Kabam has Neutralize "trigger" first (or, at least before immunity) when it comes to negating a buff. Which does explain the Wiccan interaction, I'm just curious if it was intended or if it was an oversight and if intended, what the reasoning was.
I'm thinking of this like a stack - MTG, Yugioh, etc... Neutralize and Immunity (whether a characters inherent immunity or a debuff like BWCV) obviously have some kind of priority. It appears that Wiccan's is higher than S99/RG's immunity, causing his ability to trigger on them despite the fact that they wouldn't have actually gained a buff anyway.
Their buff was "triggered" but not "activated". It failed due to Wiccan's neutralize, because that has a higher priority than their Immunity - but that's not necessarily the same as him actually reducing their ability accuracy. Or at least, I don't think it should be.
I'm unsure if anyone answered my question before (couldn't find an answer) but does Tigra's neutralise/rupture interact the same way with both Red Guardian & SM 2099? Because if so then it's definitely coking from neutralise in general vs anything new in Wiccan's kit.
I'm unsure if anyone answered my question before (couldn't find an answer) but does Tigra's neutralise/rupture interact the same way with both Red Guardian & SM 2099? Because if so then it's definitely coking from neutralise in general vs anything new in Wiccan's kit.
I tested against my Tigra with my S-M 2099...
Yes. If Neutralise is active on S-M 2009, using the Dexterity Mastery will result in a Rupture. Otherwise, sometimes it just says "Immune"
So I do believe Neutralise is hijacking the buff before the immunity is applied.
I'm unsure if anyone answered my question before (couldn't find an answer) but does Tigra's neutralise/rupture interact the same way with both Red Guardian & SM 2099? Because if so then it's definitely coking from neutralise in general vs anything new in Wiccan's kit.
I tested against my Tigra with my S-M 2099...
Yes. If Neutralise is active on S-M 2009, using the Dexterity Mastery will result in a Rupture. Otherwise, sometimes it just says "Immune"
So I do believe Neutralise is hijacking the buff before the immunity is applied.
I thought so - I tried with RG after I posted and saw similar. So oe fo the newest mechanics is the issue not any specific champ.
I know people love Tigra (so do I with my 6r3) but I'd prefer personally if the neutralise mechanic worked differently, instead of bypassing class advantages that logically seem made to counter it, like that.
Although thinking about it further, there might be a possibility that could work, although I’m not sure yet if it does what I think it should do.
Immunity *does not mean* zero ability accuracy, nor can we change the mechanics to make it mean that. That’s both nonsensical and problematic in the wide general case. But while we can’t change the mechanics, we might be able to change the champions. When someone says they expect a champ like SM2099 to have zero buff ability accuracy because they feel immunity should convey that behavior as well, nothing stops us from simply declaring that SM2099 and other similar champs have zero buff ability accuracy *as well as* buff immunity as a conceptual package. Buff immunity doesn’t mean zero buff AA, but SM2099 could simply have both. We could do this by setting the stat to zero somehow, or by adding a passive ability that confers -100% buff ability accuracy (and maybe buff AA modifier immunity). This would mean Dex would fail to produce a precision buff, and it would fail because buff AA was zero, but it would *not* fail because of reduced AA.
Would this make SM2099 and other buff immune champs avoid Wiccan’s incinerate? Not sure. It would depend on precisely how the game engine decides what “reduced ability accuracy” is. Reduced from what? This is an esoteric mechanical question. But I’m going to try to find out.
So apparently this doesn't work. There was always a major problem with it, namely that as stated this would break SM2099 - SM2099 is designed to take advantage of buffs being prevented by immunity (such as to pause his debuffs) and preventing buffs from triggering would then negate this benefit. This is a fixable problem in theory, but would require a major overhaul of his kit to fix. (I say SM2099, but of course this problem extends to any buff immune champ with similar leveraging).
The fatal problem is this doesn't actually work. According to my technical source, "fails due to reduced ability accuracy" is (as far as they are aware) implemented relative to the ability itself. So for example, Dexterity has a chance to prroc a precision. That chance is 100%. So by default any random roll will cause success. So any attempt to fiddle with AA, by any means, will cause Dex to "fail due to reduced AA." The only way for Dex to not fail due to reduced AA is if the player received a version of Dex with zero AA. Then all rolls would normally fail, and thus none would fail due to reduced AA (it is a bit more complex than that, but this is good enough for this discussion). Doing this would also break his ability to leverage Dex buffs blocked by his immunity.
So changing the mechanics is a no-go. It breaks everything everywhere, and even with a magic wand fixing everything it wouldn't work the way people think it would. Changing the champs in this way doesn't work at all, and would be extremely messy even if it did work. That leaves two possibilities for addressing this issue, if it is determined this is an issue to address: make buff immune champions also immune to Neutralize, or redesign Dexterity to interact with buff immune champs in a way that produces the right behavior.
The former is the simpler one. However, it has potential future problems. Neutralize as an effect could and almost certainly will be used in future content or in war or quest nodes. When it does, being immune to it might not be a net benefit to buff immune champs. The alternative focuses the changes on the singular mastery Dexterity which is the only way players can add a buff ability to a champ that doesn't have one (as far as I know). However, the complexity required to make this work could potentially be comparable to redesigning several champs, because Dex would have to work with the kits of all buff immune champs in ways that don't compromise their own abilities. That seems to have too high of a complexity cost.
Which leaves Neutralize immunity as the primary option, with the understanding that in the future, being Neutralize immune is not always necessarily going to be a benefit (think of champs that reduce ability accuracy, which sounds like it should always be a benefit until you run into content where it is not).
