re: Demigods versus Demigod

Bad habit really. I can never remember which one it is. Plus the game is about a group of Demigods who are trying to become a new god. It's just like Occulus or Oculus, which is it? (For amusement value, GPG used both.)

Edit:

The correct answer is Oculus. Which means Morpheas is wrong.

Thanks, morpheus.

You're still doing it. 

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WARNING - Subjective bugfix follows

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Armor and Damage types

ArmorTypes.lua

Structure is the only ArmorType that takes non-standard damage from all weapon types, and the only one for that is for Artillery (which deal 2x damage).

Artillery weapons are as follows:

- Rook's Trebuchet (level 8 upgrade - does a whopping 500 damage per shot to towers!)

- Trebuchet's on Fortresses (with upgrade)

- Catapults

- Giants

This has the rather noticeable lack of the Siege Archer idols, and the surprising existence for Giants. 

SiegeArcher01:

            DamageType = 'Normal',

What I suggest is:

1) Giants lose their Artillery DamageType. They aren't really artillery units :-/

2) Siege Idols gain the Artillery DamageType. This borders on overpowered, however, so to balance it, halve their damage. Now they do less damage to demigods, normal (artillery) damage to structures. 

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DA does not respond after using WarpStrike:

FollowThroughTime = 0.3,

All four levels of WarpStrike have a .3 FollowThroughTime.  

Follow Through for abilities below. Note that changing forms { UB: Ooze, Reg: Angelic Fury, Queen: Open/Close, TB: Fire/Ice } (with the exception of Reg's Angelic Fury) do not have Follow Through times and instead are defined manually with special logic. 

Ooze: No pause or followThrough penalty. Period. 

TB:

 - Frozen Heart: looks like .3 seconds for no abilities but you can move normally

 - Relive the Immolation: 1.8 seconds

Queen:

- PackedState (Closing)

- UnpackedState (Opening)

---------- DA ----------

WarpStrike - 0.3 <- should be .1

 Spine Attack - 0.1

Warp Area - 0.1

Shadow Swap - 0.1

---------- TB ----------
Fireball - 0.3            <- Probably for Animation? Followthru on STaff

Fire Nova - 0.5        <- Probably for Animation? Explosion radius or maybe flying back up to full height

Circle of Fire - 0.5      <- Probably for Animation? Putting staff back into normal position

Deep Freeze - 1.0    <- BIG DEAL! Why? Typo? They want it to be a 1 second "instant" cast? No animation for it!

Frost Nova - 0.6        <- Why you can't use Frost Nova I for escape. .8 second cast + .6 second follow > 1 second stun and 4 second 10% snare. Probably the time it takes for him to stand up again (animation).

Rain of Ice - 0.9         <- For Animation, put hand back down. Not a big deal since it is a .1 second cast and the rain takes .9 seconds to fall so that's probably why

--------- UB ---------
Venom Spit - 0.5

Bestial Wrath - 0.5     <- Why the ability is usless. It's only a .5 cast, but for 10% of the duration you stand there like an idiot

Foul Grasp - NONE!!!! This is probably why you can break Grasp (a feature I've never assumed was intentional because you can't issue movement commands since you have an Immobile buff). Should be 2.0 seconds or at least 0.1. I will also bitch and moan here that Foul Grasp should be channeled and if it gets interrupted or broken the stunned character should be able to move again. In fact, this is what it looks like should happen:

--------- Reg ---------

Snipe - .5  <- to stand back up

Mark of the Betrayer - .9 <- Possibly similar to Rain of Ice. It's a .1 second cast time but they want it to "act" like a 1 second ability cast

Angelic Fury - 1.5    <- Animation Enable

Angelic Fury Off - 1.0 <- Animation Disable

Explosive Mine - NONE <- probably should be .1

--------- Oak ---------

Shield - .7

Penitence - .7

Surge of Faith - .5

Raise Dead Ward - .5

--------- Occ ---------

ChainLighting - .2 <- Probably animation (putting hand back down)

Blast Off! - .25

Ball Lightning - .86 <- Maybe animation? But why should Occ care about Ball animation?

BrainStorm - .28  <- Probably animation (waving wand)

--------- QoT ---------

Summon Shamblers - .1

Mulch - .5     <- Probably animation (black curls)

Uproot - 1.0   <- no wonder this ability sucks

Ground Spikes - 1.5 <- Animation isn't that long

Spikes Wave - 1.0 <- Probalby animation

Bramble Shield - 1.5 <- Possibly "balance" since it is an instant-cast. But shouldn't be that long

-------- Rook --------

Hammer Slam - .5 <- Animation

Boulder Roll - .5 <- Animation

Struct Trans - NONE! - Which is good, we want to be able to cancel it with a movement command (unlike grasp... and note that when you cancel Struct you don't continue to deal damage)

Power of the Tower - NONE - could make .1 for consistency but the animation of the tower is seperate

--------- Sed ---------

Pounce - 1.2  <- why you stand there like an idiot after pouncing

Horn of the Yeti - .5

Heal - .5

Silence - .5

--------- Ereb ---------

Bite - 1.0

Mass Charm - 1.0

Mist - NONE <- Not an issue. Entering mist he is stuck anyway, exiting he should be free to move. Maybe make it .1 for consistency

Batswarm - NONE <- how much I would love to make this 4.0 seconds it should probably be left as-is or .1 for consistency

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Discuss. In general, I'm in favor of a wide-spread decrease in FollowThroughTime. It's extremely frustrating and I feel that it is quite stupid. It also is really quite asymetrical (UB has virtually no FollowThrough, DA can't use WarpStrike properly on a running target unless he is much faster, but Erebus suffers really bad FollowThrough on Bite and Charm).

