winston

I can confirm this, also holds for the Arch Mage at Celioth's Tower (when defeated with a High Elf at the beginning of the Shadow Campaign). The reason for this may be that you have to talk to them before they actually die.

I did some more tests with fightingdistance = 20, 35 and 65 and my character always finished his attack (possibly after running around for a short time, but never in circles ...). I start to doubt my former observations of the bug. Maybe I just saw my character running around and took that for an occurrence of the bug, because I expected the weird pathfinding to be fixed. I really don't know. I'm sorry that I couldn't help, but I'll keep an eye an the matter while I continue playing.

In spells.txt, too? Weapon-based combat arts had 65 here with 1.60.

Yes, correct. I did this during my tests, but couldn't replicate the bug. Maybe it already occurs rare enough without the hotfix. What were the original values of fightingdistance before 1.60? The same as in 1.60 without the hotfix?

Ah, I see. I had wrong expectations in what has been fixed, it seems. In my tests (about one to two hours ingame time) all initiated attacks were executed, I had no case of my character running around without attacking (regardless of the value fightingdistance). But, nevertheless, I definitely observed this behaviour while playing with the CM Patch 1.60 installed (maybe two or three times within four to five hours playing characters who use weapon-based combat arts).

Attacking groups of opponents is just what I did, so I guess my test were inconclusive. I did not see a significant difference in the behavour of my characters between the fighting distances in the original spells.txt and typification.txt (I.e. 65 for weapon-based player-character combat arts and 35 for other combat arts and normal attacks) and uniform fighting distances of 45, 50 and 55. I am not sure that the problem can be resolved with adjusting the fighting distance, because it seems to be caused by obstacles which the character has to run around to reach the target of his attack and I cannot see how a higher fighting distance can help with that. (I would not mind to be wrong, though, because this behaviour is quite annoying.)

I tested weapon-based combat arts, but to be honest, I really cannot say, whether changing the fightingdistance parameter changes anything or not. Is there any way to consistently reproduce the running-around-in-circles behaviour? Why are the fighting distances in typification.txt changed, anyway? This should only apply to normal attacks, right? I would expect that only the fighting distances in spells.txt have any influence on the behaviour of the character while executing a weapon-based combat art. (Ranged weapons are a slight weakness in my theory, though, does the game use the maximum of the two fighting distances?)

I had just found the 35-entries in spells.txt, so that would have been my next question ;-) I should have time for some tests tomorrow.

What do I need to do to test it? Is it enough to change each instance of "fightdistance = 65.000000" into "fightdistance = 45.000000"?

Thanks for your quick replies, I am looking forward to the rectification (is that a proper word?) of the problem :-)

I guess this is supposed to fix this: This fix leads to a new problem: All combat arts which are meant to affect opponents in melee range now do not work properly, because the opponents can now use melee attacks from outside the range of the combat art (examples are the deathly spears and the derogate mod of the temple guardian's T-energy shroud). Is there an easy way to fix the ranges of such combat arts?