I made a new and very disappointing discovery.
The damage absorption portion of Battle Standard doesn't work. It doesn't give you DA, and it doesn't even give the Battle Standard itself DA. You can easily test this by setting the DA value to 100%.
At first I thought that this must've been a bug that I accidentally introduced while fixing Triumph. I made a fresh mod that did nothing but ramp up the DA of the base BS skill to 100%.
No effect. I don't think that Battle Standard has ever given us DA.
This is the most broken skill ever. I'll see if I can't find a work around for this as well. I thought that I was almost done, but it turns out that I have to start over from the beginning.
In the meantime, stop putting points in BS. It's an incredibly marginal skill as written.
EDIT:
It turns out that Skill_BuffPassive can't accept the Damage Absorption parameter (The Battle Standard spell is actually a Skill_Radius that grants a Skill_BuffPassive to all friendlies in the area of effect). However, that class of skill can grant specific resistance to different kinds of damage.
What I did was change BS so that it gives you (physical) Damage Resistance instead of Damage Absorption. This is weaker than the original BS (except that this one actually works, so maybe it's stronger
).
I think that this works out nicely. To fix Triumph, I had to alter it from giving Physical Damage Reduction to Total Damage Reduction, which made Triumph a little better than it was supposed to be. By demoting the base Battle Standard power from Damage Absorption to Damage Resistance, we've achieved the same approximate balance as before (except now everything works).
I'm having some trouble getting the skill to correctly summon the higher level Battle Standards For some reason, levels 15-20 only summon the level 14 BS. IS there some sort of central pet database where I have to add entries for the newly created 15-20 Battle Standards? I have already created the appropriate dbrs in the warfare\pets directory and added the correct pointers in the Battle Standard summon spell. What else do I need to add?
Once all of the basic issues are sorted out, I'll make a new release thread so that we can more easily discuss bugs, balance issues, and whether or not we should consider this change "official" enough to add it to the upcoming fanpatch.