Gartell's Counter

Just gonna start with tldr;
I'm pretty sure Gartell's counter ability can proc on Weapon Skills.

So, I came back to the game just under a month ago and joined a Sortie static doing melee strats. Its a group that is on the less experienced end, and is still in the process of getting Gartell and Aita down. Most of my experience doing Sortie before I stopped for the last few years was doing mage strat, or joining pick up groups as a Whm, so I too am learning the fine points of melee strat.
Anyway, I noticed that Gartell's counter hits could spike really high, which is no surprise considering BG states “Uses Counter in excess of 500+ HP per hit.” Gartell was occasionally hitting my Drk for 2.9k counters, and considering that I was meleeing in a hybrid set with -50% flat DT I just assumed that was normal, and that Gartell's counters just spike really high. A week or two later, I was on Warrior trying out a Drepanum Spiral Hell build against Gartell, and eventually he flattens me with a 4.1k counter to my face. I check my gear after getting up (didn't have EquipViewer running) and sure enough, I died in a weapon skill gear set that only had, maybe -10% to -15% DT. The chatlog looks like that counter corresponds to the last Spiral Hell I did. On its own, this is hardly conclusive, I use GearSwap and if I try and fire a WS before I have 1000 TP it tends to leave me stranded in my WS gear, having nothing to trigger the aftercast swap. But it got me thinking, what if the big counter spikes I was taking was Gartell countering me in my WS set? Since I'd come back my WS sets had drifted towards REM armor sets and away from Nyame, so that would certainly open up a potential hole in my defenses, and reviewing logs certainly did show the big spikes roughly coinciding with my own WS.
But the regularity of the big spikes I've been taking vs Gartell is really abnormal compared to any other mob that uses Counter (Barring Leshonn, but I assume they share this mechanic). Theoretically, because I'm using GearSwap, the window in which my WS gear set is exposed should be minimal due to the way it handles sending packets.
Surely, other groups are meleeing Gartell much more smoothly and most of them are not using Drks with drain3 stacked HP, and yet plenty of groups are taking him down regularly and safely. It must be on my end. We did another run with me on Whm and another of our group doing Cross Reapers on Dark Knight, without stacked HP, and they never got hit anywhere near as hard as I did. I asked to see their Cross Reaper set after the fact, and sure enough, they were using a ton of Nyame gear with stacked -DT.

So, the inklings that something was off and that I was consistently getting countered in my WS set turned into a hypothesis:
Gartell and Leshonn's counter ability can activate when a player uses a Weapon Skill on them, not just against normal melee swings.
It is already obvious that their counter ability is non-standard in that it doesn't show up in the chat log the way traditional Monk mob's counter does, and since Gartell's melee attack has been replaced by the non-standard ranged AoE attack SE probably had to do a custom counter ability anyway. So if they are doing a custom counter ability, what is stopping them from allowing it to activate on WS?
Having this counter potentially activate on WS would also explain why it is so consistently hitting me in WS gear. Having counter proc this way would specifically bypass GearSwap's theoretically instant aftercast swap, because the counter proc would, by necessity, be occurring on the same server frame as the incoming WS.

So I did the obvious, I built new WS sets for Drk and War that capped -DT. The difference has been night and day, I haven't been getting knocked around anywhere near as hard. And then the one time I forgot to use the heavy DT sets for one Leshonn fight, I got swatted in the face for 2.5k again. Cut to this morning, we did Gartell with a reduced group due to a DC and time constraints. Near the end, I'm in a fetter, just got hit for 600 or so, and I chose to Impulse Drive his face instead of just moving away. My WS goes off and I instantly die to a ~1300 counter. I'm dead in Nyame gear. Same scenario as the original Spiral Hell flattening, but for a third of the damage.
After all the testing up to this point, going down like that really felt like confirmation that Gartell's counter can proc during WS, and that it was time to bring my experimentation to you folks here.

In all the discussion of Gartell that I have seen on this site, I never saw anyone discussing the possibility that his counter ability could proc on WS. Its possible that I'm just not looking in the right spot.

So, all of that said, does anyone else have experience that can corroborate this? Can it be confirmed or disproved?
And if we can confirm it, can we update BGWiki accordingly?

