I fixed Triumph!

[ConnorK]

Nice work!!!!!!!

[claudius]

Does the skill delay the amount of points it takes to get battle standard to its max level. If it does then I think you should get triumph at skill point 1 since you are slowing battlestandards progression by the same amount that you are adding the new benefit of triumph.

Still, great work and my suggestion is rather nitpicky and wouldn't matter at high level once the skill was filled up.

[Ganelon]

Originally Posted by claudius

Does the skill delay the amount of points it takes to get battle standard to its max level. If it does then I think you should get triumph at skill point 1 since you are slowing battlestandards progression by the same amount that you are adding the new benefit of triumph.

Still, great work and my suggestion is rather nitpicky and wouldn't matter at high level once the skill was filled up.

Yes. The BS starts with its old stats, but it the incrementation has been slowed down to fit the new 16 point curve. This means that at levels 2-4, the BS is slightly weaker than before. The difference is very, very tiny, being just a few percent. At level 5 triumph kicks in and the BS is stronger than ever, even with the reduced base power.

Believe me, I agonized over all the possible design decisions. I considered having the BS follow its old curve and only having Triumph kick at 11-16. I considered having Triumph available at the start and being scaled down accordingly. I considered having the BS follow the normal progression until level 5, and then slowing down once Triumph appears.

In the end, I chose the method that I thought was most consistent with how the other pets are implemented. The Liche King and the Nightmare both have smooth power curves, and they both get a new (and substantial) spell at level five.

One thing that I didn't do was scale down the progression of the BS's health and lifetime. It just didn't seem worth it, especially since there's that annoying 4 second delay before Triumph can start.

I'm hoping that I'll start getting feedback soon. Are there any bugs? (besides the ones mentioned). Does the new BS rock? Do we need to rewrite the old Conqueror guides? Does having access to a strong AoE debuff pull Warfare out of the middle of the pack? Do any aspiring modders see a better way to do things?

Maybe when I get home tonight, I'll stop being so lazy and package this as a mod so that the more casual players can get in on the testing. If someone wants to do this for me, you're more than welcome.

[ShadowLich]

Originally Posted by Ganelon

The problem was that the wrong variable were being used. They were using offensivePhysicalModifier to provide the -%damage effect, and they were using the DefensivePhysical variable for the -resist effect. These variables are (apparently) intended to work on the caster, not on hostile targets.

Mostal gave us the link to this post on titanquest-fr.com so, as I did the same modification for testing purposes (using Fatigue bonus), here I am.
For me the problem in "the -%damage effect" and "-resist effect" is not the same since the second works very well in Study Prey and Susceptibility, as the 1st doesn't work anywhere.
So in my opinion DefensivePhysical is the right variable for the "-resist effect" (someone on the forum seems to have fixed that bug line though).

The point is that you could provide the same fix for Ravages of Times for people around here since it's as bugged as Triumph, because the damage reduction bonus as you say is not intended to work on hostile targets (typically a bonus used to raise caster damage).

As a counterpart of using TotalDamageResistance, Spellbreaker will be a KA class!

[ShadowLich]

Good work by the way

[qXqo]

Sounds great, I might download it for my warrior and Harbinger.

[Ganelon]

Originally Posted by ShadowLich

Mostal gave us the link to this post on titanquest-fr.com so, as I did the same modification for testing purposes (using Fatigue bonus), here I am.
For me the problem in "the -%damage effect" and "-resist effect" is not the same since the second works very well in Study Prey and Susceptibility, as the 1st doesn't work anywhere.
So in my opinion DefensivePhysical is the right variable for the "-resist effect" (someone on the forum seems to have fixed that bug line though).

The point is that you could provide the same fix for Ravages of Times for people around here since it's as bugged as Triumph, because the damage reduction bonus as you say is not intended to work on hostile targets (typically a bonus used to raise caster damage).

As a counterpart of using TotalDamageResistance, Spellbreaker will be a KA class!

I think that this is the first time that this board has heard about Ravages of Time not working. It seems that the French fans are more on top of things than we Americans. Thanks for the tip! First Lafayette, and now this. We owe France more everyday

I verified your claims. It turns out that trying to give negative Physical Damage modifiers to enemies doesn't work. I experimented with several classes of skills, and none of them accept the modifier.

The Triumph fix that I released is currently partially broken. Because of the aforementioned bug, the damage reduction portion doesn't work. I had used Ravages of Time as an example of a damage reduction effect that "worked" and based my Triumph rewrite on it

There is a fix. I can just move from using specific physical damage reduction to general damage reduction. While this makes Triumph slightly stronger than intended, there is no possible alternative. Specific damage reduction is just flat broken as an effect, and no cleverness will fix it. I think that even the most hardcore purists will be willing to concede this much ground.

It's not so bad. Having broad spectrum damage reduction is nowhere near as imbalancing as having broad spectrum resistance reduction.

As mentioned earlier, Ravages of Time doesn't work. It's very easy to see this if you actually try to measure it. This has been staring us in the face all this time, and no-one noticed it. I always thought that the deathchill tree didn't provide as much melee protection as it should have, and now I know why. I tried using the same fix that I used on Triumph, and it works great!

I'll clean things up and try to release a packaged mod tomorrow (possibly LATE tomorrow). The new package will contain the RoT fix as well.

By the time I'm done with this, Spellbreakers are going to be banned by the Geneva Convention! It will be a serious war crime to even have a Spellbreaker on your hard drive!

[ConnorK]

If physical damage reduction can't be applied to mobs, can you instead just give the character an offsetting physical damage resistance?

Should, in theory, have the same effect. I'm sure it's more complicated to implement than it sounds. Do characters even have a "physical resistance" or is that supposed to be covered by the armor rating ?

Edit: I just remembered - characters DO have a "damage resistance". It's capped at 80% like all other resists. So increasing this resistance, if you're at the cap, won't have any effect, while reducing the mobs damage would. If you're not at the cap though, it should be a similar effect.

[Ganelon]

Originally Posted by ConnorK

If physical damage reduction can't be applied to mobs, can you instead just give the character an offsetting physical damage resistance?

Should, in theory, have the same effect. I'm sure it's more complicated to implement than it sounds. Do characters even have a "physical resistance" or is that supposed to be covered by the armor rating ?

Edit: I just remembered - characters DO have a "damage resistance". It's capped at 80% like all other resists. So increasing this resistance, if you're at the cap, won't have any effect, while reducing the mobs damage would. If you're not at the cap though, it should be a similar effect.

I considered this as a possibility. The problem is that granting the player +resist just isn't as good as afflicting the monsters with -damage:

1) If DR is already capped, the bonus as no effect
2) If the player already has a source of DR (say, from Ignore Pain), then the additional bonus from Triumph wouldn't have as a good an effect as a straight -damage effect.

EDIT: I am retarded. Ignore item #2

[Ganelon]

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.