Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover

speedmaster
Posts: 18
Joined: Fri Jan 20, 2017 4:30 pm

Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover

Post by speedmaster »

Take a look at these: http://imgur.com/a/K70sW

Thinking the aim stats from the mod is bugged. Anyone know how to retrieve aim stats for aliens through a file? Yeah, yeah it's XCOM, but nah. I have 900 hours logged in XCOM 2 and it's happening frequently enough that I'm convinced it's buggy. Perfect information was bugged since LW2's release too so I'm inclined to believe its the mod.
Lyzak
Posts: 81
Joined: Thu May 18, 2017 5:01 pm

Re: Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover

Post by Lyzak »

I've noticed a disconcerting amount of the same - disoriented enemies (sometimes with red fog) hitting - and sometimes critting - and most certainly not grazing - their shots at XCOM through full cover, fairly consistently.

But I'll qualify this and say that I'm only a couple months into my 1.3 campaign and this is by no means an extensive sample size.
Jadiel
Posts: 214
Joined: Tue Jan 24, 2017 9:28 am

Re: Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover

Post by Jadiel »

speedmaster wrote:Take a look at these: http://imgur.com/a/K70sW

Thinking the aim stats from the mod is bugged. Anyone know how to retrieve aim stats for aliens through a file? Yeah, yeah it's XCOM, but nah. I have 900 hours logged in XCOM 2 and it's happening frequently enough that I'm convinced it's buggy. Perfect information was bugged since LW2's release too so I'm inclined to believe its the mod.
I could be that the mod hasn't been updated to the reduced penalties from Poison/Disorient, or it could be that you were unlucky and they grazed and then upgraded it to a hit.
JM01
Posts: 69
Joined: Fri Feb 10, 2017 2:29 pm

Re: Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover

Post by JM01 »

While the current mods that provide statistics of aim for a shot I am seeing an alarming amount of people starting to report the same thing and am starting to think that this isn't a fluke or bad luck. I have had multiple occasions where a flashbanged, SUPPRESSED and RED FOGGED officer is hitting units under full cover (at non marked targets), and it is happening in several back to back missions. A situation like that should put an officer's chance to hit below 5% and funny enough perfect information is displaying it correctly but they are hitting those way more often, and a lot of times for full damage with soldiers that have higher than 5 dodge which should make it almost impossible to even graze and hitting for full damage shouldn't even be possible.
Darahan
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Apr 14, 2017 2:36 pm

Re: Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover

Post by Darahan »

I do have experienced the same crazy shots where Advent hits almost impossible shots and even crits. I dont know if it's just bad luck but it made me curious (and ragequitting far too often).
Doctor Sticks
Posts: 68
Joined: Sun Mar 19, 2017 5:40 am

Re: Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover

Post by Doctor Sticks »

It is for that reason that I played my last campaign with Reliable Damage, to see the difference, and yes, not having to worry about missing a 90% flanking shot (or rather, being guaranteed to do enough damage for a kill anyways) is a huge load off my mind. Likewise, you don't have to worry about your top soldiers getting taken out by a cheap shot that had a 5% to hit, and ended up top-rolling a critical hit. These things might be rare, but they are usually devastating.

It is certainly possible in any mission to get destroyed by a streak of bad luck. A bad miss, followed by a lucky crit could result in a dead solider, can result in a squadwipe soon after. The truth is, Advent can afford some bad luck (and players tend not to take bad shots anyway), while the player can be horrifically punished if a few things in a row go wrong.

It is very much a house of cards.

I might go back to Reliable Damage, and just bump up the difficulty (I normally play on Veteran).
Swiftless
Posts: 59
Joined: Wed Apr 26, 2017 4:31 pm

Re: Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover

Post by Swiftless »

I've seen some entertaining shots where a couple of my soldiers have been hit for 5ish damage on a 17% chance to hit from a CC'd Advent. I have graze turned off though, so I have to be willing to say that even a 17% chance is still a chance to hit no matter the percentile. It does seem though like a lot of my soldiers are spending more time in the AWC with wounds than in previous iterations. However, that could be due to the patch changes that reduced CC aim penalties, particularly red fog.