(Edit: typo - originally I said the "latter" choice was the simpler, but obviously it is the former choice I meant to reference)
@DNA3000 interesting as ever! Thanks for having that conversation.
As for what should be done, (assuming Kabam decide they want to address it, as you said) I’m fine if Kabam want to make buff immune champions immune to neutralise, I think it makes sense and is probably the easiest way to solve what does seem on the surface a weird interaction.
I understand the logic of the current situation and think it makes complete sense when you think about it, but if Kabam wanted to change it that’s the way id say seems the easiest and makes the most sense.
As mentioned in my edit, I'm now even more certain that Kabam has Neutralize "trigger" first (or, at least before immunity) when it comes to negating a buff. Which does explain the Wiccan interaction, I'm just curious if it was intended or if it was an oversight and if intended, what the reasoning was.
Neutralize doesn't really trigger at all (at least, not in the way we're discussing). Neutralize is like a damage resistance effect. When you hit a target with damage resistance, the resistance doesn't "trigger" when you hit them. That's why ability accuracy reduction doesn't affect (passive) resistances. The resistance was "there first." Resistance is a stat, and when you have a resistance buff/passive/whatever that effect just increases that stat. It is a continuous thing that is always there, and when you hit the target the damage is calculated based on that target's resistance. Nothing "triggers" at that point.
When you apply a Neutralize debuff on a target, that Neutralize debuff reduces their Buff Ability Accuracy. That BAA is now just lower. Whenever an ability tries to proc a buff, the game first checks to see if that ability passes an ability accuracy check. It uses the ability's ability accuracy value, modified by the champion's own ability accuracy stats. One of them is Buff Ability Accuracy, which Neutralize has already lowered. Nothing is "happening now" it happened long ago, before the ability tried to do anything.
That's why Neutralize comes first. It isn't that it gets to go first. It is that it did what it was going to do already, and doesn't actually do anything at the instant of Buff procing (or not procing). It is an indirect effect. Neutralize doesn't stop buffs. Neutralize lowers buff ability accuracy. That (lower) buff ability accuracy is what makes the champion "incompetent" to trigger his own buffs, like a drunk guy staggering to fish his car keys out of his pocket. The kamikazes that did the damage did that damage hours ago. They aren't doing anything at that moment.
(Note: deep under the hood the game engine might be algorithmically calculating things in a slightly different way, but I'm avoiding that discussion because it would not contribute anything meaningful here.)
From what I understand from the explanation, “having a buff” and “gaining a buff” are separate interactions. S99 and Red can’t “have a buff” but they aren’t immune to the “gain” aspect. Like how S99 refreshes Debuffs whenever he would gain a buff, or RG gains shield charges when he would gain a buff. The neutralize is triggering off the “would gain” which is also why his debuff pausing won’t activate while he’s affected by it. I use S99 religiously so I wish the interaction here was different for sure, but to the best of my knowledge that’s kinda what’s going on.
- did a buff get prevented by his immunity? No, because the buff was actually prevented by the neutralise, he would never have gotten the buff to trigger his immunity. It doesn’t matter that he was immune, because that’s later on in the flow chart
But why should that be the order of precedence? The abilities of a specific champion are the only constant in any fight in which that champion is used, those abilities should hold water in any situation where similar, extra abilities are competing.
I guess what I'm asking is have there been similar instances/interactions in the past that would at the very least show this kind of prioritisation in action, or if it has been coded specifically to counter buff immunity and essentially reduce the effectiveness of these champions.
I have been feeling that my recent comments are leaning into what can be classified as conspiratorial, and that is unfortunate.
My guess is that this is simply a design decision to prioritize the “neutralize (Y/N)?” question before the “immune (Y/N)?” question.
It seems odd to me, but when asked whether SM2099 is immune to buffs, I suppose the design team would answer “it depends on what the definition of ‘immune’ is.”
I’m now taking a closer look at other champs with similar unique abilities (Guardian, CB) that don’t trigger but “would have” triggered to make sure I’m comfortable with those abilities being amended by technicality before I rank any further.
The game is riddled with cautionary tales of descriptions and interactions (and interpretations thereof) plucked from somewhere down the rabbit hole: Drax and Moleman are just the current bookends, and SM2099 may be in that group as well. Why I or anyone else comes to these forums looking for clarity after nearly 8 years can only be described as derangement—the answers, when they do come, are often as halting and cryptic as the utterances of some fickle Delphic oracle.
Dr. Zola
The logic here is that you cannot be immune to what is not applied.
A rather crude example. But let’s say you are immune to tennis balls. Whenever a tennis ball is thrown at you and hits your face, you lift your arm up and wave.
Normally, someone throws a tennis ball at your face, it hits you and you wave.
But here, someone called Neutralise holds a tennis racket in between the ball and your face.
The ball is thrown at you, it hits the tennis racket and it never hits your face. You never raise your arm and wave, because you never got hit.
The tennis ball is the buff attempted to trigger, the racket is neutralise, you are immune to buffs and you waving your arm is pausing the debuffs.
It’s the same theory here, the buff attempts to be triggered and trigger the immunity, but neutralise stops the buff from ever triggering, so how can it trigger the immunity if it’s never been triggered itself?
I’ll add my diagram in of what I sent you on Line to explain it, because I think it does a good job explaining the logic here.
Here is Spidey dexing normally
Here is when neutralise is applied.
I understand that and agree that’s how it seems to be working.
But I would counter that you shouldn’t be able to neutralize something that never occurs. It appears to be a design decision—whether intended or stumbled upon—and I disagree with the order of operations and the logic underlying it.
Dr. Zola
I think you’re misunderstanding how it works when you say “you shouldn’t be able to neutralise something that never occurs”.
