Talk:Immune

Ice Block

How come Ice Block isn't on this list? It correctly has the Ability Immune, so it should appear. --Patashu (talk) 06:53, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

This answer may come a couple years too late, but just to clarify: it's there now :) - jerodast (talk) 07:04, 29 April 2017 (UTC)

Weird side cases

I'm curious if Cleave could be played if one (or both!) of two enemy minions are immune. Presumably Deadly Shot could be against a single immune minion since Destroy is supposed to affect it anyway.

I would also assume that effects that normally remove card text could remove Immune as well, like Silence and Transform. But presumably player-targeted effects of that kind could not be targeted on an Immune enemy, and random effects would be?

I realize the only way most of this would even come up is by killing an enemy Sylvanas and having it steal an Immune Beast, but I'm still curious :) - jerodast (talk) 18:48, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

All your answers should be the same if you replace 'Immune' with 'Stealth' and vice versa. --Patashu (talk) 21:37, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

Don't we already know this is not a hard-and-fast rule based on Misdirection, which is a random effect yet does not target immune heroes or minions, unlike Stealth? The Stealth rule works as a rule of thumb, but would be nice to test definitively, for science! Maybe some dev thought "well that shouldn't happen to IMMUNE minions" and threw in an extra if statement somewhere! - jerodast (talk) 04:08, 8 June 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, the Immune/Misdirection thing is very unexpected. I think it's the only exception though (Misdirection also used to try and ignore Stealthed targets, I think, so maybe it got half-changed as a result). How Immune works may change more in the future. --Patashu (talk) 04:44, 8 June 2016 (UTC)

Gorehowl

Why is Gorehowl on the list? It doesn't use the Immune keyword, nor is it related to Immune in any way. I understand it doesn't lose durability, but it doesn't grant Immune to any characters. This page is about the Immune keyword. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.120.147.104 (talk • contribs) 11:54, 28 April 2017‎

The list is dynamically generated by querying the database of all cards for cards with an "immune" tag. There is a long technical explanation on Gorehowls page on why it has this tag.

However, I agree with you that this makes no sense to the "normal" user of this Wiki, so I edited the table to exclude Gorehowl (by name). -- BigHugger (talk) 16:25, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

The explanation on the Gorehowl page is way, WAY too long and technical for the Notes section, certainly not as the first note. Relatedly, I don't think Gorehowl should be tagged as Immune at all. Just because the programming very briefly uses that effect to essentially "hack" the desired behavior does not make it it part of the card's design, and leads to confusion such as this. We don't want to have to manually exclude cards just because it was programmed in a surprising way (unless that programming is actually relevant to the card's role in the gameplay, such as interacting with related cards).

Just throwing this out there for now, it's not way high on the fix list and there is a reason someone thought it was necessary to tag it in the first place. Ultimately it's part of two much longer discussions that've been a long time coming about what, exactly, are the guidelines for mechanics notes and mechanics tags. - jerodast (talk) 07:04, 29 April 2017 (UTC)

I totally agree that manual exceptions such as this are not a good idea. The reason I chose to do it like this is that first I don't feel comfortable enough with the tag system to know how to edit that without breaking things; second I don't know what other pages do rely on that tag being in place and would be negatively impacted; and third I still wanted Gorehowl gone from that list.

Is there any way to find all the pages that include or exclude Gorehowl because of the "immune" tag, so that we can assess the total effect of changing that? -- BigHugger (talk) 21:15, 29 April 2017 (UTC)

Well, I can tell you right away I don't imagine removing an ability would ever really "break" anything other than the list for that ability not including that card anymore, so you can go for it. The "What links here" tool (left side of any page) is about the best you can do to see where a card is getting queried: https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/Gorehowl Unfortunately I don't think there's any way to differentiate generated links in tables from the direct links, so you'd have to go through them manually. Like I said though you're not gonna break anything so I wouldn't even bother analyzing it beforhand. - jerodast (talk) 05:43, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

What to do with Gorehowl? On one hand, it does not mention the Immune keyword in its text and only uses the Immune effect very shortly and mainly for technical reasons. On the other hand, the weapon effectively becomes Immune! If the attack is cancelled before the Immune effects wears off (for example if Misdirection redirects the attack from the opponent's hero to a friendly minion, which is mortally wounded by Explosive Trap), Gorehowl will continue to have the "Bloodrage" enchantment attached and continue to be Immune (at least until after the next successful attack, which can be turns later): the weapon portaits will glow with a sparkling particles effect and it will not lose Durability if the opponent plays one or more Bloodsail Corsairs nor if the equipping hero attacks the enemy hero (see the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJ35sbzkRXg). In a sense, it is similar to Gladiator's Longbow: a hero equipping Gladiator's Longbow is Immune while attacking while Gorehowl the weapon is Immune while attacking minions, and the durations of the two effects are not that different (usually they both activate and deactivate within a single attack). Of course, the big difference is Gorehowl does not have the Immune keyword in its text, probably because it would have been too long and complicated when including also its other effect (it would have ended up something like "Gorehowl is Immune while attacking minions, and gets -1 Attack after attacking a minion").

