Missile Hijacking
We wanted the reflected damage to scale with AP (magic damage) and be adjustable, so Mel casts the new spell, similar to Sylas. But instead of stealing the entire spell, (including cast animation, mana consumption, etc), she only captures the parts tied to the missile. Any effects triggered by the missile’s travel or impact are inherited by Mel.
This fixes reflecting ally heals and shields, Mel will be casting the heal and shield to allies and additional work will be needed to fix those spells (think Senna’s R, Nami’s W, etc).
This unlocks the ability for the reflector to modify the damage output of the missiles.
This makes the reflector inherit the rest of the missile spell, which solves the Recast Missiles issues (think Lee Sin’s Q, Akali’s E, Vex’s R, etc).
Damage Re-calculations
So up until this point, we used an AreaTrigger to detect missiles, destroy the original missile and then re-create a new missile cast by Mel.
One problem with this setup is that since the new missile is technically cast by Mel, according to the spellcast system (if you’d like to learn more about it, check out the spellcast article on Hwei), Mel’s stats will be used to calculate damage. So imagine level 1 Mel reflecting a level 18 full AD Aphelios auto, the reflected auto is going to tickle since Mel has really low AD. This is not the effect we want to see since, according to design, the stronger the enemy, the stronger her spells should be. So what are we missing?
We needed to use caster’s stats (AD/AP) on spell damage calculations even though Mel was the caster of the spells.
To implement this, we created a dictionary to store reflected skill shots, their corresponding casters, and their level when the spell was reflected. Let’s use everyone’s favorite Yordle Teemo as an example: If Teemo uses E and tries to poison Mel, when the E missile hits the reflection shield, we store the character reference to Teemo himself and Teemo’s level. When the poison flies back to Teemo and starts to hurt him, we check the dictionary and look up Teemo’s level and stats, and use that to figure out how much damage the poison should deal to Teemo.
Side note: Sylas solves this problem differently, using his own stats and converting AD damage ratios into AP damage ratios since he is an AP Assassin. The difference between Sylas Ultimate and Mel’s Rebuttal is that Sylas casts the spells as his own, so it makes sense the spells are based off of his stats. But since Mel is reflecting projectiles back to the original caster, it made sense that the reflected projectiles would inherit the caster’s stats instead.