The buff *does* occur, it just triggers an immunity and doesn’t activate on the champion. There’s an important distinction between what you’re saying “a buff immune champion never has buffs occurring” and what actually happens which is “a buff immune champion has buffs occurring, but they don’t actually stay on the character because they’re immune”
Like how when you use wolverine and apply a bleed to colossus, the bleed does occur but it triggers an immunity. If it never occurred, how would you get an immune call out?
It’s exactly what Cat said. “‘having a buff’ and ‘gaining a buff’ are separate interactions.”
Colossus can be subject to the “gaining a bleed debuff”, at which point he is immune to it so his immunity triggers. He is not subject to having a bleed debuff which is why it doesn’t ever get put on him.
“Prevent” is the operative term in SM99 description. What does the word mean if not “stop from occurring”?
Dr. Zola
Exactly what you think it means. But how does Spidey’s immunity prevent a buff that never got triggered?
How does a buff get neutralized if it was prevented from triggering in the first place?
We can go around and around here. The design team decided to shoehorn neutralize into the split second a hypothetical buff doesn’t happen. It is what it is.
I was part joking with @Cat_Murdock earlier, but the answer turns out to be as simple as “just ‘cus.”
Dr. Zola
I think the thing here is that you’re arguing here for what it *should* be in your opinion. And I’m arguing for what it actually is.
This is the way it’s turned out with how the game is coded, there are thousands of interactions in the game that could have gone either way and this game is what we’ve ended up with.
Why should it be the way you prefer? Both ways make equally logical sense, but you just prefer it your way. I get that, and from a player perspective I would prefer that too as a Spidey user. But unfortunately that’s not a good enough reason for how the game to work. There’s plenty of things I would prefer in the game, doesn’t make them illogical.
I’m not arguing “it should be this” or “it should be that”. You’re arguing that it’s illogical to be one way, but I strongly disagree.
Not exactly. You’re arguing for how it shows up in game, which is akin to the Moleman fracas. Either words mean something or they don’t, but if they don’t then don’t even release champ descriptions and just let us play with them to figure out how they work.
Your Colossus example: his immunity “protects” him from bleeds. Not same as “prevents.” Team should stop playing fast and loose with the way things are worded.
Dr. Zola
There's a difference between colloquialisms and actual descriptions. "Neutralize" has an in-game description. Neutralize doesn't "neutralize" things in some arbitrary colloquial way we can browse the dictionary to figure out. Neutralize explicitly is stated to be an effect that "decreases buff ability accuracy." That's what neutralize does.
So whatever you think "neutralize" should do based on Websters, it actually does that. As you say, words should mean something, and when the game provides an actual mechanical description of what an effect does, that description should be the operative one unless there's a specific reason to suspect it is in error. There's no reason to believe the description of neutralize is erroneous, so Neutralize does not act upon buffs that are there, Neutralize prevents buffs from triggering by lowering their ability accuracy.
The question was asked: why should neutralize have priority over immunity, or alternatively why should neutralize be checked before immunity? And the answer is, because of what neutralize does, it *must* be checked first. Immunity only applies to effects that are attempted. But ability accuracy determines if the attempt is made. There is no other way for those two things to resolve themselves. First the attempt must be made, and then second the attempt must be blocked by immunity if it exists. Immunity cannot proactively block things that haven't been attempted yet.
I recognize that some people have staked the opposite position either because they disagree or because they feel the situation is ambiguous and thus should be resolved in a favorable manner. However, the situation is not ambiguous, and isn't even arbitrary. As long as we understand immunity to block attempts and ability accuracy to decide when attempts are made, it is all but impossible to do it in any other order. It just is.
Been offline for most of the past day+, but here are my thoughts…
Sure—there’s logic behind that, albeit what I would call “coder in a vacuum” logic, but it’s still logic. I can accept that it’s hard for the design team to do it any other way, or that they’ve coded a bunch of different things similarly and it was easier that way or that they’ve started down this path and it would take far too much work to go back under the hood and make things function differently—especially since they don’t want another year-long game mechanics fiasco.
Neutralize doesn’t appear to be working consistently across several different cases, if some of the comments here are correct. I would assume the ways it operates in game (and the possibility there are various forms of AAR, whether they be base or buff or whatever) leads to several things being poorly understand by even the most experienced players. For a game rated 12+, that feels a little off.
For the pair of “buff immune” champs implicated, the only activating buff I am aware of (today) implicates the old bugaboo of dexterity + Precision, which has caused issues with other operations in the past. Game testing suggests removing Dex stops Wiccan’s incinerate from activating after a Neutralize debuff on SM99. If there is really a Mastery 2.0 in the pipeline, it should revisit why dodging an attack activates a Precision buff or at least provide a long overdue way to toggle Dex on/off without penalty. Alternatively, if adding the Precision buff is a coding crutch to make evasion “work,” then surely the game has some financial bandwidth after 8 years to de-crutch that code.
My friends @DNA3000 and @BitterSteel have demonstrated there is a kind of logic in how the Neutralize debuff works for the game’s two buff immune champs. They’ve worked very hard to convince me of that logic. In those two specific cases, even though it operates logically, I tend to believe the effect of an operation that penalizes upon checking to see whether a buff that cannot occur would have occurred creates a sense of the game being at best convoluted and at worst just plain cheap.
Buff immune champs are rare and should be afforded some special exceptions (much like champs who cannot crit, for example). Neither SM99 nor RG should take damage from Neutralize for asking whether they can proc buffs they cannot ever get because that question shouldn’t be *asked* by the game in the first place. Without understanding the coding difficulties, I’d suggest a carve out for those two champs or a complete overhaul of the Dex mastery if/when Mastery 2.0 arrives.
