GameBanshee Forums

I'm playing a ranged thief at the moment and messing around with Time Trap. It seems an awesome ability, but I do wonder about one thing:

It is clear to me that I can attack as normal using my melee weapons for the duration of Time Stop, thus inflicting massive amounts of (backstab) damage with little risk, but... how do ranged attacks work during Time Stop?

They seem to fire alright, but do they ever hit? Do the arrows that are shot during Time Stop hit in the first round after Time Stop has ended, or are they simply "forgotten" by the engine? And if they hit, is there a cap to the number of ranged attacks kept in the game's memory?

If you hit pause right after the time trap stops working, and nothing else has hit the target, you should be able to see how many shots that got through? haven't tried it myself though..

I've now tested this quite extensively (I started to abuse it heavily on my F/M/T cheese character once I unlocked the 9nth spell level) and it's insane.

With a high number of attacks per round (Greater WW gives you 10 Attacks per Round), you can fire off a storm of arrows while you are Timestopped. They do not hit their targets, they just hang there in the air, just like spells that have been fired off during Time Stop. The moment the Time Stop ends, all of them go off simultaneously.

Now this is what I found: the number of attacks that can successfully "hit" their target in one round is hardcapped at 10 by the engine. But arrows have a travel time before they hit their target. If you move around slightly while firing off your arrows in Time Stop or pick different targets which are close to each other but not literally in the same space, you can give some of them a slightly longer traveling time. As a result, in the round immediately after a Time Stop, some arrows will hit, others are still in flight. In addition to that, the 10 arrows that hit can hit many different targets simultaneously if you want.

Now when you combine this effect with Arrows of Detonation, then it becomes really fun! (read: uber cheese)

[url='http://youtu.be/OOG3gJYvLRE']This YouTube video[/url] shows the effect of combining Time Trap with Arrows of Detonation. I've used an overpowered cheaty character to show it, but it could just as well be done by any F/T with access to enough Arrows of Detonation and a high ApR (through the fighter HLA Greater WW).

It can be done even better by a F/M/T with level cap removed (since they can just use the regular spell Time Stop and don't have to wait for an enemy to trigger a Time Trap).

Now to the obvious question that will be raised "Is this cheese / cheating / an exploit?" I would give the following answer:

Many people already abuse the same trick to great effect with melee attacks, more specifically backstabs. Because every physical attack is an automatic hit during Time Stop, a thief/mage with a way to repeatedly make himself invisible (Mislead or Potions of Invisibility) can backstab many times in a row during Time Stop. And contrary to my arrows of detonation trick, melee attacks hit without delay, so obviously you can pull off a much greater number of "hits" this way.

Long story short: Arrows of Detonation + Time Stop is UBER cheese, but not nearly as cheesy as other commonly known uses of Time Stop.