Can someone explain how Decay casts? (in General)

I have a Decay mage. He has a Decay of around 500,000 HP. Via AS, he has about 24,000 HP at the start of the battle. He wears an HoC, and so he gets to fire his Decay in the last round of ranged. This is now that round looks from my perspective against Koy:

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Joe takes damage from his own Magic Missile (176310)!
Joe's Magic Missile hit The Grid [379839]
Cloudscape absorbs damage [36374]
Hubbell Man takes damage from his own Decay (2676)!
Hubbell Man's Decay hit Prophecies [10]
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Joe gets big AMF backlash and does OK damage (more than I would expect, but Koy does not have his big wall armor on). Cloudscape (lead minion) absorbs damage. Cloudscape is still alive (nothing could touch him, I have just fired MM up to this point).

Then my Decay mage fires...at Prophecies. Huh? Cloudscape is the lead minion. Later in the battle (round 8 or so) I get this:

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Hubbell Man takes damage from his own Decay (1345)!
Hubbell Man's Decay hit Cloudscape [3417]
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No one on Koy has died, but now the Decay targets the lead minion? Once everyone but HM is dead?

Can anyone enlighten me as to what is going oh?

My guess would be that Cloudscape absorbed every bit of damage it could. That 36374 damage killed it, so your next attack, Decay, hit the next minion.

Then Cloudscape was revived with TSA.

Had to be TSA revival.

So training a Phantom Link just higher than the amount of HP you regenerate per round and your minion will come back to life each round to absorb damage and then become invisible for the rest of the round as it temporarily dies, allowing that minion to get alot more extra HP from TSA regeneration than they would otherwise (since they would presumably be dying in an earlier round if they could be targetted).

Alternatively one could really piss Ranger off by using a mage with a TSA and massive DD and balance the HP so that it is not quite enough to survive one round of AMF in melee but just enough so that the TSA revives it. So each round the minion kills itself, becomes invisible for the remainder of the round and then revives :)

I believe this would work when you were the attacker but not when Ranger is (since his attack would occur before the AMF) . The minion would also survive its AMF in ranged where AMF backlash is lower so a massive PL / HP minion or three and/or a massive Evasion would probably be needed to get through ranged (although Ranger doesn't have his Mageseeker at the moment so it could work for a few cheap wins).

Sutekh I'd love to see you try this against Ranger :) If nothing else it would hasten a change to the way TSA works with respect to targetting temporarily dead minions.

A PL Minion can never absorb enough damage to kill it on its own.

Yea I forgot about that :P Ignore what I said above.

I'm still trying to stalemate with Ranger using the second method though, just having a little trouble balancing the AMF backlash at the moment

Koyaanisqatsi (Battle Royale) defeated Bigglesworth after 12 rounds of combat

Getting closer :P

You got a stalemate then SP? That's not bad going with a 1,825 MPR character......

Bigglesworth Koyaanisqatsi (Battle Royale) Stalemate 25 7:04 AM EDT

There, using a character with less than 2k PR. Obviously I'm not going to be able to beat him but the principle is there so that it could work with a big mage.

Basically I PLed the TSA minion to death so that his HP is zero but the TSA revived the minion at the end of the round. In every round after I AMFed the minion to dealth, after which Koy could not hit me since it could not "see" any live minions. At the end of the round the TSA revived the minion again (the regen amount is exactly the same as the AMF amount).

This won't work if Ranger attacks me first though.

Brilliant! :D

Can we get this TSA nonsense fixed, then? It's ridiculous, all the way around. Hiding in death should not be allowed in ANY scenario. Isn't PL/TSA/ToE/leech already powerful enough that it doesn't need that as an additional advantage?

And yes, a mage could do it to -- that doesn't make it "OK" or "balanced", it just makes it twice as stupid.

Not to mention, I don't even buy this argument. Cloudscape absorbed about 30-40K per round in that battle. So, on the last ranged round he would have still had hundreds of thousands of HP left, yet my Decay doesn't attack him. I really do not understand. No one knows what's going on here? No one has seen this before or will try fighting Koy to duplicate results? I guess I'll go buy BA and do it myself...

This morning Cloudscape is getting hit. So yes, it is the TSA issue, and the reason Cloudscape was hiding in death last night but not this morning is that I fought several battles in a row last night. I must have been getting my figures from one of the latter battles, where Cloudscape was riding the TSA-regeneration edge after being beat down a bit.

So, that at least explains that.

Now, can we get the TSA-hide-in-death bug fixed? Yes, it's a bug. If it a feature, then we need to start a new list: FDRF -- Frequently Discussed Retarded Features.

Jonathan, please do something about this -- this is a meaningless forger asking here, no axe to grind (pardon the pun). Is this really how you want things to work?

"Alternatively one could really piss Ranger off by using a mage with a TSA and massive DD and balance the HP so that it is not quite enough to survive one round of AMF in melee but just enough so that the TSA revives it. So each round the minion kills itself, becomes invisible for the remainder of the round and then revives :)"

I really do not care of someone at 2k MPR stalemates me, it is rather funny actually. As long as my hammer can squash their skull if I attack, it is all cool with me.

But certainly kudos to SP for stalemating me with a 2k MPR character!!