Although thinking about it further, there might be a possibility that could work, although I’m not sure yet if it does what I think it should do.
Immunity *does not mean* zero ability accuracy, nor can we change the mechanics to make it mean that. That’s both nonsensical and problematic in the wide general case. But while we can’t change the mechanics, we might be able to change the champions. When someone says they expect a champ like SM2099 to have zero buff ability accuracy because they feel immunity should convey that behavior as well, nothing stops us from simply declaring that SM2099 and other similar champs have zero buff ability accuracy *as well as* buff immunity as a conceptual package. Buff immunity doesn’t mean zero buff AA, but SM2099 could simply have both. We could do this by setting the stat to zero somehow, or by adding a passive ability that confers -100% buff ability accuracy (and maybe buff AA modifier immunity). This would mean Dex would fail to produce a precision buff, and it would fail because buff AA was zero, but it would *not* fail because of reduced AA.
Would this make SM2099 and other buff immune champs avoid Wiccan’s incinerate? Not sure. It would depend on precisely how the game engine decides what “reduced ability accuracy” is. Reduced from what? This is an esoteric mechanical question. But I’m going to try to find out.
So apparently this doesn't work. There was always a major problem with it, namely that as stated this would break SM2099 - SM2099 is designed to take advantage of buffs being prevented by immunity (such as to pause his debuffs) and preventing buffs from triggering would then negate this benefit. This is a fixable problem in theory, but would require a major overhaul of his kit to fix. (I say SM2099, but of course this problem extends to any buff immune champ with similar leveraging).
The fatal problem is this doesn't actually work. According to my technical source, "fails due to reduced ability accuracy" is (as far as they are aware) implemented relative to the ability itself. So for example, Dexterity has a chance to prroc a precision. That chance is 100%. So by default any random roll will cause success. So any attempt to fiddle with AA, by any means, will cause Dex to "fail due to reduced AA." The only way for Dex to not fail due to reduced AA is if the player received a version of Dex with zero AA. Then all rolls would normally fail, and thus none would fail due to reduced AA (it is a bit more complex than that, but this is good enough for this discussion). Doing this would also break his ability to leverage Dex buffs blocked by his immunity.
So changing the mechanics is a no-go. It breaks everything everywhere, and even with a magic wand fixing everything it wouldn't work the way people think it would. Changing the champs in this way doesn't work at all, and would be extremely messy even if it did work. That leaves two possibilities for addressing this issue, if it is determined this is an issue to address: make buff immune champions also immune to Neutralize, or redesign Dexterity to interact with buff immune champs in a way that produces the right behavior.
The former is the simpler one. However, it has potential future problems. Neutralize as an effect could and almost certainly will be used in future content or in war or quest nodes. When it does, being immune to it might not be a net benefit to buff immune champs. The alternative focuses the changes on the singular mastery Dexterity which is the only way players can add a buff ability to a champ that doesn't have one (as far as I know). However, the complexity required to make this work could potentially be comparable to redesigning several champs, because Dex would have to work with the kits of all buff immune champs in ways that don't compromise their own abilities. That seems to have too high of a complexity cost.
Which leaves Neutralize immunity as the primary option, with the understanding that in the future, being Neutralize immune is not always necessarily going to be a benefit (think of champs that reduce ability accuracy, which sounds like it should always be a benefit until you run into content where it is not).
(Edit: typo - originally I said the "latter" choice was the simpler, but obviously it is the former choice I meant to reference)
Of course I’m late to your comments, but I just saw this: do you recall why Precision was made part of Dex in the first place?
Although thinking about it further, there might be a possibility that could work, although I’m not sure yet if it does what I think it should do.
Immunity *does not mean* zero ability accuracy, nor can we change the mechanics to make it mean that. That’s both nonsensical and problematic in the wide general case. But while we can’t change the mechanics, we might be able to change the champions. When someone says they expect a champ like SM2099 to have zero buff ability accuracy because they feel immunity should convey that behavior as well, nothing stops us from simply declaring that SM2099 and other similar champs have zero buff ability accuracy *as well as* buff immunity as a conceptual package. Buff immunity doesn’t mean zero buff AA, but SM2099 could simply have both. We could do this by setting the stat to zero somehow, or by adding a passive ability that confers -100% buff ability accuracy (and maybe buff AA modifier immunity). This would mean Dex would fail to produce a precision buff, and it would fail because buff AA was zero, but it would *not* fail because of reduced AA.
Would this make SM2099 and other buff immune champs avoid Wiccan’s incinerate? Not sure. It would depend on precisely how the game engine decides what “reduced ability accuracy” is. Reduced from what? This is an esoteric mechanical question. But I’m going to try to find out.
So apparently this doesn't work. There was always a major problem with it, namely that as stated this would break SM2099 - SM2099 is designed to take advantage of buffs being prevented by immunity (such as to pause his debuffs) and preventing buffs from triggering would then negate this benefit. This is a fixable problem in theory, but would require a major overhaul of his kit to fix. (I say SM2099, but of course this problem extends to any buff immune champ with similar leveraging).
The fatal problem is this doesn't actually work. According to my technical source, "fails due to reduced ability accuracy" is (as far as they are aware) implemented relative to the ability itself. So for example, Dexterity has a chance to prroc a precision. That chance is 100%. So by default any random roll will cause success. So any attempt to fiddle with AA, by any means, will cause Dex to "fail due to reduced AA." The only way for Dex to not fail due to reduced AA is if the player received a version of Dex with zero AA. Then all rolls would normally fail, and thus none would fail due to reduced AA (it is a bit more complex than that, but this is good enough for this discussion). Doing this would also break his ability to leverage Dex buffs blocked by his immunity.
