I played a game that had ricocheting bullets once.

In it, the bullets hit other enemies instead of hitting the same enemy over and over.

I know! It's crazy! But I truly believe it's possible for alchemers to be like those guns, as well. In fact, if you gave me the source code, I could probably achieve it by a handful lines of code.

I'm sorry.

It was ridiculous to suggest that a ricochet gun be modified so that, in order to be used optimally, must be performed ricochets with.

Other weapons being unbalanced does not excuse alchemer from being unbalanced.

Alchemers should have built in hit limits as long as Shard Bombs do. JUST SAYING

The problem here is that they ricochet to one side, and randomly at that.
It MUST be a bug.

I would suggest that they make the ricochets bounce away from the first struck enemy and ricochet towards the nearest enemy in that arc.
The ricochets could get weaker with distance to account for the increased hit rate of the ricochets.

Another way to go about it could be to make the ricochets split into half-damage bullets which fly backwards and diagonally, and then backwards again on the second bounce. It would make them more predictable and not the random lopsided mess they are now.

@Krakob:
"Does it" vs "should it" ;P

I don't have DR so I can't test it.

@"it must be a bug":
Funny enough, while coming up with an example for Kesari on what kind of behavior would have been a 'bug' vs 'intended', I have a feeling I understand why they went with the behavior they did lolll

As you guys may or may not have noticed, all the movement in SK can really be done on a flat 2d grid (you'll never have an overhead bridge). Let's say you have a bullet that hits a wall: you have an idea of the angle of the wall so you can do simple calculations to make it 'reflect' off the wall.

But what about entities on the field? If it were a fully 3d game, then yeah, I guess you could do something like raycast to the model and actually use the models and polygons as part of the actual reflection calculations. But it's not; we're actually playing a 2D game with 3D graphics. At most, the effect of height that I've seen is when a projectile hits a slope.

I have no idea how they determined 'hitboxes' for non-static entities (monsters, bushes, boxes) - do they have custom shapes (polygons), or are they just large circles/rectangles? They would have to do math that takes into account angles for walls and each of these entities (a lot of special cases).

...but with the current behavior ("left ricochet"), you don't need to care about the relative angles: just say "Oh, it overlapped [at all]? Well, let's spawn another bullet relative to its old angle". It's waaaaay simpler. But wait, it's always the same angle? Let's throw in a twist and do something like:

> when parent bullet overlaps:
> make a new bullet of the same type
> new bullet's angle is: parent's angle + random(90);

And bam, you have simple logic that skips the heavy math in favor of really simple logic (why deal with all the polygons when you can just... not deal with them LOL), and isn't 'boring' (wow, random chance!).

tl;dr version:
lazy programming, and it worked lo0l.

Who said they were intended to be real 'ricochets' in the first place?

Since we're running into suggestion territory here, I'd actually prefer if the alchemers had a non-random behavior, even if it was 'exploity': for example if the ricochets were consistently 45 degrees from the original shot trajectory, you could use walls to do intentional (rather than lucky) trick shots.

A lot of the 'exploity' mechanics are what give the flavor of depth to the game (some of these were intended, others weren't):
- Shield cancelling attack animations
- Shield cancelling a slash1 then doing a slash1-slash3 combo
- Manual reload/timer cancel via weapon switch
- Old shard bombs' multiple hits for massive damage
- Alchemer double ricochet
- Catalyzer double charge tagging (2 charges for one shot!)

This game would feel so terribly shallow if all these mechanics were 'fixed' :\

Volcanic pepper box included.

If any weapon hits more than 2 times in 1 second, all consecutive hits should be nullified.

I have a brilliant idea
Let's put hit limits on DVS!

It's actually just the same gun general mechanic as any other guns. I bet devs are not thinking hard about alchemers as this post suggests. Bullet meets object or reach max range -> bullet disappears -> explosion appears (which few exception on which explosion does not appear at bullet disappearance location like pulsar pre-fix where there is gap between small and expanded bullets that sometimes monster "dodge" it, also antigua with a bit randomized place that you can't break boxes even it's a straight shoot)

Bullet itself does not do any damage, the explosion does. There's some delay between bullet to explosion animation, hence you see a bunch of bullets from volcanic pepperbox charge just disappear without any damage. Alchemer ricochets just re-appear to where the explosion happened. The fix should be about ricochet/charge bullet explosion being able the recognize the object position and appears based on object location.

