After running a few missions in Scorched Desert, I’ve found that the Crystallized Flame doesn’t damage environmental objects (like barrels, locks, or the train’s coupling).
At the same time, Crystallized Blaze still works and damages the same objects.
I’ve done the same quests about 3 days ago, and everything was fine, so it might have started to occur after that restart.
Ground Target abilities have never damaged environmental objects going all the way back to the beginning of TSW. You can’t target them with a charge, either. Not a big deal in SWL, but in TSW Trucker was a very popular ability and trying to use it gave a “No line of sight” message no matter what.
This isn’t completely right: GT abilities (like Overload) do damage environmental objects, just some Special abilities don’t.
Instant damage does work. Anything that does damage ticks over time will not work. I wasn’t clear.
There must be something special about Overload, though. Possibly because it’s channeled.
I don’t think channeled has anything to do with this. I think any source of damage that is either a proc or a dot will fail to do damage. Does Crystallized Blaze does at least 1 tick of damage at the beginning? Overload is being 3 times direct damage.
I don’t know if they do direct damage before the dot or not. According to the tooltip, it’s all periodic damage, but I’m not sure of the actual internal mechanics of the abilities. I’ve never used elemental in SWL.
That’s why I suggested that maybe it has to do with channeling. As far as I know, only direct damage does damage to environmental objects, but I was just going off of the tooltip for Overload so suggested an alternative.
The first hit (out of 21 hits) of Crystallized Blaze can proc various things, hence i think it is treated as a direct hit.
I can further confirm that it’s not a matter of ground effects not hitting environmental objects, given that not only does Flicker’s area hit environmental objects, it deals several times more damage to them than it does to monsters.