So changing the mechanics is a no-go. It breaks everything everywhere, and even with a magic wand fixing everything it wouldn't work the way people think it would. Changing the champs in this way doesn't work at all, and would be extremely messy even if it did work. That leaves two possibilities for addressing this issue, if it is determined this is an issue to address: make buff immune champions also immune to Neutralize, or redesign Dexterity to interact with buff immune champs in a way that produces the right behavior.
The former is the simpler one. However, it has potential future problems. Neutralize as an effect could and almost certainly will be used in future content or in war or quest nodes. When it does, being immune to it might not be a net benefit to buff immune champs. The alternative focuses the changes on the singular mastery Dexterity which is the only way players can add a buff ability to a champ that doesn't have one (as far as I know). However, the complexity required to make this work could potentially be comparable to redesigning several champs, because Dex would have to work with the kits of all buff immune champs in ways that don't compromise their own abilities. That seems to have too high of a complexity cost.
Which leaves Neutralize immunity as the primary option, with the understanding that in the future, being Neutralize immune is not always necessarily going to be a benefit (think of champs that reduce ability accuracy, which sounds like it should always be a benefit until you run into content where it is not).
(Edit: typo - originally I said the "latter" choice was the simpler, but obviously it is the former choice I meant to reference)
Of course I’m late to your comments, but I just saw this: do you recall why Precision was made part of Dex in the first place?
Dr. Zola
The Precision buff in Dex has come up as an issue since forever, because as far as I can recall it has been in there forever. I do not recall if there was ever an official explanation for its presence, but I have always assumed the idea conceptually was a less sophisticated version of what Elsa now does with more modern and complex mechanics. The precision buff was meant to allow players who evade an attack to then counterattack and punish the attacker with a critical hit. It is so firmly baked into the idea of Dexterity that we now have champs like SM2099 who explicitly rely upon that buff existing, even when they are immune to that buff's effects entirely.
Champs like SM2099 and Red Guardian seems to reflect the idea that the counter-attack benefit of Dexterity is so fundamental, champions that cannot benefit from it should probably benefit from it in some other way - as for most buff-immune champs, the most likely way they would have their buff immunity triggered is via Dexterity.
But even if we exclude buff immune champs, the precision buff in Dexterity has been there for so long, the entire game has been built upon it in lots of subtle and not so subtle ways that would hurt players if it was removed. For example, champions like Angela benefit from having more buffs, and the dex buff counts. Players have learned to leverage those kinds of interactions, which makes it all but impossible to remove without an Earth-shattering reason. If they wouldn't remove it when Dormammu arrived to eat that buff, I doubt they would remove it to soften Wiccan's impact on buff immune champs.
I do know the devs are aware of this interaction, and the fact that it is counter-intuitive to some players, and have been open to discussions surrounding the issue. I wouldn't expect immediate action (or necessarily any action) but they are considering the options that exist. Keeping in mind, one of those options is "keep it like it is" but there are other options. Some may be unpalatable for other reasons, some may require extensive technical work, neither of those things is entirely visible to me.
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Let’s use your line of thinking then. You still haven’t answered which ability accuracy can’t be decreased in Mysterio’s case. Say a player oblivious to this topic sees a fight in game and decides he’ll use Mysterio because his ability accuracy can’t be decreased. Now, tell me, how do we know 100% this player will be happy because Mysterio actually worked, or ops, it wasn’t the ability accuracy Mysterio’s ability actually worked for?
What's the difference in functionality right now between Mysterio's "Ability accuracy cannot be reduced" and any other immune to AAR champion?
As a reminder, here is my theory
"imagine that Ability Accuracy is a separate thing to buff ability accuracy, and instead it’s something called Base Ability Accuracy (I made up that name)
Imagine stat 1 and stat 2 respectively for base ability accuracy and buff ability accuracy .
Neutralise reduces stat 2 but not stat 1. So when neutralise is active, stat 2 decreases and they don’t get buffs anymore. When a champion cannot have ability accuracy reduced, or are immune to AAR they are immune to alterations in stat 1 (base ability accuracy). But neutralise only affects stat 2."
So you asked "which ability accuracy can’t be decreased in Mysterio’s case"
My answer from a few posts ago that you may have missed is this:
"The way that fits into my theory is that “ability accuracy cannot be decreased (or ability accuracy cannot be reduced)” is referring to what I think is stat 1, or base ability accuracy. So that aspect cannot be decreased, but his buff ability accuracy can be decreased. Because ability accuracy is not the same as buff ability accuracy."
This mechanic was introduced not that long ago with Tigra and it would be better to tweak this specific mechanic than, as you say how mechanics interact in general.
I'm not saying Mysterio is 100% just an immune to AAR champ, I'm saying it looks that way because he interacts the exact same as all other immune to AAR champ. If that's the case, change his description.
You’ll have to excuse me, but you still haven’t truly answered my question. How do you know 100% when is Mysterio ability accuracy not going to be decreased then? That’s what I want to know.
If the concept of “ability accuracy” on its own doesn’t encompass all the different ability accuracies you and I mentioned, and there is such thing as base ability accuracy, then what does it encompass?
If Mysterio isn’t supposed to work against neutralize, then why does he work against Domino?
I’m saying that it when you see “ability accuracy” in mysterio’s abilities, it should actually say “base ability accuracy”, because what Mysterio is immune to is the stat 1 that I refer to in my post.
