I’m not really sure what’s going on here… but I encountered 4 flaming eyes in a certain part of my game map. After weathering their blindness attacks and eventually escaping them, I blindly grope my way to my safehouse, and I try to wait out the blindness and return to business as usual…
1800 heartbeats, nothing.
Another 1800 heartbeats… nothing.
Tired now, so sleep for the night… still blind.
Eventually I cheated to cure it with a royal jelly, but I’m not seeing anything that would suggest blindness should ever become a permanent thing that needs to be cured through such extreme measures… and so here I am!
Looking up blindness, it SHOULD only last 20 turns with the teleglow that those eyes infect you with – and that’s after 4 in-game hours… with a 1 in 10000 chance. Instead I’m getting insta-blinded – sometimes up to 7 times per space moved – and the blindness isn’t going away at all, even after Teleglow disappears. So what gives? What’s going on?
As a side note, this isn’t the first time I’ve run into these guys. It’s just the first time the blindness has persisted more than a few turns. I’m still not quite sure how I’m supposed to fight the darn things when they blind me from 900 yards away, but that’s not really the issue here.
Yes, sniper rifle is the way I do it as well. I carry one around in my 4x4 boot for just this reason.
I did hear people talk about using a blindfold to protect yourself; apparently they can’t actually target you if you are already blind but I’m not sure if that’s true. I do know that they ignore NPCs and just got me with their nasty ass beam though. A shot selection of 5 and they will unerringly hit me over and over again…
Perhaps a chance of going blind at a radius around them as if to imply the attack being stronger at close range than at a distance. Further out. The less chance of harm.
Right now, I think what happened is that the blindness effect stacked like… several hundred times while I was bumping into objects. Once you’ve been blinded, it probably shouldn’t be able to keep stacking blindness on you, since you can no longer see the light, or whatever it’s doing. And it certainly shouldn’t be able to hit you with it 7 times in a row.
Why wouldn’t blindness attacks necessarily stack? Depending on the nature of the attack, maybe temporary blindness is just a temporary result of a few attacks, but cumulative attacks would cause permanent damage. The optic nerve is a large nerve behind essentially a focusing lens and a sack of fluid. Damage to any of the three could cause vision problems/loss if severe enough.
See, that makes sense when you’re being blinded by something physical. Get whacked in the eyes hard enough and you’re going to stay blind.
But the flaming eye isn’t physically hitting your eyes. It’s making little flashy lights appear in front of your face, rendering you blind for a certain amount of time.
A flashbang will render you blind for a few seconds/minutes (I don’t know, I’ve never been hit by an actual flashbang). For the sake of argument, let’s assume they render you blind for 10 seconds.
Now if someone throws seven flashbangs at you in quick succession, are you going to be blind for 70 seconds? Probably not. One, after the first attack, you’re going to instinctively close/cover your eyes. The next six probably wont affect you at all except for deafening blasts. Two, even if they did stack, you’d probably get diminishing returns, once the optic nerve had already been overloaded.
“See, that makes sense when you’re being blinded by something physical. Get whacked in the eyes hard enough and you’re going to stay blind.”
Glance directly at the sun for a moment. Your vision is affected but will return to normal. Look at it continually and your retinas burn and you can be blinded permanently. No physical contact, and who knows what kind of radiation the bots are pumping out.
See, there’s the weak point in your reasoning: PC goes blind as soon as flaming eye attacks him/her. Kinda hard to look at something, continually or not, if you are already blind.
I believe you missed my point. I was making a point that physical contact wasn’t needed to be blinded.
The mechanics of being blinded by the sun and being blinded by a robot are totally different. While the player may see a flash before going blind, is it just light being shone at them? Is there some sort of radiation or something else as well? If so, the temporary blindness of a single blast could continue to stack or become permanent with repeated attacks.
Contrary to popular belief, there are no different “kinds” of radiation. It’s all particles of different wavelengths, no more, no less.
As for “something else”, well, if we get a Word of God that Flaming eyes are able to somehow magically blind us while we’re already blind, okay. Until then, blinding people who are already blind is nonsense.
It is magic if the source of affliction blocks its application to sensory organs with its first application but still somehow afflicts them more times even if it, by definition, cannot (mundane explanation: you cannot see the flaming eye while blind so how can it blind you if it only can do it if you see it, which you cannot after the first glance).
If there is some form of radiation used in it’s attack and not just a bright flash, then it can indeed continue to cause damage to tissue regardless if you can see it or not.
As I mentioned before, if it’s a combination of a flash of light and something else like radiation, then a flash burn from the light would provide the immediate blindness which could be temporary while radiation could cause permanent damage in sufficient amounts
It doesn’t explain how it stacks blindness duration in equivalent amount per turn. The thing you are describing would be “get blinded initially for X turns, and if you don’t get away in Y turns you are blinded permanently”. It doesn’t work like this in-game.
About the “permanent” part:
As @kwahn stated him/herself, it was probably not really permanent, but instead “a very long time”, since it got stacked multiple times, similar to Permanent Shakes. It probably would have worn itself off, given enough time (whatever “enough” would have been).
As for “blindness shouldn’t stack”:
While I don’t have any background in “eye science” or experience with flash grenades, I think it would be possible to stack the effect (although probably not 1 grenade = 5 seconds, 2 grenades = 10 seconds …).
I’ve once got (temporary) blinded by a magnesium fire and suffered from blindness longer than a colleague who was exposed to it for a shorter period.
As for the “you would close your eyes” argument: Our lid is actually pretty weak and lets enough light pass to blind you given a strong enough flash. Covering your eyes with a body part or using a blindfold however is a different story.
Light. Sorry, you made me do it .
Sunlight, just as @Sediment wrote, to be exact. It contains “generic” light (as in; visible wavelengths) strong enough to blind you temporarily and UV-light which will cause incurable damage to your eye if it’s exposed long enough to it.
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