I’m not sure how this happened. I was using the books Slow End and Shock Lightning, not Chain Lightning, and I was zapping the remaining enemies to get rid of them quicker and end the level. I hit the one in front of this guy and somehow he ended up stunned, with no stun counter to indicate he was stunned. He was just frozen in place, and I ended up summoning a weak Knight next to him to slowly plink away at his life and kill him. Any idea what happened, how he got stunned from me shocking the guy in front of him AND perma-stunned?
Perma-stunned enemy
Crazy! Sounds like a weird edge case. Likely there’s a bug in the status effect code, where it removed the counter but not the effect. Anyways, good bug case here - I’ll see if I can reproduce this. Can you upload a save file for me?
I can the same thing happen, with one of those big, fat, spitting splitter revenant. I perma-stunned it somehow with the Shock Lightning-boosted Lightning spell. I had to recall a Defender in order to get enough Psi to blast it down, at which point the spawned mini-worms moved as normal. Seems to be a case of splitter-mobs not playing nice with Shock Lightning…?
That happened to me once with a cultist. Once I killed it the spawned attacker was fine. I don’t recall specifics of why/when it happened though.
There are a few things that might be happening here. First, it could be a normal stun that’s being applied - through stun stab, or roar, or any of the other attacks that have it as a flavor. Or, it could be coming from the shock lightning. Lastly, when an enemy is knocked back beyond its initial spawn point (from pushback or knight knockback) it converts the extra lost time from pushing it back into stun time.
I don’t think it’s the last case - much more likely a weird interaction from the first few.
For clarification: in my case, I was doing the 2nd Challenge Map (where you are only allowed 6 Defenders, no Archers or Dragons), and the Bloated Splitter Thingie was outside the range of any of my units, but a few “steps” out of the Monster Spawning symbol. He had the little star “I’m stunned!” icon over him, and it just… never went away. Until I killed him with repeated zaps of my Lightning spell. He was actually the last mob on the map; once I killed the mini-worms, I won.
[attachment=0]defenders_quest_save_slot_1.dfq[/attachment]
Trying to get my 3rd gold star on the stage Realm of the Wizard, and on the last wave with abominations one of the resulting worms would not go below 1 hp. It probably should have died closer to the center where his buds did, but he was pretty stubborn 
Did it ever die? Was it stuck in place? Did it eventually hit azra?
It got to me, ruined my perfect 
got it easy next try though.
Hmmm… weird. Hopefully this is a side effect of the damage queue bug, which I’ve just fixed in 1.0.21. We’ll see what happens.
I’ve seen this too. A dragon repeatedly tried to NOM the worm but it kept coming. I think I used the push back skill and the worm died, however.
One thing that might be going on:
To fix some OTHER bug, we put in a behavior that an enemy that “dies” while being pushed back / knocked back will not die mid-flight, but instead be reduced to 1 health and killed when it reaches the end of its pushback. So, what might be happening is you have enemies that were knocked away, killed, and then the “kill on landing” never resolved. It makes sense that pushing back these enemies would kill them - because it gives the game another chance to resolve the “kill this when it lands from knockback” logic.
Can anyone confirm if this technique always works with these kinds of enemies?
Had it happen again on one of the challenge levels, my knight with 9 on his knockback smacked a purple zombie and killed him, but he stayed up with 1 hp until I pushbacked him, then he died.
Okay, so it probably is related to the “never lands from pushback” phenomenon. I’ll look into it and see if I can put in a safety check or something that kills it if it detects that it’s just sticking around for now reason.
I would like to confirm a reproduction of this bug as of the latest version.
Windows 7 Professional 64
Game version: 1.0.22
Running a 2-squad game, Detonate the Mines Expert+
There is a Water Fiend+ that keeps going down to 1 HP, and not dying, every hit it takes is displayed as a “nom” (the default dragon bit him before). Paused the game, searched the bug forum, which recommended to try Pushback. Screenshot while the fiend is immortal: http://prntscr.com/fjhrn (the 'shot also shows that I have used dragon fire on it, to no avail).
I cast Pushback, while airborn, the fiend got hit several times, and after landing it died.
Only have a save file from right after the battle (attached).
EDIT: Oh shit, the attached save file is an entirely different export… please ignore it. And now I have played a few more battles since, let me know if I should export and upload the file anyway.
Great repro case. This should help me reproduce the bug, hopefully!
I think this is a bug related to nom, but I had a Cultist Priest+ spawn which was impossible to kill.
- His HP would sit at 1 and flicker up to 2311 before returning to 1.
- nom kept hitting the cultist, even when all my units were deleted from the map for a very long time. All cold/bleed/burn/poison effects wore off, but nom kept hitting him.
[attachment=1]Super cultist.jpg[/attachment]
Luckily it wasn’t headed for Azra, so I just finished off the boss and waited for it to reach Zelemir to collect my perfect score…
[attachment=0]Super cultist at end of level.jpg[/attachment]
Forgot to mention - this was on the latest public version 1.0.22
Is it sad that I saw this zoomed-in screenshot and thought to myself “Wow, our new graphics are pretty cool looking”? I’m always playing zoomed out and haven’t seen what it looks like full-sized in quite a while. Lars - we should do some zoomed in, panning shots of the game for our trailer. 
Anyway, thanks for the detailed report, hopefully we can nail this down, because that’s not cool, haha.
This bug’s been reported a bunch of times. The current workaround is to cast pushback, which “unsticks” the enemy and lets it die. The bug is caused by a special case in the code that makes enemies killed mid-pushback not die until they “land,” and in rare cases this interacts weirdly with stun. I’ll try to hit this one in the next patch.