For proper animation, I understand why there is slight follow-through on certain abilities, but I again, think that lowering follow-through for the majority of abilities would result in a much more fluid player experience. 

I think these qualify as balance changes. I think someone should collect all the balance changes that have been brought up in this thread and combine them into a new thread about proposed balance. I know, I know, I'm a stick in the mud.

re: Artillery

So, it might make more sense to consider that Artillery refers to Siege damage. The Moho engine didn't include melee weapons, so when they converted it over some liberties about function names were made. Giants have artillery weapons because they are the equivalent of heavy siege bots. Your suggestion for siege archers suggests that you just want to halve their damage against everything but buildings. I'm not sure I like that balance idea.

re: FollowthroughTime

As I understand your thesis, you believe that followthroughtime should be reduced to increase fluidity game play. (I'd suggest putting a version of your final paragraph before you begin the listing of the abilities. It was really hard to understand what you were trying to say until I got to the end. Also as a stylistic guide for this forum, I've grown fond of vertical lines, indents, and bullets.). Again, this seems to be a game balance issue, and not a bugfix. Hence I cannot endorse it at this time.

FUCK! This is why I hate writing long forum posts in these thingies. Ptarth harasses me about not having pretty posts so I write one and what do I get? I lose it all >

Grumble grumble.

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Anyway, so I found a pretty big issue with the Tower Damage citadel upgrade. Should go in 1.03. This is the Weapon code for a normal ole' Tower of Light:

Nothing wrong there, right? All it well~

Now let's take a look at Regulus' Angelic Fury buff:

So it Adds a Damage Radius of 2 to all his normal attack, and it have a -.30 multiplier to his dealt damage that as given as splash. a -.30 modifier = 70% damage dealt. So if he had 100 Weapon Damage after the DamageRating modifier, he would deal 100 damage to his primary target and 70 to everything around it in a range of 2. Sounds good.

Well, what if you don't define DamageSplash? It defaults to 1. So you deal 100% of your WeaponDamage to everything in your DamageRadius. That sounds natural enough, and it's what we see in the game when your creeps are spiked by the tower and you take full damage.

Now, bring up CitadelUpgrades.lua

So it multiplies Weapon Damage by 110% (300 -> 330). That's good. It Adds 1 to the DamageRadius (2->3). That's good. Means you can shoot those f'king Demolishers with splash as a creepwave walks by. Awesome.

It also multiplies the DamageSplash to be 10%... wait. That's 100% -> 10%. That's terrible!

I didn't want to spend 500 gold to reduce my splash from full damage to 10%! Why would I ever want to do that!

Proposed Fixes:

1) Remove natural splash damage from towers. Leave upgrade as it is.

• Pros:
  • From the tooltips, that appears to be the most natural and straightforward solution
  • Makes the upgrade a little more attractive, since splash is somewhat important (though 10% is nothing)
• Cons:
  • Towers get nerfed. That is far from necessary
  • Probably not used in a lot of high-level games anyway because it's not effective enough, even against the things it is supposed to counter.
• Balance:
  • Towers "steal" less gold since it takes longer for them to kill a creepwave. Gold difference between someone hiding behind a tower and another farming all the creeps on the flag is less
  • Rushing in with a Creepwave becomes extremely strong. It takes 5 shots for a tower to kill 5 minotaurs which gives you a free 10 seconds of damage with no splash
  • Minions become extremely powerful early game (think about monks. It takes 5 shots for monks to die and no splash). Now throw 4 spirits or a bunch of Nightcrawlers at a tower. It takes forever for them to die

2) Instead of making it a -.9 Mult make it a .1 Mult (it goes from 100 -> 110% splash)

• Pros:
  • Upgraded Towers scale a little better
  • Towers are stronger
• Cons:
  • Doesn't make much sense. Why should splash deal more damage than the direct target?
• Balance:
  
  • This upgrade becomes a wtfpwn to minions. More damage, huge splash. All for 500 gold. That's gonna hurt minion builds unless they put all their money into demolishers.
  • However, minions are no weaker or stronger without the upgrade

3) Combine 1 and 2. Halve normal splash damage, and make the upgrades Additive (50% -> 60%,75%,85%,100%)

• Pros:
  • This is probably what the developer's actually intended in the final product. I bet originally, normal towers had no splash but there were balance issues, so they added it. But they forgot to update the upgrades. The Citadel upgrades seem to make the most sense that way as well (final damage upgrade is 50% -> 100%)
  • Upgrade has utility (increase anti-demigod damage by 10%, increase splash radius by 50% and improve splash damage by 20%) while not being super powerful against minions builds
• Cons:
  • Towers are still nerfed
• Balance:
  • Minions become more powerful Level 1 but their effectiveness slightly tapers off if you get the upgrade (as it should be)
  • Towers still steal gold, but if you auto-attack very carefully you can probably mark them all.
  • Towers are still nerfed

I know thats the fun part

As I recall, LE wasn't always paralyzed after the bite animation. This was something that was added because I specifically recall being miffed about the new pause after an update.

