Hi, I've been playing around with the moon druid and discovered this bug where Tav would instantly die - no saving throws - when taking enough damage to instantly down you in wild shape.

Tav took 40 pts of damage from the boulette, whie in wildshape. She had 22 HP in bear form and 5 remaining on her humanoid form, with 38 being the maximum in humanoid form.
With 40 damage dealt there's an excess of 13 damage, far less than 38, which is what would be required for an instant kill as in the 5th Edition rules.

here's a video clip. I could reproduce the bug pretty consistently.

https://www.veed.io/view/5ebe656d-82b7-43de-8c5e-95275088ce0f?sharingWidget=true&panel=share

Interesting. I wondered whether the game might actually be recording multiple hits against your Tav that exhausted their 27 effective HP and then their three saving throws. There are lots of damage numbers flying around in your vid and in the bit of the combat log you show there seems to be 6 slashing damage before the 40 damage that finishes your Tav off?

Is that definitely not what’s happening? I didn’t notice a problem with insta-death in my own moon druid playthrough, but then I might just not have been paying enough attention.

Some of those numbers belong to Shadowheart, so it's not as many on Tav as it looks.
There's 8, 6 and 40 going at Tav. 8(acid) and 6(slashing) come first, which even combined would not have been enough to drop the wildshape. 22-8-6=8 in wildshape- 8+5=13 - 40 = -27. Still not enough for an instant kill.
Prior to the 40 piercing damage Tav was still in wildshape and wasn't rolling death saves.

the fall damage is what killed your Tav... that fight is buggy when characters get trapped against terrain [a well recorded issue]

you say you can recreat the problem... have you managed it in other areas/ fights?

I could/tried only recreate it with the bulette. Nothing else does that kind of damage.
Same thing happened in other positions, for instance when Tav was downstairs, where Astorion is in the video.
It didn't seem like Tav was trapped in any of those scenarios. Especially downstairs she was stationed rather spaciously.

Also you might be able to see it in the video briefly it says in the log "Tav fell to a lethal blow", which doesn't sound like falling damage to me but this could be a generic message.

On another note, if it would've been falling damage I think Laezel and Shadowheart would've gotten killed too. Those two only ever were downed, no matter how many times I tried.

yes you can't fly away because the terrain stops you but it is fall damage... appied by script, another area you would be able to do something like this is the windmill fight [another scripted battle, easy to bust]

That still doesn't explain Laezel and Shadowheart not dying and only going unconscious from the same attack. Which was a pretty consistent, just so happens that in the recorded video example laezel was missed.

I'd test changing back to human form to see how that changes the result ... The bear has a prone effect which could be effecting the outcome

What is scripted is the bug pops up tossing everyone away ... The real problem is it's random location of that battle

Or alternatively, you could submit a save with your dead Tav explaining what went wrong to Larian support if you can be bothered. Sounds like you’ve already spent a fair bit of time trying to work out what’s going wrong here, and it may not be worth investing more if they can confirm this is down to a known bug!

i can clearly be bothered to test and report bugs... what i don't have is any examples of Larian testing bugs people send in or actually just telling us what should or should not happen so we know the boss didn't say roll with it

they have the same skills i do... i grant you they have background access but they also have a boss telling them to hit this deadline with Owlbears, Playstation etc where as i can take my time to read the game code and test different outcomes for my own shits and giggles

That suggestion was to the OP rather than you! If investigating bugs is your bag then I by no means meant to suggest you shouldn’t.

But usually when I report a bug to Larian support they’ll respond and let me know if it’s a known issue, and frankly if it is then I personally am not going to spend time testing it further myself. If the OP is like me in that, they might want to find out if the bug is already under analysis before they spend any longer on it.