Another solution could be to keep the Immune tag on Gorehowl, and simply add to the Immune page (before the cards' list) a line such as "The following is the list of cards with Immune effects. Included here is Gorehowl which, although not explicitly having the Immune keyword in its text, effectively becomes Immune while attacking minions (see Gorehowl#Notes for details)." Elekim (talk) 15:19, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

Nobody's saying it doesn't technically become Immune, but you make a good point about how it is possible for the Immune effect to actually affect the game; I'd forgotten the exact circumstances. Even so, there comes a point in complexity and rarity of an event that does not match the way the card is described, where that event becomes a "bug" rather than a "mechanic"; the Gorehowl-Misdirect-Explosive combo is way past that point. As to "effectively" becoming Immune, you're underselling yourself - it literally becomes Immune! But the tagging system shouldn't be overloaded with every detail we discover about what is literally happening in the code, or the most hidden of corner cases. It would become unusable and confusing for the general Hearthstone audience. Gorehowl's effect's phrasing and 99.9% of its behavior is as a unique effect unrelated to Immune; we should tag it that way.

You mentioned the "big difference" being Gorehowl not having the keyword, and while that's a big deal on its own, it goes far beyond that:

• Gorehowl has no Immune bubble at any time. Every other Immune effect has similar graphics, even for a time as short as Longbow. They even made different ones for heroes and minions. But none for Gorehowl.
• The Bloodrage enchantment does not say Immune, it says "No durability loss". Every other enchantment I could find associated with an Immune card used the word Immune.
• The only time the Immune status is even observable in game outside of the described effect is in an extremely circumstantial situation that is clearly an unintended bug - there's nothing in Gorehowl's text about "you get a free face attack and immunity to Corsair if you lost an earlier attack".
• No other effect has ever applied Immunity to weapons. It seems to be something intended for characters with Health. Saying "oh, it's just like Longbow but it's the weapon instead" doesn't really fly when Immune weapons are so rare they don't even have a graphic for it. (Admittedly, I could see this one changing if the Ooze meta got intense enough.)
• The phrasing wouldn't be that clunky. Stablemaster says a beast is "Immune this turn". It doesn't have to explain what that means. So why doesn't Gorehowl say "Costs 1 Attack but gains Immune when attacking minions"?

For those reasons, I disagree with your interpretation that it doesn't have the text "because it would have been too long and complicated" - everything about this screams "players are not supposed to associate this with being Immune at all". I think we should remove the tag. Leave it on both pages as a relatively trivial note about technical implementation, but well below the other "mainstream" mechanics, if not in the Trivia section.

- jerodast (talk) 22:24, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

Both proposals (removing the Immune tag from Gorehowl, or mainting it with the addition of the "explainig line") had some pros and cons for me, I just played devils'advocate to support the second one since the first one has already been strongly supported and it seemed to me that a decision was about to be taken without considering all the aspects. :-p However, I agree the "remove tag" option is by far the better, so we should go for it. If in the future we will get Immune weapons (Durability is not that different from Health after all), or a bubble on Gorehowl, or cards that can actively target weapons (instead of being auto-targeted) to see if a "Bloodraged" Gorehowl cannot be targeted (as Immune characters cannot), we can think about reintegrating the tag, but for now we'd better remove it. However, I think we should still keep the notes well highlighted in Gorehowl's Notes section and where they are in the Immune page, not just treating them as "Trivia".Elekim (talk) 06:38, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

Yep, didn't mean to make it personal, I've certainly played devil's advocate myself :) In this case though I have a definite opinion, so I was not holding back in making the case for it haha. - jerodast (talk) 07:01, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

Great discussion. In spite of Elekim's excellent "devil's advocate" arguments, I agree with Jerodast.

My main argument for agreeing with the "remove immunity" point is twofold: (1) the logic in favor of the tag is extremely convoluted and will baffle the average Hearthstone player; and (2) I strongly suspect that the Gorehowl-Misdirect-Explosive combo is truly a bug, not an unexpected but acceptable interaction; I would not be surprised if Blizzard one day expends the resources to fix this (it might even already have happened).

I think a bug that is easy to explain (and easy to verify) can be included on this site. For any mechanic that is convoluted to the point of near-incomprehensible but not a bug, I have strong doubts. But for conoluted bugs, I very strongly feel that the only place for them is the advanced rulebook and perhaps a note on the relevant card pages. I'd rather explain once, on the Gorehowl page, why Gorehowl sometimes doesn't lose a charge due to some weird immunity shenanigans, than having to explain on every page that lists all cards with the immune ability why Gorehowl is in there.

Since it appears we're all agreeing on this, I'll go ahead and remove the immune ability from the Gorehowl page, and then undo the special-case exception I added previously on this page. -- BigHugger (talk) 18:33, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

Tooltip

According to this page, the tooltip for Immune was changed in 2022 (Patch 24.4.0.150659). However, in my game client, the tooltip actually reads "Immune characters can't be damaged". So either the change was intended but never correctly executed, or it has been reverted in a later patch. BigHugger22 (talk) 15:54, 4 September 2023 (UTC)