Warcraft II style Death Coil and Unholy Armor? (MUI)

[Cherrymage]

Hello. I'm making a Warcraft II Death Coil spell and Unholy Armor spell, but I have no idea how to make the spells work correctly..

Any help is appreciated.

 

[Nichilus]

Well, death coil seems to be point-targeted ability. You shoot projectile and it flies to targeted point, then explodes for AoE damage. It deals X damage which is divided among enemies hit. The caster is healed for the damage done.

This spell may be the easiest to do manually - make a dummy unit which appears as the deathcoil. When death knight casts the ability, save targeted point, create the death coil dummy unit and manually move it towards its destination. Once reached, kill dummy, create some special effects and pick every enemy unit within Y range of the targeted point. If 0 enemies are there, do nothing, else set damage like this: Z = X (=base ability damage) / (amount of enemies in the group), then pick each unit in said group and deal Z damage to them. Also set life of caster to caster + (ability base damage), since it does either null or full damage.

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Unholy Armor - as I understood it, it costs the caster some mana and it also costs the target 1/2 (of current?) HP. Then it creates a shield for X seconds that absorbs any damage taken, however things like polymorph still work. Can be cast on both allies and enemies.

My first idea here would be to simply use Divine Shield (basically giving a unit "invulnerable" flag), however then it could not be targeted by polymorph spells, etc.
So the ideal way here would be to use a Damage Detection System (DDS) which allows you to manipulate damage taken by units before it is applied.
The process could be basically done like this:
Base the ability on some buff-giving ability (e.g. unholy frenzy). Unit casts the ability -> set life of target to 1/2 of current hp.
Make second trigger which fires when DDS damage event is triggered. When it is triggered check if target has the specific buff. If yes, null damage.

 

[Cherrymage]

Ok, thanks. I will try your suggestion.