I fixed Triumph!

[Ganelon]

I got Triumph working properly (almost). The fix was actually pretty easy once I started studying other similar effects.

As most people on this board know, Triumph is bugged. It applies the debuffs to the Battle Standard creature itself, which is less than worthless. There is a persistent rumor that the -50 stun resist effect works correctly, which is false. Triumph is flat out broken.

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.

I switched out the variable for OffensiveTotalDamageReductionMin and OffensiveTotalResistanceMin (both found under the Offensive Duration tree), and they work! You have to add a duration to the effects if you want them to last more than one frame (use OffensiveTotalDamageReductionDurationMin and OffensiveTotalResistanceDurationMin).

There is no ambiguity about these results. I ramped up the resit debuff to -1000 and the damage reduction to -100% and turned on the show all damage mod. These effects were very obvious and totally uncontrovertible. My dinky pine club went from doing ~20 damage to 200-300 damage and my damage intake dropped to zero.

Triumph is a spell that has to be cast by the Battle Standard pet to work, and it sometimes takes its sweet time. In fact, sometimes the Battle Standard's duration will not be long enough for the fickle creature to make up its mind. I noticed that the Core Dweller seems to always cast provoke the moment it is summoned, and I wonder if the BS AI can be modified to follow suit.

This isn't perfect fix. Triumph is now slightly stronger than it was meant to be. It now affects ALL resists and ALL damage sources. I'm willing to live with this. In most cases, there isn't much of a difference.

[PinkFrog]

Hehe... this kind of stuff gives me the instant-head-ache.

Nice findings and good work!

All creatures have only 1 initial-skill-slot. That means only 1 skill can be fired right at spawn-time. In the case of battle-standart its the normal b.s.-skill, which is obsviously needed.

They have set the secondary skill to be fired 100% chance at any enemy-approximaty, which should work as well. I havent checked if the skill is "instant"-cast, which should help. Generally the a.i. tends to fire skills only when enemies are around.

[Poinas]

Originally Posted by Ganelon

This isn't perfect fix. Triumph is now slightly stronger than it was meant to be. It now affects ALL resists and ALL damage sources. I'm willing to live with this. In most cases, there isn't much of a difference.

If it affects all resists then it is still broken. Are you saying it lowers all resistances..by how much? If it lowers life reduction and vitality, then it is completely retarded.

[Ganelon]

This isn't a perfect fix.

It works like a hit from Sapros. It should affect everything. The amount is by whatever numbers you enter, but the most sensible thing to do would be to use the old Triumph numbers.

What you call retardation, I call progress. At max levels, Doomhorn + Triumph would inflict 35% damage (versus the normal 25%). At Ultimate levels, it they inflict 57.6% (versus the normal 36%). If bosses have an inherent 90% defense against life reduction (I haven't checked, but the prevailing wisdom places tehe number between 90 and 96%), then maxed Doomhorn + Triumph does 12.5% and Ultimate does 25.2%.

You usually only have time to use Doomhorn once per battle, and Sapros can achieve better results in less time, anyway. I think that this is acceptable, and is preferable to not having Triumph work at all.

While typing this, I just discovered that Doomhorn has a hidden Total Resistance reduction in it's dbr. Holy crap! It looks bugged as hell (the maximum number is way lower than the minimum ones), but Doomhorn might actually already be a mini-Sapros! More tests are needed.

[Ganelon]

More discoveries!

I found that changing Triumph's DistanceProfile (found under SkillConfig) from "short" to "maximum" causes the Battle Standard to always cast Triumph at the first opportunity. Which is not to say it's immediate.

The BS always waits a minimum of 8 second after being created to start using Triumph. I have never seen it use Triumph sooner, under any combination of settings. I don't know why. I thought that maybe the base BS skill had a very long casting time, but a check of the dbr belies this notion.

But, if an enemy is in range, the BS ALWAYS starts after 8 seconds. I added a single point of fire damage to Triumph to make testing easier, and I never saw it fail. This is a huge improvement over the original case, where Triumph would frequently never get activated.

If all enemies in the AoE are killed, Triumph will sometimes shut down. If fresh enemies enter the area, it always starts back up, but usually waits a few seconds before doing so.

The flame pulse effect associated with Triumph is a poor indicator. Triumph frequently works without displaying this effect.

Unless someone can think of a better workaround for Triumph, I'm going to zip up the dbr so that everyone can benefit from it. It is up to the individual to decide if this constitutes a fix or a cheat.

[kalyan]

Well, this could be done a long time ago, but for me using OffensiveTotal* mods is not a solution.
Anyway, it's worth to pack it up for people who want uber-cheat skill instead of Triumph.

[Ganelon]

I did it. I found a solution that is very, very close to the original spirit of Triumph. I think that it will please almost everyone.

I had to eliminate Triumph as a separate skill altogether. I merged it into the base Battle Standard skill, making BS a 16 point skill (like the other pets). Triumph is a secondary spell that the BS learns at higher levels (like how the Liche King learns Soul Blight). The most logical place to start phasing in the Triumph spell was during the last 6 levels (10 if you count Ultimate levels), although it could be brought in earlier (this would mean flattening its power curve so that it still has the same power at maximum level).

The new Triumph spell is actually a modified copy of Deathchill Aura (called DeathChillAura2 and placed in the skills\warfare directory). This spell never appears on the player's character sheet (again, it works like Soul Blight). It turns out that Deathchill can't accept the -Physical Resist modifier either, but I was able to teach the Battle Standard a modified version of Necrosis and added that to the base effect. Necrosis accepts the -Physical Resistance mod just fine. I had to give the BS a pool of energy to be able to operate the spell.

I tested this by upping the -resist effect to 1000. It was very easy to see the difference. My pine club was whacking satyrs for ~3000 damage when the Triumph spell was up and running.

Outstanding issues:
Right now, I'm still using the graphical and sound FX of Deathchill Aura. Hopefully, changing these back to the old effects will be easy and won't break anything.

A neat side effect of these changes is that the BS is a lot more decisive about casting Triumph. It now does it in 4 seconds, instead of 8. This makes a HUGE difference and makes the spell more practical.

Some notes:

The game is very particular. Skills that work perfectly when given to a player can behave oddly when cast by pets. Class and template is important, but can only be accessed by Notepad, and results are still inconsistant between pets and players.

I've already tried all of the obvious solutions. I tried replacing the contents of the Triumph file with the contents of Deathchill (while remembering to change the pet_modifier file of Triumph to match). This doesn't work. It creates a bugged version of DC Aura that is invisible, has a range of touch, and inflicts massive combat damage on enemies (it gets the base Battle Standard damage bonus). I teid changing the class of Triumph from Skill_BuffAtackRadiusToggled to Skill_BuffRadiusToggled. If you can think of it, I've probably already tried it. I don't believe that there are going to be any significantly better solutions to the problem, although you are welcome to try.

[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.

[qXqo]

Will Triumph still appear as a seperate skill now it is merged with BS?

[Ganelon]

Originally Posted by qXqo

Will Triumph still appear as a seperate skill now it is merged with BS?

Not on the player UI. I removed that button. If your Battle Standard skill is level 5 or higher, the Triumph spell will appear under the main BS entry when you mouse over the base battle standard skill.