Also, I wonder how much of a good idea it is to have ANY pauses except for animation. Not from a balance perspective, but from an engine perspective. Putting things to sleep is always bad as it has the chance to create blocking events. (I notice that the ones with really high pauses outside of animation are also the ones that get you stuck the most or drop focus from your DG for no reason) 

How many times have you used 1 of the listed skills and then popped a sigil, only to die, but lose the sigil from inventory?

Given the information from Exxcentric's testing, I decided to try out something obvious. I increased the effective area and knock back abilities of the metadamage part of post mortem. In essence, whenever something died while post mortem'ed it would cause everything to fly into orbit. The end result of this, besides being hilarious, was that experience was only granted by the unit that died to trigger the post mortem. All other units that were launched into space did not have a normal death, no experience or gold was awarded. More importantly, they also did not run the ondeath functions, they just ceased to exist.

My next test was to drop the knockback to 0, and increase the damage to 10,000. This caused everything close to the post mortem unit to be knocked back, by a tiny amount, and take lethal damage. The end result was that I got full experience for all units being killed.

In conclusion, I'm pretty sure that this is a bug with all of the metadamage abilities. When units are destroyed, probably when they do not fall onto the map's surface, they don't die, they are just destroyed.

This first problem is fixed by changing MetaImpact in Conquest.lua from:

to:

This doesn't seem to change any of the visual effects and does properly award experience, regardless of how far they are thrown back. It does not however fix the gold award. I need to add damage to Unit.damagers. My syntax to do that wasn't quite right, so I'm still working on it.

Looking around I've noticed several other functions also use knockback (they use the function AddImpulseEx).These will also need to be fixed to correctly kill units.

Before I do this, I'd like to confirm with everyone that anytime a unit is knocked back it dies?

Sounds good. I'll go ahead with this then.

So, after looking at it, it is time to make some people mad.

Should Knockback (overkill) effects instakill? Currently it does, however I'm not sure it was intended.

Consider Heaven's Wrath.

AffectRadius = 7,
DamageAmount = 250,

MetaImpactRadius = 10,
MetaImpactAmount = 8,

It deals 250 damage to all units within 7 of its point of origin. Then it instakills all infantry units within 8 units. Does it make sense to deal minor damage to units close to origin, and then kill everything (that is infantry) within a larger radius? Additional evidence is that the death effect of the knockback is incorrectly code. It makes more sense that the knockback wasn't meant to kill everything, just to knock them back without damage. However, then something was added to kill everything that was moved.

re:METAINFANTRY

Looking at the lua, I only found the following units classified as METAINFANTRY (aka can be knocked back).

• Reinforcements
  • Priests
  • Archers
  • Warriors

Which Demigod minions were you referring to?

re:Heaven's Wrath

I'm not sure that Heaven's Wrath was balanced for the purpose of farming. Like many things I think it evolved from a previous state without a lot of top-down direction. That isn't to say it isn't balanced or useful, but I don't think it was a directed effort.

re: Other MetaImpact Abilties

There are several that exist, Regulus Mines, Demon Assassin AOE, Rook Hammer Slam, Rook Boulder Throw, QoT regular attack, etc. If someone wants to look into them and make up a table with the metadamage effect, metadamage range, affectradius, damage, and if they reward gold and xp, that would be wonderful. I have a sneaking suspicion that some of these do not perform as intended, but haven't been discovered yet due to the difficulty in identifying correct experience and gold gains in heated battles.

re:idol monks & metainfantry

I see nothing in the lua to support this. I didn't do an ingame test.

re:Warp Area

I spent about 10 minutes testing this, but was unable to replicate the behavior. I maxed Warp Area (Warp Area 2 + Furious Blows). I did notice that get units to "fly" well the DA has to be in the middle of a large group of units, typically fighting other things. If it is just him and the enemy, they typically dogpile in front and do not go flying. I also noticed a number of odd cases where the DA would have more than enough available warps, but would miss killing one of the targets. I can potentially see how the DA would produce the behavior described by hedgie, however I have not found a way to replicate it yet.

re:minions and MetaInfantry

In-game testing reveals that monks, night walkers (vampires), and siege gunners are not affected by knock back. I'm going to assume that means spirits, shamblers, and the other various levels of idols are also not affect by it, since that also concurs with the code.

I'd just like to mention that there used to be some serious issues with DG's becoming unresponsive after an attack (Lord Erebus' Bite, Sedna's Pounce) They may have added in the long FollowThrough times to combat this bug? If LORD-ORION is correct in that the delay was introduced in a patch, it may well be intentional to avoid a worse bug.