Update: Dauntless developer Phoenix Labs offered an update on the Godhand laser bug, promising a proper fix in an upcoming update. Here's the full statement:
"Bugs like this tend to crop up during Betas and we're always thankful to the community for helping us track them down. We did think we had a fix in for this, but it turns out that when you meddle with a force this devastating, strange things can happen. We're hoping to have a fix in for our next update. See you in the Shattered Isles!"
Original story:
Dauntless is a free-to-play co-op action RPG about hunting big-ol' monsters called Behemoths. It's a game explicitly about boss fights where positioning and timing are of the utmost importance and preparation is half the battle. So you can imagine how jarring it is to see players casually melt Behemoths with a rainbow laser beam from sniper range, as Twitch streamer TaintedAura does here:
You are looking at The Godhand. The Godhand is an Exotic-tier War Pike with a unique ability: a laser that deals more damage the longer it's held on a target, up to a cap of 200 percent bonus damage. Ordinarily, this laser has a fairly short duration and a significant cooldown. It's meant to be a fun tool for your arsenal, not your primary damage dealer. But for the past few weeks, players have been getting around the Godhand's limitations using a simple bug in Dauntless' controls which makes the laser infinite. The bug is especially funny in groups, as Reddit user IgneelAlex25 demonstrates in this post.
Dauntless developer Phoenix Labs released a patch earlier this week intended to fix the Godhand bug, among other improvements. "Slayers will no longer get stuck in Godhand beam animations and cannot sustain infinite beams," the patch notes read. "All life as we know it will no longer instantaneously stop, and every molecule in your body will not explode at the speed of light."
But the Godhand would not be silenced. Life as we know it has not ended as of yet, but crafty players found a new way to trigger the laser bug post-patch, and multiple people have confirmed that it still works. Behemoths still aren't safe from rainbow-patterned death, but Phoenix Labs is surely working on a follow-up fix. I've reached out to the studio for more information and will update this story if I receive a reply.