Mysterio is not immune to buff ability accuracy reduction. He is not immune to shrug off ability accuracy reduction. He is immune to ability accuracy reduction (which is a completely different stat than buff ability accuracy and shrug off ability accuracy, remember, add base in front of it if it helps you conceptualise it as a different stat). That’s why buffs can be prevented. And tenacity can be prevented.
Mysterio works against domino, because she tries to reduces his base ability accuracy, but he’s immune to it. If domino reduced buff ability accuracy then it would work, because Mysterio isn’t immune to that.
As for the question of what does base ability accuracy encompass, that’s a question that kabam would have to answer. And that’s why I agree with you and anyone else saying that it’s not clear enough, and should be explained in full so we know what’s going on in the game.
Sorry man, but I strongly disagree with you there. For starters, Mysterio isn’t immune to AAR, his ability accuracy can’t be decreased. Now, if this is the same thing, then we already have big problem number 1 in the game mechanics.
When you explain what Domino does, you are saying Mysterio is allowed to gain a buff, even though Domino is trying to reduce his ability accuracy to gain said buff. For your explanation to work, the game sees Domino trying to interfere with Mysterio’s ability to gain a buff by reducing a non-buff ability accuracy stat (the so called base ability accuracy, that if truly a thing that exists, no one knows what is encompasses), which makes no sense. Why would there exist 2 different ways to interfere with the ability accuracy of gaining a buff (that for all intents and purposes have the same exact conclusion - buff failing to trigger), one like Wiccan’s and a second one like Domino’s?
I’m not really following what you’re saying about Domino if I’m honest.
As I’ve said before, it would be great if kabam confirmed how it worked. I’ve spoken about this quite a lot and I’m kinda mentally checking out a bit if I’m honest. I’ll probably just leave it with the request for Kabam to confirm how it works.
The way I structured my comment I already knew what interaction is taking place.
And I had a strong feeling that it was not a bug according to cap murdocks early statement.
It was coded taht way.
I accept every step taken by kabam, good or bad. I can only disagree, but in the end it is what they want and I accept it anyway.
I was and still is against the word 'buff Immune'. And I would suggest they remove the word buff immunity from s99's basekit if it is not coded as real immunities. Like a bleed immune champ can never get a bleed, the same thing should be applied here too.
Domino is failing Dex buff. Okay cool. It looks right. Domino doing domino things, she can do anything but she can never apply bleed to a bleed immune.
The word immunity should not be used for s99. Immunities are absolute. This is not. I beg your pardon, but I don't understand this paragraph.
Masochism don't apply debuffs it removes them from defender. It's a defender node. Does not effect attacker.
Since we are on masochism. The effect gives defender a hidden regen 'buff'. How it is coded I don't know, but morningstar copies that 5% regen and gains a 'buff' for herself. This is also a hidden description which is mentioned nowhere.
One more example where description does not align with the buff/debuff ability is Mystic Conditioning with it's hidden active debuff.
The mental gymnastics that people have to do to understand some of this is way over the top.
There will always be the need to make reasonable assumptions about how the abilities in the game works, because the devs are never going to go the route of placing technical descriptions in the game. 99.99% of the players wouldn't understand such descriptions if they did. The important thing to note is that the "reasonable" interpretation has to be free from wishful thinking bias. If something is stated to be immune to buffs, the reasonable interpretation cannot be "he's immune to buffs because he's supposed to be my wonderful counter to everything that punishes everything that has anything to do with buffs period."
The game is run by a computer. The computer is told to execute a set of instructions based on the way the game engine is constructed. It isn't necessary for a player to understand how the engine works. but it *is* necessary to learn how game engines work in general if someone is going to tackle the question of how things "should be." When you see "cannnot be decreased:" you can take that at face value, with the awareness that your understanding is going to be simplified and incomplete and that's just life, or you can attempt to learn how game mechanics tend to work and realize you can't just tell the game engine "this thing cannot be decreased" without adding specific mechanics that the game engine can enforce to do that. It is likely going to be by some kind of immunity mechanic because that's just the algorithmic translation of immunity - you were going to use this to touch that, but if this flag is on then don't.
Maybe there's some weird downside protection mechanic that is only used for Mysterio, but I suspect it is more likely they are using some other more general mechanic and that's how it was written in the game. Because "cannnot be lowered" implies "can be increased" and a game mechanic where only positive value changes are allowed would be highly suspect to add to a game engine.
Wiccan is neutralizing and reducing an ability accuracy that doesn't exist? That doesn't quite line up.
Yeah, S99 and RG don't exist in a world where buffs don't exist - but they do exist in a game where there shouldn't be a negative ability accuracy for dexterity. If we were to give their AA% for dex to trigger, it would be 0%. So... what exactly is Wiccan (or anyone for that matter) reducing this to?
S99/RG dex back - trigger buff - it fails (due to reduced AA) - Wiccan applies incinerate..? Because he reduced their non-existent chance to gain a buff?
Also - notice how I said gain and not trigger?
Because you ARE right in the sense that the buff would still trigger - however, due to their immunity it fails. So it fails because of THEIR immunity and intrinsic 0% ability accuracy. Not because of Wiccan or him reducing their Ability Accuracy.
Edit to add: This also brings into question what "the tree" looks like. Does Neutralize trump Immunity?
So let's say BWCV had a Neutralize and Buff-Immunity placed on someone (I know...it's a hypothetical) and they would trigger a buff. What stops the buff? In this case with Wiccan it seems like Neutralize "activates" first... which would explain the Wiccan interaction, but I stand by saying it shouldn't. Feels like an oversight tbh..