It does bring up a question though. I was reading ufopaedia on dodge and it said the following:
Dodge is a new mechanic introduced in XCOM 2, it gives a chance to receive a "grazed" shot taking only a portion of the damage.
Which begs the question;if the graze band is turned off does it also render Dodge ineffective? It's been a while since I played consistently so I can't remember what vanilla dodge vs. LW2 dodge was like. One of the reasons I ask this is I have a Shinobi with a 37 dodge stat who's gotten hit a couple of times and it just felt a little weird. I'm willing to chalk it up to bad luck but I just wanted to double check and see if anyone knows the answer.
Lyzak
Posts: 81
Joined: Thu May 18, 2017 5:01 pm

Re: Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover

Post by Lyzak »

I think we're trying to figure out if "A lot of people having suspiciously 'bad luck'" in fact means more than "A lot of people having suspiciously 'bad luck.'" Certainly yes, ADVENT will take a lot more bad shots and therefore land more hits (than someone taking less shots, period). But it does make you wonder, especially when it seems that a lot of these "unfortunate incidents" revolve around impaired units taking REALLY bad shots. You wouldn't want a player feeling, "Oh, I shouldn't bother with Flashbangs, a disoriented officer is still gonna take a 5-10% pot shot and manage to hit for full damage through high cover."

But again. Small sample size, confirmation bias, who knows. If there is, in fact, some kind of "bug," it's gonna be a hell of a bug to hunt down... :?

Swiftless, Graze Band is independent of Dodge if I understand correctly.

From what I've read (someone feel free to jump in and tell me if I've got this wrong), shots calculate via:

1) You roll to hit, "graze" or miss. Graze occupies some fixed percent where hit and miss intersect. Ergo if I have a 50% chance to hit and graze band is set to 10%, I actually have a 45% (or 40%?) chance to hit, a 45% (or a 40%?) chance to miss, and a 10% (or a 20%?) chance to "graze."
2) You roll to CRIT. Crit promotes a graze to a hit, and a hit to a crit (but I don't believe affects misses)
3) Enemy rolls to DODGE. Dodge DEMOTES a crit to a hit, a hit to a graze, or a graze to a miss.

So therefore, if you turn the graze band off, you SHOULD still be able to dodge hits down to grazes.
Alketi
Posts: 159
Joined: Sat Jan 28, 2017 3:11 pm

Re: Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover

Post by Alketi »

There was a last minute bug-fix regarding disorient+suppression not working correctly (or something similar). It was visible in one of Xavier's videos last week. However, in that video, True Information showed hit percentages of 70-90%, proving that disorient+suppression wasn't being applied correctly.

However, here the reports are that people are getting hit with 5-10% shots after cover is taken into account. This should happen once every 10 or 20 shots on average, and could certainly happen more frequently in isolation and even consecutively.
trihero
Posts: 1099
Joined: Sun Jan 01, 2017 7:01 am

Re: Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover

Post by trihero »

It would be helpful if you guys collected impartial data on this, like recorded every shot's information without discarding things that might invalidate the hypothesis. I see a ton of unsubstantive words like
I am seeing an alarming amount of people starting to report the same thing and am starting to think that this isn't a fluke or bad luck.
or even the title itself
Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover
What does "frequently" and "alarming amount" mean? Personally, I can easily say that aliens frequently miss through full cover. How do you account for the ton of people who don't notice anything out of the ordinary? I'm not saying there's nothing wrong, but if there is something wrong it might help to provide repeatable, verifiable, unbiased evidence.
Lyzak
Posts: 81
Joined: Thu May 18, 2017 5:01 pm

Re: Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover

Post by Lyzak »

trihero wrote:It would be helpful if you guys collected impartial data on this [...]
Yup, yup. That's why I say "Confirmation bias," and why it'd be such a killer to truly figure out if it's a bug. Can you really imagine asking players to mark shot percentages for every ADVENT or alien attack? To get substantially damning data, you'd need a lot of people, a lot of data per person, and (ideally) identical play environments because, let's be honest, how the heck do you control for 200,000 players with 200,000 different configurations of mods? :lol:

I can personally tell you that I'm not going to be writing down every single shot ADVENT takes at me to compile it for statistical analysis. If only I had that kind of free time in my life right now. :roll:
Grendel13G
Posts: 7
Joined: Tue May 09, 2017 9:27 pm

Re: Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover

Post by Grendel13G »

One thing to consider is that in 1.3, flashbangs and suppression don't apply as much aim penalty as they did before. I do find myself getting hit a lot more by disoriented and suppressed enemies than I used to, which is really jarring, but that's likely my reptilian brain's fault, not the game's.

(Though ultimately I am hoping that there's something funny going on with the game, so that my reptilian brain will feel vindicated.)
trihero
Posts: 1099
Joined: Sun Jan 01, 2017 7:01 am

Re: Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover

Post by trihero »

Grendel13G wrote:One thing to consider is that in 1.3, flashbangs and suppression don't apply as much aim penalty as they did before. I do find myself getting hit a lot more by disoriented and suppressed enemies than I used to, which is really jarring, but that's likely my reptilian brain's fault, not the game's.

