Arc Warden attack animation modifier causes increased atk projectile travel time

[TheZett]

Description

Arc Warden’s npc_heroes.txt data contains an entry for modifying his attack animations at certain attack speed values.

This "AttackSpeedActivityModifiers" entry causes a few issues, which affect the travel time of his attack projectile and punish players for building atk speed on the hero, as attacks will take longer to connect with their target.

Once Arc Warden’s attack speed reaches a value of 170+ ("high" atk speed), he starts using a different attack animations, which cause his atk projectiles to spawn further back behind/beside the hero.

This slightly altered spawn point of his atk projectiles causes the projectile to travel for a longer distance and thus delays the attack from connecting.

Attack projectile spawn point comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KYb4gWqofE

Attack projectile spawn points (low atk speed)::

Attack projectile spawn points (high atk speed)::

I have modified the game and created a second Arc Warden, which is nearly identical to the first one, except that I have removed the "AttackSpeedActivityModifiers" from the 2nd AW.

Also both Arc Wardens got their damage variance removed (always 34 base damage, pre-stats).

In my tests I could clearly see that the standard attack animation, which the regular AW uses for "low" atk speed values (below 170), is by far the best and most consistent animation.

The "high" atk speed value animation AW starts using as of 170+ atk speed is much worse and delays the projectile unnecessarily.

Here are a few comparison videos:

Low attack speed (<170): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzccqI1vg8o

High attack speed (175): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spEB00ckUyI

Very high attack speed (455): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lN66AVeuI0

The following two videos, which use 0.25 playback speed, demonstrate quite clearly that the standard attack animation has less travel distance, due to it using superior atk projectile spawn points (in front of AW), when compared to the ones used by the high atk animation (besides/behind AW):

High attack speed (0.25 speed): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vtq7PMBXzTM

Just to make sure, I tried swapping the position of the two AWs, and it does not change the results at all. The Double always attacks its target first:

High attack speed (0.25 speed, swapped position): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71kzar0E9Qk

Proposals on how to fix this issue:

I have four ideas how Valve could fix this issue, depending on how much effort the want to put into fixing this issue:

1. Remove the "AttackSpeedActivityModifiers" entirely and always use the default attack animation (may look funny at higher atk speeds).

2. Ramp up the projectile speed when using the high atk speed animations, so the projectile travel time stays consistent.

3. Fix the spawn points of his high atk speed animation atk projectiles, so the average travel time & distance stays the same, when compared to his default atk projectile spawn points.

4. Increase the atk speed values required for AW to switch from his standard atk animation to his inferior high atk speed animations (e.g. from 170, 275, 350 to 370, 475, 550), so this at least band-aid fixes the issue of only happening outside of the laning stage, where every CS counts.

Example Match ID (and possibly Timestamp)

multiple videos are provided

Screenshots

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