Some? I think most of them is not latency issue. Try volcanic pepperbox charge on two conditions, monster (that can be knock back easily) being pinched in a wall or just roam freely, also antigua on ghost (blue) blocks.
http://youtu.be/yU9PfoTWZkY?t=1m8s <- if it's latency, could you explain to me why the blue blocks is not hit on first two shot? I did those shots without changing the angle.

from shooting an alchemer at a wall, it's pretty easy to see that gun shooting is clientside.

With fairly heavy latency, you can shoot, and the bullet will appear and hit the wall almost immediately, as if you had no latency at all. However, it will take a moment for the ricochet bullet to appear, which is where the latency comes in. the second ricochet bullet appears immediately when the first ricochet hits a wall. From this we can tell that the initial shot is clientside but both of the ricochets are serverside.

I've had it before where I've planted a charge shot onto the side of an enemy, and it explodes clientside, but a moment later the child bullets appear behind the enemy and it takes no damage. Initial shots from guns are certainly clientside, which is wonderful for appearance, but really messes up your leading since you can't actually see where your bullets are going on the server.

getting internal ricochet charges are extremely fun because they do lots of damage, but you can't fire them that often.

But wait, isn't that what Iron Slug and Callahan are meant to do???
Don't be silly. they're just there to look pretty alongside all the other guardian gear, while Izola is running out of volcanic plate shield recipes.

Seriously, I don't see what the problem is for making iron slug and callahan do hilarious amounts of damage. It's perfectly possible with alchemers, but I still don't see people using them that much either.

@Poopsie:
Actually, I had the pulsar thing in mind when talking about latency, but after reading your post again, I misread which bug you were talking about. Sorry.

You can clearly see that the damage is explosion based from a lot of places in the game:
- Alchemer only explodes on contact, so it can't kill grass, but most other guns can if you make the bullet die on top of the grass.
- Catalyzer 'chain' detonation only happens if the rotating bullet is in range of a previous explosion (aka almost never).
- If an enemy tags you with a Catalyzer in Lockdown and you have one, you can dash to where the bullet will explode and you can blow yourself up.
- If you shoot a Callahan diagonally into a group of boxes, sometimes, you can destroy the inner block of the group without destroying the blocks in front of it, because the explosion happens a little past the contact location.

So no, I'm not disputing the explosion-based damage nor talking about how moving away from a point of contact can make a bullet explosion deal no damage.

I was talking more about things like this, where what you see in your side isn't what happens server side. Watch the red team Chaos guy circling below me (he dies at 2:28): I leadshoot ahead of him so I miss on my screen, but he takes damage and you can see an alchemer ricochet bullet spawn where the server saw it hit.

We're talking about different things and have nothing to prove to each other.

---

Also @ your suggestion for a fix:

If the moving bullet makes contact with a living entity, it should pass that information to the explosion so the explosion can deal damage to it regardless of its distance to the explosion (cause if it didn't make contact in the first place, it wouldn't have exploded - only fair, yeah?).

So instead of spawning the explosion at the target's location like you suggest (because face it, that'd be weird if a Kat was flying past you and the ricochet spawned behind you), the explosion happens at the same place the bullet died and everything looks/acts the same way, except it makes sure that the thing you hit takes damage.

PS.
Alchemer double ricochets aren't due to this mechanic; they're due to the angle of the spawned bullet being randomly aimed inwards towards the thing that it made contact with.

interesting thing happened yesterday.

I was in FSC, in the room where a bunch of gun puppies with boxes behind them spawn on either side of a walkway with a trojan at the bottom.

I went to shoot one of the boxes, but missed slightly...

When the bullet died, it was right at the back of a box, just beside it. As the bullet died it explode (as bullets do), and the explosion just hit the box.

That's all well and good, but then a ricochet spawned. This means that a ricochet does not spawn when the original bullet hits something, but when the explosion of the bullet dying hits something.

Just a thing that I thought people might find interesting.