(Though ultimately I am hoping that there's something funny going on with the game, so that my reptilian brain will feel vindicated.)
Another thing to consider is we're actually fighting more, instead of stealth missions all the time. As the volume of fights increase, so do the number of claims of false patterns (like if you increase population size, you will get an increase in number of prank calls)
mattprice516
Long War 2 Crew
Posts: 265
Joined: Tue Jan 10, 2017 12:49 am

Re: Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover

Post by mattprice516 »

Lyzak wrote:1) You roll to hit, "graze" or miss. Graze occupies some fixed percent where hit and miss intersect. Ergo if I have a 50% chance to hit and graze band is set to 10%, I actually have a 45% (or 40%?) chance to hit, a 45% (or a 40%?) chance to miss, and a 10% (or a 20%?) chance to "graze."
2) You roll to CRIT. Crit promotes a graze to a hit, and a hit to a crit (but I don't believe affects misses)
3) Enemy rolls to DODGE. Dodge DEMOTES a crit to a hit, a hit to a graze, or a graze to a miss.

So therefore, if you turn the graze band off, you SHOULD still be able to dodge hits down to grazes.
This is correct. The graze band is two-sided, so with it set at 10% (the default setting) a nominally 50% hit shot will have 40% to hit, 20% to graze, and 40% to miss.


EDIT: Also, not gonna comment on whether or not there actually is a bug going on with to-hit (I don't have the data to know) but I would like to point out that even a series of events with a 1% chance of happening will happen to (on average) about 2000 players of LW2. I'd caution drawing conclusions from anecdotal evidence - by the very nature of this discussion people who have experienced unlikely things will be more likely to come here and comment.

Doesn't mean there isn't a bug. Just means that if there is, tracking it down will be much easier with saves demonstrating what should be impossible behavior (like an enemy with 5 hit chance and 0 crit chance getting a normal hit on an Xcom soldier with a positive dodge score).
Last edited by mattprice516 on Thu May 18, 2017 9:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
trihero
Posts: 1099
Joined: Sun Jan 01, 2017 7:01 am

Re: Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover

Post by trihero »

So therefore, if you turn the graze band off, you SHOULD still be able to dodge hits down to grazes.
There is one issue I saw that I have not been able to explain/reproduce:

1) I had graze band at 0
2) I flanked a MKI shieldbearer on my first network tower, who I *think* has zero dodge
3) a 96% chance to hit against it...grazed.

I was unable to explain it, and it actually happened 2 shots in a row. Either MKI shieldbearers have dodge and PI didn't show it (PI listed 0% dodge), or there's just something weirder going on.
Lyzak
Posts: 81
Joined: Thu May 18, 2017 5:01 pm

Re: Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover

Post by Lyzak »

mattprice516 wrote:This is correct. The graze band is two-sided, so with it set at 10% (the default setting) a nominally 50% hit shot will have 40% to hit, 20% to graze, and 40% to miss.
Gotcha. I did not know whether "10%" meant "override 10% of hits and override 10% of misses" or if it meant "graze 10% of the time, with 5% overriding hits and 5% overriding misses."

20% suddenly feels rather large, hahah. I think I should turn my graze band down. :lol:
mattprice516
Long War 2 Crew
Posts: 265
Joined: Tue Jan 10, 2017 12:49 am

Re: Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover

Post by mattprice516 »

trihero wrote:
So therefore, if you turn the graze band off, you SHOULD still be able to dodge hits down to grazes.
There is one issue I saw that I have not been able to explain/reproduce:

1) I had graze band at 0
2) I flanked a MKI shieldbearer on my first network tower, who I *think* has zero dodge
3) a 96% chance to hit against it...grazed.

I was unable to explain it, and it actually happened 2 shots in a row. Either MKI shieldbearers have dodge and PI didn't show it (PI listed 0% dodge), or there's just something weirder going on.
That is odd. I wonder if the graze band slider doesn't work quite correctly?
JM01
Posts: 69
Joined: Fri Feb 10, 2017 2:29 pm

Re: Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover

Post by JM01 »

Just played a bit more (around 2 missions) and the first one I didn't really see anything that stood out (then again I had the fortune of not really letting the enemy take any shots, I think they literally only took like 1 MAYBE 2 shots). The second mission...... two ~30% shots to my technical that was smoked and under half cover putting her in bleed out (sucks but well I expected it because XCOM). My Grenadier that was behind full cover who has 9 natural defense (so had a to hit of -54) was shot by a drone and killed because he only had one health...... by a shot with a 1% chance to hit (drones have a base aim of 55 so literally 1% chance to hit), ANNDD it wasn't even a graze. Had it been a graze it wouldn't have felt like such BS.