The way it works here is pretty much the way I’ve seen it work in every game engine with comparable effects. This isn’t just a weird Kabam thing. It’s just how things ordinarily work. I could explain why, but I’m not sure the explanation would be meaningful to most people. It has to do with initiator-target semantics. Immunity is a property of the target. Triggering chance is a property of the initiator. So the natural way to implement is for initiator checks first, target checks second. Not coincidentally, this matches people’s intuitive notions of immunity most of the time in neutral settings. Bulletproof doesn’t mean no one shoots at you. It means when people shoot at you, the bullets don’t hurt you. That’s the conceptual basis for calling attribute modifier effect blocking “immunity”. Usually, but not always, a bool that’s quick for the engine to check.
Immunity *does not mean* zero ability accuracy, nor can we change the mechanics to make it mean that. That’s both nonsensical and problematic in the wide general case. But while we can’t change the mechanics, we might be able to change the champions. When someone says they expect a champ like SM2099 to have zero buff ability accuracy because they feel immunity should convey that behavior as well, nothing stops us from simply declaring that SM2099 and other similar champs have zero buff ability accuracy *as well as* buff immunity as a conceptual package. Buff immunity doesn’t mean zero buff AA, but SM2099 could simply have both. We could do this by setting the stat to zero somehow, or by adding a passive ability that confers -100% buff ability accuracy (and maybe buff AA modifier immunity). This would mean Dex would fail to produce a precision buff, and it would fail because buff AA was zero, but it would *not* fail because of reduced AA.
Would this make SM2099 and other buff immune champs avoid Wiccan’s incinerate? Not sure. It would depend on precisely how the game engine decides what “reduced ability accuracy” is. Reduced from what? This is an esoteric mechanical question. But I’m going to try to find out.
Personally I do think that Neutralise shouldn't work against champions immune to AAR. Any champion (Tigra, Apoc, etc) made less effective on Attack by this will also be made less effective on defense; giving us more options when fighting them.
But my personal preference really isn't particularly important: consistency and predictability is important. These game mechanics need to not be a barrier to new players/non-forum users playing the game.
I'm the proud owner of a r3 Mephisto (hey, you do what you have to, for that TB rank-up, right?). He predates Neutralise by a long way, but his Soul Imprisonment ability is worded almost identically:
Now I've known for years that Mephisto's AAR to prevent buffs doesn't work on OML and the others. Since they're described as immune to AAR, I always accepted this as intentional.
With Neutralise defined as acting through AAR it's surely reasonable for me/us to think it would work the same way?
Sadly, in many ways the easiest solution to bring a lot of clarity to this is just a bit of text change:
If this infographic was just changed to: "Decreases buff ability accuracy by the stated amount. This effect bypasses Immunity to Ability Accuracy Reduction" that would clear up a lot of confusion.
It'd leave my boy Mephisto hanging out to dry, but at least it would be clear and consistent; and I'd accept it as a solution.
It still leaves the RG/SM2099 issue unresolved. Whilst both you and I understand the explanation we've been provided now, we didn't at the start of this thread.
Given that we're both reasonably intelligent people who are active in the forums, and have been playing the game for seven years apiece, I think that's good evidence that the Neutralise/Buff Immunity interaction is essentially unexpected and counter-intuitive; even if it's 'right'. For me, unexpected and counter-intuitive doesn't make for 'accessible' or 'enjoyable'.
But it is what it is. We've talked, we've raised the issue, we've offered solutions. The Kabam team can take from that what they will (or won't) in for time.
I understand that my stance of 0% chance was flawed, I didn't really know how to explain what I was thinking from a game mechanics standpoint but with the combination of your two posts I do think you understood what I was trying to say.
As mentioned in my edit, I'm now even more certain that Kabam has Neutralize "trigger" first (or, at least before immunity) when it comes to negating a buff. Which does explain the Wiccan interaction, I'm just curious if it was intended or if it was an oversight and if intended, what the reasoning was.
I'm thinking of this like a stack - MTG, Yugioh, etc...
Neutralize and Immunity (whether a characters inherent immunity or a debuff like BWCV) obviously have some kind of priority. It appears that Wiccan's is higher than S99/RG's immunity, causing his ability to trigger on them despite the fact that they wouldn't have actually gained a buff anyway.
Their buff was "triggered" but not "activated". It failed due to Wiccan's neutralize, because that has a higher priority than their Immunity - but that's not necessarily the same as him actually reducing their ability accuracy. Or at least, I don't think it should be.
It's actually an interesting interaction.
Yes. If Neutralise is active on S-M 2009, using the Dexterity Mastery will result in a Rupture. Otherwise, sometimes it just says "Immune"
So I do believe Neutralise is hijacking the buff before the immunity is applied.
I know people love Tigra (so do I with my 6r3) but I'd prefer personally if the neutralise mechanic worked differently, instead of bypassing class advantages that logically seem made to counter it, like that.
Anyway now we know.
The fatal problem is this doesn't actually work. According to my technical source, "fails due to reduced ability accuracy" is (as far as they are aware) implemented relative to the ability itself. So for example, Dexterity has a chance to prroc a precision. That chance is 100%. So by default any random roll will cause success. So any attempt to fiddle with AA, by any means, will cause Dex to "fail due to reduced AA." The only way for Dex to not fail due to reduced AA is if the player received a version of Dex with zero AA. Then all rolls would normally fail, and thus none would fail due to reduced AA (it is a bit more complex than that, but this is good enough for this discussion). Doing this would also break his ability to leverage Dex buffs blocked by his immunity.
So changing the mechanics is a no-go. It breaks everything everywhere, and even with a magic wand fixing everything it wouldn't work the way people think it would. Changing the champs in this way doesn't work at all, and would be extremely messy even if it did work. That leaves two possibilities for addressing this issue, if it is determined this is an issue to address: make buff immune champions also immune to Neutralize, or redesign Dexterity to interact with buff immune champs in a way that produces the right behavior.