Counters stop your attack, so your WS would do 0 damage if it could be countered (or drastically reduced if it had multiple swings/DA proc).

Likely what is happening is that when your WS goes off, it's finished server side, and since you are at or close to capped delay reduction, auto attacks are going through during the WS animation. The order of the damage log is not always in the correct chronological order due to message loading latency, so what's actually happening is you are still being hit by Gartell during the WS and your auto attacks are being countered shortly before WS or shortly after.

Counter damage is also proportional to attack, so if he has been in Wind hand mode, and absorbed atk buffs, then he will counter harder/hit harder in general. He has a triple attack auto attack on top of being able to counter.

Then in Thunder mode, he reflects debuffs, so if you've put Dia III/Defense Down/Box Step on him, he also hits and thus counters harder. His fetters in either mode also put a high DOT effect onto you, in addition to the Zisurru pulse, -296HP per tic. It's pretty easy to go from full to zero if you get the DOT effect, into a Triple Attack, into a counter.

But like I said earlier, autos start to happen before you see your WS animation finish, so that is what is most likely. If he could counter WS, it would be super noteworthy, because it would make melee mode on him total hell. He'd rob any forward facing DD WSing his front of most of their WS damage.

There's a reason that most groups kite Gartell.

Traditonal counters work this way, yes, but even the most causal glance at whatever Gartell has shows that it doesn't work this way, WS or not. I have never seen a normal melee swing against Gartell deal 0 damage, let alone getting a "Gartell Counters X person's attack for Y Damage" showing up in a log. Also the traditional counter preempts the attacker gaining TP from their attack, yet I have never experienced, nor heard anyone mention having reduced TP gain from Gartell's counter ability. It really feels much more like Warrior's Retaliation ability than Monk's counter.
I'm well aware of the damage order in the chatlog being unreliable, and I've considered the scenario you have proposed, but there are issues with it.
If my auto attacks are triggering counter before my WS goes off, my WS would never fire, as I'd be already be dead, and should be in TP gear. The fact that the WS goes off at all shows that getting killed by a counter is not happening prior to WS. So that leaves the idea of dying to an attack round immediately after the WS, and there are two things that point to it not being the case.
The first is WS lockout time, it takes a full two seconds after the WS goes off to resume swinging, which really stick out in a zerg environment. When the instance is super laggy its much easier for this to happen, and that does happen in sortie, but that hasn't been the case for my recent testing.
The second indicator is that TP does not reset on death. If I WS and then perform a melee swing, and the melee swing triggers a counter that kills me, I should have my WS TP return plus the TP return from one attack round that kills me, but instead I went down with exactly the TP return I'd expect from a single hit WS.

I'm well aware that he steals buffs and that is why I expect to get hit for up to 2K in the future in a DT stacked WS set under fetters, but it is the 2.9k to 4k outliers that got me on this course of inquiry

How i always assumed it was, and that the spikes are crits, not sure about it working on WS but I dont think it's a true counter either.

Thinking about it ive never seen if retal procs on player used ws i.e w3 mobs or something, assume not since i never saw any mention of it and not to say gartell cant be different anyway

He robs forward facing DDs of their WS damage not by slowing their hit-by-hit TP gain, but by putting their faces in the ground
I've personally been struggling with SAMs who reflexively position and reposition for Overwhelm, and it is a problem

I think part of the reason that this is coming up now, and not years ago, is the current state of WSD gear. Back in the earlier days of Sortie people were using much more Nyame gear. I came back to try out the changes to Limbus, and as such went in with a lot more relic+4, AF+4, and Empy+3 in my WS sets because they have bigger numbers than my R20ish Nyame gear, and I suspect a lot of hardcore Sortie folks who have been at this a long time just moved to R25 and R30 Nyame, so the gap in DT was probably less prevalent

More likely either crits or double attacks, or a combination.

If you get countered, you don't generate TP. The WS/JA delay is a couple seconds, but remember by the time you see the WS animation, the server's already processed it, so the delay in time for your eyeballs is shorter than that. It becomes more obvious on any really long animation WS. Go do Resolution. You'll see yourself start gaining your next auto round's TP gain well before the WS animation finishes.

