Cascade Damage Calculation

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edited July 2014 in MPQ General Discussion
Hello MPQ community,

I am interested in known how damage from cascades is calculated. I've been wondering this for a while and haven't been able to find any information about it.

Just from watching my matches today it seems that if I make a swap that makes two matches at the same time then the first match does 100% damage and the second match does 75% damage. It seems to be the same if I make a match of 3 and immediately cascade into another match 3 of the same color, 100% damage for the first match and 75% damage for the next match. Then some cascades seemed to do 100% for more than the first match and I think at one point during a large cascade that the damage got lower and lower and then reset back to full damage. I assumed the damage would just decay exponentially with each successive match but that doesn't appear to be the case.

Can anyone explain to me how the damage is calculated during cascades? Does it matter how often the same character makes the attack during the cascade or if it is all the same color matches? Does matches involving tiles that have fallen from above the top row or critical matches reset the match damages during a cascade back to full? I'm really puzzles and was hoping not to need to write down all my matches for the next few days just to figure it out.

Any information is welcome.

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  • Unknown
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    As far as I know cascades continue to diminish throughout their lifetime for match damage AND environmental AP given per match by x0.75 per match in the cascade. The caveat to that is strike tiles are applied at 100% value throughout the entire cascade. That does mean that, say, a green match mid cascade on a team with Daken/Laken will cause a sudden jump in damage as you generate new strike tiles.

    As far as a cascade resetting... i've never seen it myself and i've seen some pretty big cascades when I was testing cascade producing abilities (>10 sets of matches with crits several times).
  • mischiefmaker
    mischiefmaker Posts: 932
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    I can confirm that bonfire's assertion is correct -- 100% on the first match, 75% decay on each successive match, strike tiles applied at 100%.

    I have, however, seen matches in which I got 100% damage on every cascaded match. I think it might be due to having OBW on the team (same effect as crit tiles that match in mid-air), but I don't remember if I ever confirmed that.
  • Unknown
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    What do you mean by the same effect as crit tiles that match mid air?
    I have noticed that sometimes they will match mid air if it would create a match at the tile where it was created and sometimes it wont.

    As far as her effecting cascade damage I can confirm that it still lowers some of the time while she is on your team. I haven't been able to find out what causes some cascade matches to do full damage yet.
  • mischiefmaker
    mischiefmaker Posts: 932
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    When OBW is not on your team, when a crit tile is created, it always falls to the bottom and then checks to see if it matches anything.

    When OBW is on your team, when a crit tile is created, it checks to see if it matches first, then if it doesn't, falls to the bottom and checks again.

    Our best guess as to why this is is that her anti-gravity device (the name of her blue power) keeps crit tiles from falling long enough to match.
  • jojeda654
    jojeda654 Posts: 1,162 Chairperson of the Boards
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    mischiefmaker wrote:
    Our best guess as to why this is is that her anti-gravity device (the name of her blue power) keeps crit tiles from falling long enough to match.

    Somebody's probably mentioned this already, but isn't it more likely that Espionage is responsible for this behavior. It seems to me that the game needs to check every match in a cascade and see if the damage should double dip AND steal AP. I'm pretty sure Daken's Purple lays down stike tiles at the end of the turn. I think Anger does this as well.

    I guess it could be tested with two OBWs at 0/5/0 and 0/0/5.
  • Unknown
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    The Anti-Grav leading to floating thing was a joke, though at that point only OBW was identified to exhibit this so that explanation sounded as good as anything else. For that matter at the time this was reported we don't even know it is an intended behavior or not. I remember another thread where D3Will say this is a bug and not intended and I think people also reported similar behaviors on other passives and it's probably tied to a passive that triggers on a color match, which is why we don't see it for all characters with passives and that we see it most often with OBW because she has 3 colors she can check for a passive as opposed to usually 1 (Healing Factor, Inspiration).
  • Unknown
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    The passive effect sounds like a good explanation. Am pretty sure I've seen this with Daken when matching 5 green, but never knew why til now.
  • Unknown
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    I made an environmental match 3, cascaded into a full damage match 3, then cascaded into a full damage critical match 3. All matches were made my the same character. Does anyone have any reasonable ideas of why some cascades decay in damage and others don't?

    I think I made a match 5 today that created a critical tile in a position that would make a match while OBW was on my team but her passive hadn't triggered and the critical tile fell so it seems likely that it is her espionage ability that causes it. I doubt Daken would cause a similar thing because OBW's ability triggers as soon as you make the match before tiles have a chance to fall and cascade where Daken's ability triggers after the tiles have fallen.

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