The former is the simpler one. However, it has potential future problems. Neutralize as an effect could and almost certainly will be used in future content or in war or quest nodes. When it does, being immune to it might not be a net benefit to buff immune champs. The alternative focuses the changes on the singular mastery Dexterity which is the only way players can add a buff ability to a champ that doesn't have one (as far as I know). However, the complexity required to make this work could potentially be comparable to redesigning several champs, because Dex would have to work with the kits of all buff immune champs in ways that don't compromise their own abilities. That seems to have too high of a complexity cost.
Which leaves Neutralize immunity as the primary option, with the understanding that in the future, being Neutralize immune is not always necessarily going to be a benefit (think of champs that reduce ability accuracy, which sounds like it should always be a benefit until you run into content where it is not).
(Edit: typo - originally I said the "latter" choice was the simpler, but obviously it is the former choice I meant to reference)
As for what should be done, (assuming Kabam decide they want to address it, as you said) I’m fine if Kabam want to make buff immune champions immune to neutralise, I think it makes sense and is probably the easiest way to solve what does seem on the surface a weird interaction.
I understand the logic of the current situation and think it makes complete sense when you think about it, but if Kabam wanted to change it that’s the way id say seems the easiest and makes the most sense.
When you apply a Neutralize debuff on a target, that Neutralize debuff reduces their Buff Ability Accuracy. That BAA is now just lower. Whenever an ability tries to proc a buff, the game first checks to see if that ability passes an ability accuracy check. It uses the ability's ability accuracy value, modified by the champion's own ability accuracy stats. One of them is Buff Ability Accuracy, which Neutralize has already lowered. Nothing is "happening now" it happened long ago, before the ability tried to do anything.
That's why Neutralize comes first. It isn't that it gets to go first. It is that it did what it was going to do already, and doesn't actually do anything at the instant of Buff procing (or not procing). It is an indirect effect. Neutralize doesn't stop buffs. Neutralize lowers buff ability accuracy. That (lower) buff ability accuracy is what makes the champion "incompetent" to trigger his own buffs, like a drunk guy staggering to fish his car keys out of his pocket. The kamikazes that did the damage did that damage hours ago. They aren't doing anything at that moment.
(Note: deep under the hood the game engine might be algorithmically calculating things in a slightly different way, but I'm avoiding that discussion because it would not contribute anything meaningful here.)
Sure—there’s logic behind that, albeit what I would call “coder in a vacuum” logic, but it’s still logic. I can accept that it’s hard for the design team to do it any other way, or that they’ve coded a bunch of different things similarly and it was easier that way or that they’ve started down this path and it would take far too much work to go back under the hood and make things function differently—especially since they don’t want another year-long game mechanics fiasco.
Neutralize doesn’t appear to be working consistently across several different cases, if some of the comments here are correct. I would assume the ways it operates in game (and the possibility there are various forms of AAR, whether they be base or buff or whatever) leads to several things being poorly understand by even the most experienced players. For a game rated 12+, that feels a little off.
For the pair of “buff immune” champs implicated, the only activating buff I am aware of (today) implicates the old bugaboo of dexterity + Precision, which has caused issues with other operations in the past. Game testing suggests removing Dex stops Wiccan’s incinerate from activating after a Neutralize debuff on SM99. If there is really a Mastery 2.0 in the pipeline, it should revisit why dodging an attack activates a Precision buff or at least provide a long overdue way to toggle Dex on/off without penalty. Alternatively, if adding the Precision buff is a coding crutch to make evasion “work,” then surely the game has some financial bandwidth after 8 years to de-crutch that code.
My friends @DNA3000 and @BitterSteel have demonstrated there is a kind of logic in how the Neutralize debuff works for the game’s two buff immune champs. They’ve worked very hard to convince me of that logic. In those two specific cases, even though it operates logically, I tend to believe the effect of an operation that penalizes upon checking to see whether a buff that cannot occur would have occurred creates a sense of the game being at best convoluted and at worst just plain cheap.
Buff immune champs are rare and should be afforded some special exceptions (much like champs who cannot crit, for example). Neither SM99 nor RG should take damage from Neutralize for asking whether they can proc buffs they cannot ever get because that question shouldn’t be *asked* by the game in the first place. Without understanding the coding difficulties, I’d suggest a carve out for those two champs or a complete overhaul of the Dex mastery if/when Mastery 2.0 arrives.
Dr. Zola
Dr. Zola
Champs like SM2099 and Red Guardian seems to reflect the idea that the counter-attack benefit of Dexterity is so fundamental, champions that cannot benefit from it should probably benefit from it in some other way - as for most buff-immune champs, the most likely way they would have their buff immunity triggered is via Dexterity.
But even if we exclude buff immune champs, the precision buff in Dexterity has been there for so long, the entire game has been built upon it in lots of subtle and not so subtle ways that would hurt players if it was removed. For example, champions like Angela benefit from having more buffs, and the dex buff counts. Players have learned to leverage those kinds of interactions, which makes it all but impossible to remove without an Earth-shattering reason. If they wouldn't remove it when Dormammu arrived to eat that buff, I doubt they would remove it to soften Wiccan's impact on buff immune champs.
I do know the devs are aware of this interaction, and the fact that it is counter-intuitive to some players, and have been open to discussions surrounding the issue. I wouldn't expect immediate action (or necessarily any action) but they are considering the options that exist. Keeping in mind, one of those options is "keep it like it is" but there are other options. Some may be unpalatable for other reasons, some may require extensive technical work, neither of those things is entirely visible to me.