When it's wind mode, the DOT from the Fetter is a Choke effect. This reduces your VIT to 1. This means you lose hundreds of points of defense, but also means that Gartell gains capped fSTR against you(this means you take BIG damage).

In addition to DT on Nyame gear, Nyame also sports very high physical and magical evasion, meaning Gartell's attacks are more likely to miss or be resisted. Due to the massive VIT reduction from Choke, this makes %DT even more valuable, but Nyame's defenses are 4-fold. It sports high raw defense, high raw evasion, high MEVA, and high -DT. The new Limbus armor can be very good, but you have to keep an appreciable amount of -DT in your WS set in any serious content(really no less than -25% and -30% or more would be highly advisable depending on your healer). This is why if you read about people's initial reaction to +4, a lot of folks were underwhelmed, and hoping for DT% augments or something similar on the AF/Relic.

Which hand was he in when you observed the damage? Perhaps he absorbed something that made his attack skyrocket. Counters can crit, unsure if retaliation can. I wouldn't be surprised if Gartell had unique version of retaliation though. I have seen people die without any log message, which I assumed was a counter proc and dropped packet, but can't say I've ever seen it occur in a WS

been 6boxing gartell since may, didnt know he counters. my melee method involves kiting on paladin tho, blu geo brd cor rdm all meleeing from behind

what is your kill time, and are you procing blue with a sc? makes things tremendously easier (especially when there are issues with kiting or taking longer)

I started doing Sortie as a melee about 3 weeks ago and started testing dedicated capped DT WS sets about 6 days ago.
What got me to start looking at this was going back and reviewing the log after Gartell fights, and noticing how irregular the damage spikes were. It was pretty clear when counters went off as they would hit noticeably harder than Gartell's melee attacks. Gartell's counter (Retaliation?) ability only shows up in the chat log as a normal attack that deals higher damage, I am not using BattleLog or customizing my chat log output in any way. If the counter can crit or multiattack, it does not show up in the log.
A Gartell Counter proc simply looks like
"Gartell hits Player for 2,952 damage" in the log
I'm not saying that it cannot multiattack or crit, but that if it can, it isn't explicitly shown in the log.

This isn't eyeballing one or two big hits, this is weeks of testing. I don't remember what hands on what day, because the sample size is simply too big and I should have been screenshotting the logs. The control is simple, the first two weeks I was using a low DT WS set, the third week I was (mostly) using a max DT WS set. While both groups show variation in counter damage, DT WS group shows MUCH more consistent numbers topping out at below 1400 (I expect to see a max of 2k or so) whereas the low DT WS set has been much more varied. While it still has the 1100-1400 hits, it also has the 2.5, 2.9, and 4.1k spikes.
Importantly, a fair amount of that has been on Dark Knight with stacked HP from drain3, which showed let a lot of big counters go through without actually killing me. And in those cases the log generally showed counter damage falling into tiers, either they would land in the 1100-1400 damage range, or they would spike into the 2500-3000 range. One fight I think I literally saw three hits for ~2950, mixed in with 1100 hits.
What this says to me is that either the big spikes are normally occuring things like crits or multiattack procs, or they are spiking that high because they were hitting my WS set that had low (but not negative) DT.
If it was the crits and multiattacks, then changing my WS set should have had no impact on taking spike damage, as the damage would have been about the same in my Hybrid set as in my WS set.
If it was hitting me in my WS set, then changing that to a full DT WS set should have removed the big spikes entirely.
For all but one run in the last week I've been using the stacked DT WS set and all counter damage, regardless of hands or fetters, has never gone above 1400. For the one day I forgot to select that high DT WS set, Leshonn countered me for 2500.
I consider that pretty conclusive evidence that these damage spikes cannot be simply chalked up to crits and/or multiattacks.

The reason I focused on talking about the times that counters kill me is that those are times where I can conclusively point to the set I took the hit in, because I'm locked into that gear set on death. I've only got 3 samples there because it is a comparatively more rare event. One on War in a low DT WS set (~4100), one on Drk with a low DT WS set (~2500), and one on War with a high DT WS set (1300). All 3 died with a single WS worth of TP return remaining.

