POE 3.19 Infinite Damage Bug with Vaal Lightning Strike: How This Works

We go to the new Vaal Lightning Strike infinite damage bug discovered due to the Kalandra Amulet granting -60% Vaal Skill Effect Duration in poe.

Kalandra allows you to get negative stats with Reflecting Mist, GGG forget to test what happens when you reach negative values, leading to some unintended consequences:

-Negative Gain Physical As Extra Elemental Damage.

-Negative Area of Effect to Self-Curse with Temporal Chains without Blasphemy Downside.

-Zero Mana Allowing you to reserve infinite auras in Scourge League.

How This Works

-Reflection of Kalandra allows us to get -60% Vaal Skill Effect Duration on Amulets.

-You can get -25% on the Tree and -15% on the new Dusk Ring.

-Most people were playing this with Vaal Storm Call as Storm Call actually benefits from Reduced Ruation.

-Theoretically, -100% Duration means the Vaal Lightning Strike should not work, but in this case, it lasts forever, meaning INFINITE DPS.

Will Other Vaal Skills Work

Tested out with other Vaal Skills, but only Vaal Lightning Strike allows it to be completely broken.

VEQ->Turns into normal EQ. (no waves)

VSpark->Cast goes instant but proj instantly despawn.

VSC->Can’t really tell tbh, might be only 1 hit or all at the same time.

VRF->You just take dmg, nothing else.

VBV->Only last for a couple “ticks”.

Purities->Don’t work.

VGH->Cage stays for a short duration.(fixed min duration?)

VCYC->Doesn’t do anything either.

VDS-> Clones despawn instantly.

VCS->Lasts a very short duration.

Final Tips

It's most probably spaghetti code. Duration is probably counted per tick starting from 0 until it hits the actual duration, and my theory is since there will always be a tiny discrepancy between tick update count and time elapsed, the game skips checking the 0-second duration and just keeps going and checking, finding out it hasn't reached the duration and keeps going.

It could also be a divide by 0 issues or a differentia issue where the game expects the differentia between duration and time elapsed to get smaller and waits until the differentia switches signs, but since the duration is 0, it never does and so stays forever. So probably this is something very much baked into the fundamental code of duration counting and they'll have to fix that based on how organized GGG's code is, this could be a problem to fix lmao. Changing fundamental things always results in a billion bugs showing up. Why it only really works with VLS? It could be something related to projectiles specifically and the duration of projectile shooting entities.

-This is definitely getting fixed as soon as GGG gets back to the office.

-Having the ability to potentially crash the servers has always been a huge red flag as it allows rollbacks in crafting.

-Could try doing Simulacrums with it and see how many reward waves as everything would instantly die.

-5 Ways might reach record number of monsters with perfect resets.

-Kind of crazy GGG did not test negative values when the whole league was designed around being able to get negative value on certain niche stats.

-Hateforge kind of works with this new Amulet mod.

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