[Ganelon]

I've got the mod working as best as I think that I can. I believe that this is the closest that we're going to get to a fix for the Triumph bug. There is a download link at the bottom of this thread.

This was a lot harder than I expected. Every time I fixed one issue, two new ones popped up. It turned out that even if Triumph's primary effect had worked straight out of the box, it still would've been a weak skill, because the AI controlling the Battle Standard is as dumb as a post. I found a way to force the BS AI (an apt moniker if ever there was one) to turn Triumph on at the first opportunity and keep it on (the original AI would constantly toggle Triumph on and off, an effect you could actually see in vanilla TQ). The old AI would also "dry fire" Triumph the first time (the visual effect would appear, but it would'nt carry any effects). You had to wait for the BS to try casting the spell a second time for the effects to work.

The changes:
Triumph no longer exists as a separate skill. It has been merged into the base Battle Standard skill, which is now a 16 point skill. Triumph becomes available to the BS starting at level 5 (just like how Soul Blight gets added to the Liche King's arsenal).

The power curves have been rescaled to account for the new 16 point spread. The beginning and maximum values for the base Battle Standard spell and for Triumph are the same, but the middle levels have been flattened out to achieve a smooth slope. The Ultimate levels behave exactly the same.

The BS will cast Triumph four seconds after it comes into existence. This appears to be a hard-coded limit. I have removed the BS's ability to toggle Triumph on and off, so it will no longer arbitrarily turn the spell off in the middle of combat. You can tell Triumph is working because you will see the flame pulse effect radiating from the Battle Standard. Monsters will be affected at the bottom of the first second that they are in the AoE (i.e. if a monster walks into the AoE, it will only be affected when the clock ticks over to a new second). The effects of Triumph stop the instant the BS goes away, or that the monster leaves the AoE.

The effects really do work. You can easily verify this with the Show All Damage Mod. And yes, the -Stun Resist effect works fine too.

The Triumph-enabled Battle Standard is a real beast. On the offense, it gives you a HUGE flat bonus to damage (incorrectly listed as +% damage in Titan Calc), a substantial boost to OA (equivalent to about 11 levels' worth of Dex at maximum level), and a brutal resistance debuff to the enemy.

On the defense, it gives you a large portion of Damage Absorption (the best kind of damage prevention in the game), and reinforces it by severely reducing the opponent's damage output.

To cap it all off, it gives you +1 to all skills and knocks 50% off of the energy cost of any spells you cast while in its radius.

If you max this out, you can pretty much tank any boss in Normal. I don't think that's there a single pair of skills that have stronger synergies than these two.

Outstanding Issues:
There is one infuriating bug that I simply cannot squash. Due to some weird engine bug, the Battle Standard has gained a mysterious, invisible, extremely short-ranged attack that it sometimes uses. This attack does no damage on its own, but it carries the modifiers from the Battle Standard spell. This enables the BS to occasionally do damage to monsters that get very close to it. Simply standing in melee range isn't enough; the monster usually has to be standing partially inside of the BS for this to happen.

If you have been putting lots of points in BS, the damage can be enough to hurt or even kill weak monsters in Normal Acts I and II. Beyond that, the damage becomes insignificant (in Legendary, I saw a Helos Satyr take five hits and barely lose a quarter of its health).

This mystery attack doesn't happen often in normal play. You almost have to deliberately kite monsters back and forth over the BS to make this happen. Still, it's a disappointing flaw. I've tried fixing it by giving the BS a negative damage rating, or by adding passive debuffs to it that cancel out the bonus damage that the BS gives itself, but nothing seems to work.

If I don't find a way to fix this, and if I don't get any bug reports, I'll see about sending this file to the main downloads section so that it doesn't get lost in the archives.

I've learned a lot about TQ modding from this, and I've used the knowledge to make a series of tweaks. I might release a compilation of my fixes in the near future.

Installation:
I decided to release this mod as a set of raw, unpackaged dbrs. This allows the user to decide what they want to do with them. You can add them to your main database, and can write as a separate mod, or you can merge it into some other mod that you like. If you don't know how to do any of these, here is a step by step guide to writing the dbrs to your main database. You can use this as a starting point to learn how to do the other two operations.

1) Start the Art Manager (found in the main TQIT folder)
2) Click on Mod --> New
3) In the New Mod Name field, type "Triumph" (any name will work)
4) Click OK
5) Click on Build --> Build This will create an empty mod for us to use
6) Close the Art Manager
7) Go to the database folder in your main TQIT directory
8) Make a backup copy of your Database.arz and put it somewhere safe
9) Make a backup copy of your Database.arz and put it somewhere safe
10)Make a backup copy of your Database.arz and put it somewhere safe
11) Seriously, make a backup.
12) Copy your database.arz to the clip board (Control-c).
13) Go to Users\(your Name)\Documents\My Games\Titan Quest - Immortal Throne\CustomMaps
14) You should see a new folder there called Triumph. Go into it.
15) You should see a databse folder. Open it.
16) Paste your database.arz into this folder.
17) There should be a 1 kb file called Triumph.arz" Delete it.
18) Rename the database file to "Triumph.arz" The mod now thinks that the main database is just a part of the Triumph mod.
19) Go to Users\(your Name)\Documents\My Games\Titan Quest - Immortal Throne\Working\CustomMaps\ (notice the "working" field... this is NOT the same folder that we were just in!).
20) There should be a folder here called Triumph. Don't enter it yet.
21) Unzip the contents of the zip into the CustomMaps folder. The "Triumph" folder contained in the zip should be merged with the "Triumph" folder in your file manager. The raw dbrs are now loaded into the work space of your new Triumph mod.
22) Go back to the Art Manager and open it
23) Click Mod --> Select --> Triumph
24) Click on the database tab (it should be near the bottom).
25) On the left panel, you should see a green folder called database\Triumph. This folder contains all of the raw dbrs that you just unzipped. You can poke around and look at them if you want. If you want to tweak the mod to your liking, this is where you do it.
26) Once you're happy, right click on the database\Triumph folder and choose "Build"
27) The new dbrs are now being written into the database that you left in the Triumph folder
28) Go back to Users\(your Name)\Documents\My Games\Titan Quest - Immortal Throne\CustomMaps\Triumph\database and copy the Triumph.arz to the clipboard. The file should be slightly bigger than it was before.
29) Go to the database folder in your main TQIT directory. Paster your Triumph database into here.
30) Delete the old database.arz (YOU DID MAKE A BACKUP, RIGHT?!)
31) Rename Triumph.arz to database.arz the Triumph mod is now part of your core game and will always be automatically loaded when you start. You can merge as many mods as you want into your main database this way.

To uninstall, just delete the database.arz and replace it with your backup.