Distortion + Spirit of Failure

Distortion (Stance) You have a 75% chance to "Evade" attacks. Whenever you evade an attack this way, you lose 5..3 Energy or Mantra of Distortion ends. Updated: 1/11/05 10 None 45 sec.

Spirit of Failure (Hex Spell) For 30 seconds, target foe has a 25% chance to miss with attacks. You gain 1..4 Energy for each miss. Updated: 11/20/04 10 3 sec. 10 sec.

This is a wording question: If I "evade" an attack it essentially means that my opponent has "missed." However, does an evade from Distortion trigger a miss from Spirit of Failure?

A similar question was asked and discussed here. In general, the game seems to consider each miss chance seperately. Effectively, a 25% miss chance and a 50% miss chance are 75% or whatever the actual number would be (What? talk to Ensign isf you want math...) the same as if they were just added together but if there's an additional effect from one miss chance it doesn't affect the other. If the first miss chance stole 5 health and the second caused 13 damage, there wouldn't be a 75% chance to steal 5 health and do 13 damage whenever you were attacked, there'd be a 75% chance the attack would miss, 25% to steal 5 health, and 50% to do 13 damage. The game engine checks each miss chance seperately so that while you'll never see the difference in evading an attack you'll see it when it considers what else missing an attack means.

So, to answer your question, no, Distortion and SoF don't interact like that. You'll have a greater chance of an attack missing if you have Distortion and your opponent has SoF but a miss from SoF won't trigger Distortion and vice versa.

Please ignore Saus' math. That's a good rule to follow whenever you're reading things around here

He is correct, in that miss chances are checked sequentially, and effects are applied accordingly. A 50% miss chance followed by a 25% miss chance will actually be a 62.5% chance to miss overall, but the effect applied on a miss depends on which calculation the miss actually occured.

I'm not sure if miss calculations are done FiFo or LiFo. Some other nice tester who's checked it out in a bit more detail could probably tell you that.

Oh, you'll pay for that Pharalon... Tempt ye not those who wield the banhammer by calling attention to their lack of mathematical prowess...

According to Freyas it's the last hex that's first considered. So, 50% damage followed by a 25% steal would be a 25% steal with a 37.5% chance of damage (which is probably the wrong figure, too, thank you very much) while the reverse would be 50% damage with a 12.5% chance of a steal. Either way, it's still the same 62.5% miss rate. That's LIFO, just like enchantment and hex removal, which would make sense to me, but you never know.

Id like to make this even more confusing by point out that LIFO or FIFO may not mater in this specific case. Since it may calculate all the enemies hex's that cause them to miss then calculate his chance to miss because of effect on you no matter what order they are cast in.

Order is actually very important, because while it doesn't effect the overall chance to miss, it does effect the chance of each effect triggering.

The first effect checked will have it's stated chance of triggering, but each effect after that will have a reduced chance of triggering, relative to the case where it is the only source of %chance to miss, due to the fact that a reduced percentage of attacks are actually getting through to it. So you want to try and get your best effect to be the first checked.

Actually ... it doesn't matter what the 'source' of the miss is. If a miss occurs, it will trigger any effect that is triggered by a miss. The easiest way to check this is to use Price of Failure (deals damage to the target if a miss occurs) along with Spirit of Failure or Distortion (you gain energy). Both end effects have visuals (when you gain energy blue sparkles appear around your character; when damage is dealt a green effect surrounds the target), and both visual effects are triggered when a miss occurs while the target is affected by both spells.

quite interesting discussion - but can you clearify things a bit for me ?
i understand the combined probability calculation of "chance for miss with several hex".
But on the effect side it is not that obvious for me.

GW goes through the hexes A,B,C by LiFo;
assume a miss occures by probability calc of hex B.

Pharalon mentions that only hex B will get its complete effects. A and C won't score or will have their effects reduced. ( How much ? )

GhostRaptor has seen Hex A, B in action concurrent - which would mean a miss means a miss and all hexes with trigger on that event show effect.

Did i get something wrong ?

PS: i am not talking about "blind", which is a condition and is treated in a special way.

So if Distortion causes the miss and Spirit of Failure was casted first, then Spirit of Failure will trigger. But, if SoF was casted second then it will not trigger if Distortion causes the miss? And yes, I'm confused, heh.

The strange thing is that I've noticed some inconsistancies with how these trigger. For instance, I've used both Spirit of Failure and Blind, and only gotten the enegy bonus from SoF very rarely. However, using Price of Failure with Blind seems to trigger Price of Failure every time. In the case of Spirit of Failure and Distortion, I'm quite certain that evades from distortion will not trigger SoF(as I can't test it out and report back due to the NDA), simply because distortion "evades" while SoF triggers on "miss". As there are skills that differentiate between the different types of evasion(swift chop, etc), I'm pretty sure that things that trigger off of a "miss" won't trigger off of an "evade", and vice versa.

This is something we might want to look into testing out during the BWE, though- it does make a difference for many strategies.


edit: didn't see previous post

Actually, looking at SoF and Distortion again, you should get your SoF bonus 25% of the time- the reason being that SoF causes a "miss", which I think is taken into effect before evasion- if they don't hit you, there's no need to evade. If they are taken into effect at the same time, however, if I am not mistaken, casting SoF then Distortion will give a 75% evade rate with Distortion first, and then on the 25% of attacks that get through Distortion, you'll have the 25% miss chance- giving you a 6.3% of gaining your energy.

Ok i didnt think it was possible to have two effects trigger off the same miss? i thought if one affect happend then none of the others would trigger. Is this only the case for blind since socke stated it was treated diffrently?