Patch: Doggy Miss Bugfix

You make a good case for this having been a deliberate decision by the developers, assassin -- I had not considered that possibility, and I think you may be right. Maybe it would be better to rename my patch from a "bugfix" to something else?

I personally think of Doggy/Golem more as part of the Bodyguard/TrueKnight category, which is why I thought of the animation handling as a bug. The change I've made will definitely be a nerf to Golem and a boost to Interceptor, so some additional balancing may be called for.

If we wanted to go the other direction, and make the existing animation selection routine more intuitive, I think I would lower Interceptor/Golem's evasion chance, and apply it directly to the target's Evade during the primary evasion calculation lower in the hit determination routine. That way, the pool of available evade sources would all be handled similarly, which would better explain why they are randomly interchangeable.

As a side note, one of the BNW beta testers, Cecil, just discovered a bug with this patch, so I will be uploading version 2 shortly. The current bug will cause misses against targets without any block animations to be converted into hits, followed by removal of statuses from the attack data, just as if DogBlock/Golem had intercepted. The cause is the `CPX` op assuming that X had been set by the block bit selection code.

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Version 2

I've updated the patch to reflect assassin's point about whether the code constitutes a "bug", and to resolve a mistake that was causing non-equipment misses to be treated like DogBlock or Golem by accident. See the update readme.txt inside the zip file for more details.

The initial post has also been updated with the current version.