Spank The Crocodile
Well, I've decided to do it today, so I went into the Box Zone 3 World 1 and went till the end. At the last checkpoint, I hit one of the crocodiles and jumped on it. Then I held down the auto-attack or skill 1 to permanently attack the crocodile with my nunchuck. I did try auto-attack but it didn't work. I also could've technically placed something on the key but I didn't have the nerve to do so. So there I was standing on the crocodile attacking it over and over again. In the meantime, I continued studying Japanese (I'm currently 2-3 chapters behind). I occasionally looked at the screen and I also was wondering how long it would take.
The attacks take 1/2s, 1/4s, and less than 1/4s. It's hard to tell exactly how fast skills cast without knowledge about the animation time (a.k.a. the time in between skills. E.g.: Skills that have no cooldown or cast time). Nonetheless assuming the animation time is at maximum half a second, it should be between 1/2s + 1/4s = 2/3s and 1/2s + 1/4s + 3 * 1/2s = 2.25s. The skill chain does 25 damage with each hit being two single hits and a double hit. So 4 * 25 = 100 damage. This results in 100 / (2/3s) = 150dps to 100 / 2.25s = 44.44dps. Assuming the number shown is the integer limit of 32bit on a 32bit client and 64bit on a 64bit client the limits are 2^32 = 4294967296 and 2^64 = 1.84 * 10^19. This is only the case for unsigned integers. If we assume they are signed (meaning the data type also stores negative numbers) the size is 2^(32 - 1) = 2147483648 and 2^(64 - 1) = 9.22 * 10^18. This means it would've taken me...
- Worst case: 1.84 * 10^19s / 150dps = 1.23 * 10^17s (~3,899,616,115 years)
- Best case: 2147483648s / 150dps = 14316558s (~165 days)
Not Even Five Minutes In...
While I haven't calculated how long it would take me I came across something interesting way before dying by holding a button in a game. What happened is that suddenly the damage number was gone. I was no longer hitting the crocodile. My first thought was to stop attacking it and retrying. Maybe it just didn't show the number anymore at that point? The number didn't restart. Then I decided to move away and get back to it to retry. No change. After a while, the crocodile was no longer stunned and knocked me off of it. I used the chance to retry to stun it but without avail.
This is interesting. The Guild Wars 2 wiki entry says crocodiles are unkillable. If that's the case, what is this? I mean it's not necessarily dead. It's still there but... invulnerable as in it has no hitbox anymore. Yet it can still deal damage and it's still solid, as well as being visible.
Switch On Game Design Brain...
Thinking about it from a game engineering and game design perspective I can only describe it like this:
If we assume a crocodile is a game object consisting of three hitboxes and three models (stun animation, idle animation, attack animation) the hitboxes would be
- hit detection trigger hitbox (detects when the player hits the crocodile)
- attack range trigger hitbox (detects if a player enters the hitbox and attacks them)
- solidity collision hitbox (prevents objects from falling through it)
The hit detection trigger hitbox is the biggest allowing you to hit the enemy without taking damage or touching the solid part. The attack range trigger hitbox is nearly as big but definitely smaller allowing the player to hit the crocodile while not getting hit themselves. The solidity collision hitbox is the smallest and it fits the crocodile when it's in its stun.
The stun is probably realized with either a timer or a boolean.
Since the hit detection trigger hitbox detects the hits and triggers the damage to display I assume it also takes in the damage. So if the health drops to zero this one despawn (dies) while the rest stays alive. Still weird but it would explain the phenomenon.
But...
How Much Health Do The Crocodiles Have?
I had to answer this question hence why I went to another one to test on that one. I know I hit it once so it should be 25 down. So I kept hitting this one over and over until I got around the number where it stopped before. It should be above 12000. Eventually, I got there. The last number I saw was 14525. This means depending on the speed and overkill it probably has around 14500 to 14550 health.
Eureka!
There you go, I learned something else and probably you did too. New information for the wiki and new fun fact or useless facts you can tell other people. Right next to the deadly 37.5m drop when you use the fall damage mitigation trait.
Oh, by the way, don't try in real life. Fall damage is real and it's painful and deadly at way lower drops.
P.s.: if you destroy the jewel of the frog king it refills its health to 100%.