I'll keep playing and report if anything really bonkers happens but I have never had THIS much bad luck before (and I have had some pretty bad streaks). I just hope we can actually gather information that could prove whether or not there is an actual problem. I'm ok with it just being my imagination and wouldn't be on here if not for so many people reporting this. My friend playing is also reporting that he is seeing a lot of advent hitting low % shots.
Littlebob86
Posts: 14
Joined: Sun Apr 09, 2017 8:21 pm

Re: Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover

Post by Littlebob86 »

I had something similar that I posted on EU aim rolls, something like a 65 aim gunner, who was flasgbanged, according to perfect information had a 60% chance to hit
DaviBones
Posts: 75
Joined: Mon Apr 03, 2017 8:30 pm

Re: Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover

Post by DaviBones »

While we're on the subject of really bad luck, I once rolled 7 nine times in a row on two six-sided dice, which is approximately a 0.00000992% chance, or about 1 in 10 million.

There are so many humans now, it's not a question of if something incredibly unlikely is going to happen, it's a question of who it's going to happen to.

Not saying there's not a bug, but even if there is, these kinds of bugs are nearly impossible to track down because of the inherent difficulty of differentiating them from really, really weird luck.

For what it's worth, my campaign is doing fine :D although 1% shots grazing still send me into a rage :evil: but at the end of the day, it's still an 11% chance to happen, which is pretty good odds...
Jadiel
Posts: 214
Joined: Tue Jan 24, 2017 9:28 am

Re: Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover

Post by Jadiel »

Something to bear in mind when you're looking for anomalies is range bonuses - it's easy to forget that these apply to ADVENT also, and they benefit from the 1.3 buffs too. I've found a lot of players forget about them when calculating opponent's chance to hit.
JM01
Posts: 69
Joined: Fri Feb 10, 2017 2:29 pm

Re: Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover

Post by JM01 »

Jadiel wrote:Something to bear in mind when you're looking for anomalies is range bonuses - it's easy to forget that these apply to ADVENT also, and they benefit from the 1.3 buffs too. I've found a lot of players forget about them when calculating opponent's chance to hit.
Yep a lot of people do forget to do so and in those cases if I put myself in the situation where I am getting shot at by an enemy close enough for them to get a range bonus then I done fucked up and I deserve what happens. In my cases all the BS has occurred at far range.
DaviBones wrote:While we're on the subject of really bad luck, I once rolled 7 nine times in a row on two six-sided dice, which is approximately a 0.00000992% chance, or about 1 in 10 million.

There are so many humans now, it's not a question of if something incredibly unlikely is going to happen, it's a question of who it's going to happen to.

Not saying there's not a bug, but even if there is, these kinds of bugs are nearly impossible to track down because of the inherent difficulty of differentiating them from really, really weird luck.

For what it's worth, my campaign is doing fine :D although 1% shots grazing still send me into a rage :evil: but at the end of the day, it's still an 11% chance to happen, which is pretty good odds...
An it's fine that things like that happen "once in a while" like as in just about never and if it does happen to you once you can be pretty sure that it is likely never going to happen again. Advent hitting shots back to back with percentages that low happens too often. In fact I don't think that advent has ever had a higher chance than 55% to hit my soldiers lately as I have my soldiers in cover and I find a way to control as many advent as possible.

I really hope it's just me here and my bad luck streak ends but I've already had to restart 1.3 campaigns 4 times due to squad wipes being caused from the domino effect that resulted from advent getting these shots.
Garthor
Posts: 30
Joined: Wed Jan 25, 2017 7:56 pm

Re: Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover

Post by Garthor »

JM01 wrote:An it's fine that things like that happen "once in a while" like as in just about never and if it does happen to you once you can be pretty sure that it is likely never going to happen again.
Casinos would love you.
Severian
Posts: 28
Joined: Wed Feb 01, 2017 2:23 pm

Re: Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover

Post by Severian »

I'm wondering if this is simply a false reporting thing. I am using Perfect Information, and it tells me the Advent soldiers' aim and the chance that Advent had of making the shot. If this is giving a correct number, I agree with posters here that we are seeing too many successful shots. For example, a disorientated red-fogged officer with 45 aim should really not be shooting my gut through high cover (-40 from the cover never mind my guys innate defence and the graze band). However, could it be that PI is now presenting wrong information and the officer's aim is much higher for some LW2 reason?
justdont
Posts: 113
Joined: Wed Feb 15, 2017 2:36 pm

Re: Aliens hitting me frequently through full cover

Post by justdont »

I'd say that any talk about percentages not being reliable is very meaningless without sufficient sample data. Without it, words such as "frequently" or "alarmingly" mean nothing more than "personally I think it was too much".

PS: And for those interested - yes, you can easily collect sample data even without additional tools - you can use explosives (grenades, rockets, etc) which have a hidden effect of changing RNG seed. Or you can use "save scum" mod. Let some particular ADVENT take a shot at you 100 times without fixed RNG seed, and we'll be talking.
Post Reply