Invisibility

[Dracos]

How is Invisible but SEEN enemies supposed to work?

I've seen 4 takes on Invisibility:
1)Enemy shows up highlighted but clear. Okay, the enemy is using invisibility but got seen by my character See Invisible, I assume.
2)Enemy shows up like that...but then goes actually invisible after a bit. Not quite sure what this is to be? Rewards fast decision making certainly, but seems strange from a turn based perspective.
3)Enemy is just invisible until it hits you. Makes sense, character did not beat its Invisibility power with See Invisible and the enemy got the drop on me as a result.
4)My character stops, saying it sees an Orc Master Assassin. I don't see anything, the square is empty, but repeatedly auto-targeted, so I can just blast the invisible enemy to death. Also, not quite sure what this is supposed to be. Game has clearly decided my character sees the enemy and I don't have to guess at all on the targeting as it'll auto-target with the spells, but I also can't see the enemy, so it really sucks for manually selecting it for spells.

Not quite grasping 2 and 4. I assumed 2 was just 'you barely may have seen him' or he went stealth as his action after turning invisible, covering some bare pass, but 4 I'm not quite able to conclude at all. Maybe its some difference with stealth and invisible?

Anyone able to clear up what's actually happening?

[Davion Fuxa]

Note that you might be confusing Stealth and Invisibility here. Examples:

Orc Grand Master Assassins use Stealth to sneak up on you. If they hit you then they have a 'chance' to break Stealth; assuming you haven't spotted them. Stealth won't break for them if you fail to spot them or if they don't hit you (and have a chance to turn it off).

Hitting an Elven Tempest in the Mark of the Spellblaze can trigger Secrets of the Eternals which has a chance of turning them Invisible. This won't break until Invisibility expires.

[Dracos]

Definitely could be. Have yet to play a character which made use of either, so I don't have a good feel for them. Invisibility just seemed too expensive and penalizing on the arch-mage I'm trying at the moment.

On my current character, I have pretty outrageous See through Stealth and See through invisibility (80+ on both). The Orc Master Assassin one really confused me as the game told me I saw him, the auto-targeting picked out the square he was in (twice as I didn't quite get what was going on besides there being an orc master assassin to my east, and canceled, then re-chose to cast an attack spell). For all of this...I couldn't see anything in that square, and if I hadn't been auto-exploring I wouldn't have had any idea something was going on.

Just trying to figure out what this sort of event is. Is it my character failing to detect stealth? Succeeding in detecting invisibility? I'd assume stealth since the assassins aren't generally magic casting enemies.

[DeNarr]

Stealth in this game can be very strange. I've repeated hit occurrences of seeing a thief, I start to mouse over him, and THEN he disappears without me taking any action. I typically just attack the square that I saw him in, just seems really strange to have things change without an action being taken.

[Marson]

The graphics you see can be out of sync with the state an entity may be in.

Your shield can expire, but your toon on screen will still show a shield around it. Vimsense may 'see' a creature (you can mouseover it and get a tooltip), but you won't see it on screen, just the lit ground. It's a frustration I've run into a lot lately, but I haven't been in the mood to try and debug it.

[Nagyhal]

The graphics you see can be out of sync with the state an entity may be in.

Anyone get any further researching this?

[Marson]

I haven't. I'm pretty sure this is taking place in an area of the code I haven't familiarized myself with yet and haven't had the energy to dig into it.

[twas Brillig]

One (tedious) thing you can do if you know you're dealing with stealthy/invisible enemies is right-click the tile you (think) you saw them in. If it gives you the Inspect Creature option, that's positive confirmation. (also lets you check on their resources/sustains/defenses/etc. even though you can't hover over them for the usual pop-up) That said, I'm a bad player who doesn't pay close enough attention to the state of enemy stealth. I think that trick works even if you haven't spotted them (giving away their location while not breaking stealth), and I'm reasonably sure it works against invisible enemies no matter what (unless See Invisible will sometimes fail to outline seen enemies).

I always assumed enemies popping in and out of visibility was the game's way of representing you catching a glimpse of them.

[cctobias]

BTW, you can always right click and inspect any enemy even if they are not rendering due to invis/stealth. So if something disappears and you lose track of which square they are in right click squares until you get an inspect option.

[Marson]

If I remember right, you can always right-click whether invisible/stealthed or not. However getting a tooltip is a good indication as to whether you should be seeing the creature graphically represented on the map.