Please don't patronize me, Vyre. Just because I've taken two years off the game doesn't wipe out the 12 years prior I spent looking at the resolution animation.
Any melee DD worth their salt is not watching the animation to gauge when they are out of the lockout period, they are looking at the TP gauge. The lockout period is super obvious when you are watching the TP gauge and two seconds feels like an eternity when I'm doing fast paced events. I know what lag looks like and this ain't it, chief.
As for Gartell's counter preempting TP generation from the countered attack, I certainly notice something like that when fighting a traditional Monk mob, so I expect I would notice when an attack round gives no return on Gartell. I have noticed no difference in TP gain rate between fighting Gartell from the front or from the back, and the only difference I notice in TP rate between Gartell and other Sortie NMs is simply down to the obvious stuns on thunder hands. Whether or not Gartell's counter ability procs on WS, it explicitly functions differently than traditional counter. If you can actually show me that it inhibits TP gain outside of killing a DD, I will believe you, until then I'm going with my personal experience which says it does not.

As to which hand he was in when I observed the damage, the most recent confirmed hit to my WS set was this morning, for ~1300 damage to my Warrior's Nyame based DT set (-50 generic DT) and that was while inside a Choke fetter.

Hard to say kill time, but we have generally been doing Darkness SCs with RDM bursting. Generally doing Impulse Drive <=> Cross Reaper when Sam + Drk, tried Impulse Drive <=> Spiral Hell on Sam + Drepanum War, and recently got stage3 Helheim for Impulse Drive <=> Fimbulvetr.
The damage spikes have not solely occurred during fetters, although fetters are where the big peaks show more clearly. I mentioned taking a 2.5k hit from Leshonn, for instance, who does not spawn fetters.

The purpose of me posting about this is not in order to optimize strats, but to talk about what may or may not be an overlooked mechanic

fair enough, but iirc fetters don't start until 3min which is a relatively long fight time for any sortie boss. every time he does that animation sucking in the air his damage increases if not procced, same for leshonn.

I haven't done sortie in over a year, but I recall being able to fight indefinitely as long as blue proc was landed quickly and no one was enraging him.

Fetters are not just on a timer, Gartell will also start spawning them based on its HP%. Its really easy to get fetters to spawn within Warcry's duration, for instance. I think they start spawning at 50% HP

SAM WAR WHM BRD COR and RDM or GEO. Zerg it, Asylum at start to prevent absorbs. It dies in like 30-45 seconds with wind hands. Thunder can take longer with stuns.

I'm sure other DDs work more or less just as well, but that's what we use.

I we are well geared, so you will struggle if you're just coming back.

We started with A/E and C/G. Once we were killing those fast we added in B/F and then last D/H.

For H it's important to proc. Not required, but it makes things significantly smoother.

We start with F-> G with 1hrs then do C->B->A->D then 1hr again for E/H. Generally get all the lesser NMs upstairs and nakaaul at end.
We don't do Botulus because we zerg fast enough and then AoE Regen+dancers after E to run to H

DT WS gear helps anyway because:
Outgoing packet contains equipment (pre or miscast)+action chunk
Incoming packet contains action message (hit, miss, etc.)
Next outgoing packet (~0.4s after first) contains equipment (idle)

That means you are not wearing DT gear for about half a second after you WS, or longer if you are one of the people who slam their WS macro ten times when it isn't quite up yet.

Swapping in DT gear makes you more durable.

0.4 seconds between outgoing packets? That is a lot longer than I had been led to believe, the way people talk about Gearswap and packets being near-instant led me to assume the time between the pre/midcast packet and the aftercast packet would be something like 1/60 of a second. The slower rate makes far more sense for a PS2 era game designed around congestion of large player counts bottlenecked by 56k modems.

In any case, there is a way to conclusively test if Gartell's counter can proc on incoming weapon skills
Since it is possible to WS while disengaged, we could just have a tank hold Gartell and then have a DD WS from the front while disengaged. Repeat until a counter goes off or you get bored.
Probably safer to do against Leshonn, since it can counter too, but I think it has a lower overall counter rate, so would take longer. Also wouldn't have to go to the basement that way.
Could also just hold him and swing without taking hate to get a baseline counter rate for comparison.

Anyone on Asura want to actually do a dedicated test with me? I should have time tomorrow