Opposition -- bug or WAD?

[krpeters]

My enemy is attacking me with Poison Golems, and I decided that Opposition would be the easiest way of dealing with them. They're carrying Standard of the Damned, so they have excess HP. It turns out that Opposition doesn't take this into account, so it hit him for only 85 hp. Fortunately my troops were able to do the rest, but it seems like a bit of a bug.

[Corinthian]

Thats interesting. But opposition should really do 999 points of damage I think. Are you sure they were not carrying an elixir of life or something? Because those will save a unit from a single death spell.

[krpeters]

I had another look at the replay. Definitely no elixir of life involved. It occurs during the spell phase. My mages are spamming Opposition repeatedly, then the red "85" shows up and he is left with 26 hit points. Then the troop phase commences and and I get lucky hits for another 8, 16, 11, and he dies. This is the Dominion RNG at its finest -- no damage at all for 10 rounds, and then all the good hits (a failed save & three awesome melee attacks) clustered together.

Because opposition can affect inanimate troops, it doesn't use the soul slay mechanic (999 damage). It looks like the mechanic it uses only does damage equal to the starting HP.

[Bananadine]

Disintegrate can do that too. I think Gift of Health might be another thing that can allow a unit to survive that kind of attack, sometimes. Maybe Opposition and Disintegrate have the same effect--sometimes hitting for about 1000 damage, sometimes hitting only just hard enough to kill or nearly kill the unit. I hadn't known Opposition did this, but I just tested it, and yeah, of my first two kills with the spell, one caused about 981 damage, and one caused 26 damage (which was just enough to kill).

Maybe the strong hit comes when the spell happens to beat magic resistance extra-hard, while the weak hit comes when it only barely beats magic resistance. Or maybe, once it has passed magic resistance, there's a totally independent roll that determines whether it hits hard or less hard. Or maybe it's something else.