Hard to kill heroes

[Lord Esdin]

That's pretty good, like I previously said just determine how much HP you want it to have and let that determine your food cost, then finally fine tune it by adding or subtracting armor

1600-1800hp -->8 food cost

1500 or below -->7 food cost

 

[Reon]

8 food cost makes it pretty prohibitive to construct though

 

[Lord Esdin]

you can still build 5 - 9 of these depending on how much food is used up on other units.

Look, lets say you get the typical 100 food, 10 food goes on peasants (gold & lumber)
You're left with 90 food, now lets say you have 1 hero and some kind of a small standing army
Hero - 5 food
3 basic infantry units - 6 food
2 ranged/anti-air unit - 6 food
2 heavy attackers - 8 food
2 spell casters - 4 food

that's 29 food

leaving you with 61 food to spare

with that you could build 7 airships and that is quiet enough, realistically though it would be about 5 airships and 7 or so flying anti - air units to defend them against air threats

 

[Reon]

What I meant is if you need a much larger standing army you can proba Ky only build 2 to 3 of these, along with the fact that you need a additional 5 or so flying units to defend these from aerial units

 

[Lord Esdin]

I never said that these units don't need an anti-air attack, like the chimaera, I just said that its anti-air attack needs to be weak so that its not some sort of flying tank that can take down numerous flying anti-air units. So give it an air attack that does 20-30 damage with a cooldown of 1.5 or an attack that does 40-60 damage but every 3 seconds, I think that'll balance it out, also for obvious reason that attack type of this attack should be piercing.

 

[Banelingline]

My own idea would be having a unit that's designed to potentially be all-solving, with a Piercing or Magic AoE attack to run over most possible threats to it, something crazy like 3k effective HP after the block of armor, but costing a truly vast amount of resources and, owing to its damage type, being basically useless to deal with structures. And Medium armor units of considerable bulk. Flaws dealt with via a cargo capacity and Burrow functionality, allowing a game-ending move of getting three of them fully loaded with Siege units, then having them fly into the enemy base to lay waste to everything that could be sent in response. At a total cost of some 80 food for three bodies, maybe, and easily 3k resources.

 

[Reon]

nice idea. but it would be ultra OP

 

[Lord Esdin]

@Banelingline

That could work, but that's extremely OP and would need tons of balancing imo

 

[Reon]

@Banelingline

That could work, but that's extremely OP and would need tons of balancing imo

It would basically win all battles-not a good idea at all

 

[Lord Esdin]

Maybe, depends on how its balanced, Hey Reon are you still trying to come up with a hard to kill hero?

 

[Reon]

Yes. You have some new suggestion??

 

[Lord Esdin]

Well...as I have previously mentioned some time ago I worked on a project. In a particular segment you were supposed to get rid of a noble because he was planning a couple, now this mission wasnt hard, but after you killed the noble you pissed off one of his military commanders, who I remember from the backstory was supposed to be tough as hell. Now I just remembered some of the abilities given to him to make him strong:

A 3 level hardened armor ability (same thing as hardened skin)

An ability based on roar that raises armor and hp regeneration

An ultimate that summoned 2 powerful warriors to his aid

Some ability like storm bolt (damage and stun to the target)

Also a non hero ability that reduced damage from spells

Together with lots of hp and a group of friendly units this made the hero very hard to defeat.

One last note - if you have any kind of units summoned as an ultimate make sure they have both spell immunity and resistant skin, otherwise they will take heavy damage from dispell and can be charmed, doomed, transmuted, etc.

 

[Reon]

Thank you!

if i may ask - which of the abilities contributed the greater to the hero's toughness in battle???

 

[Spear]

Guys. Dont forget the auras. Devotion aura and ofcourse thorns Aura.

Thorns aura can really beef up your units & heroes if used right

 

[Lord Esdin]

@Reon I honestly dont know, the combination of all those abilities except the storm bolt like ability make the battle hard. The storm bolt thing could've been replaced by almost any offensive skill with little change to the battle. In fact I think I suggested to my buddies to have the hero carry a completely different offensive skill that would've allowed the him to damage multiple targets for less damage, but we went with the bolt instead for some reason.

@Spear First off any aura makes the battle more difficult as long as the hero projecting it has lots of unit it affects. (Meaning that trueshot aura and brilliance aura may not be useful in all instances) But one thing I found is devotion aura barely impacts the battle. If you change around the aura and make it really strong ( I mean like +6 armor to all targets then yea it's really effective, i mean i remember creating an ultimate out of a spellbook which among other things gave its user an aura that increased armor by 8, and that worked well). As far as thorns aura, it depends on the battle, in some instances it's really effective, in others it barely matters, think melee vs ranged attackers.

 

[Reon]

@Lord Esdin, thanks

how since I can see you're online, how are you on writing lore?

 

[Lord Esdin]

I never really wrote much lore...it wasnt my job, but that doesnt mean I'm bad at it

You trying to get help with writing lore?

 

[Reon]

nevermind, thank you though

I was wondering what sort of summoned warriors did your commander summon for aid

 

[Lord Esdin]

It was 2 strong melee units, obviously they had resistant skin and spell immunity...cant remember much else at the moment

 

[Reon]

that simple?

 

[Lord Esdin]

It was a long time ago, I cant remember every detail

I think they also had critical strike and a modified hardened skin ability that allowed them to ignore up to 30 or 40 damage 25% of the time. That's as best as I can recall it, you gotta understand I worked on this years ago

 

[Reon]

thats so cool, I never knew you can modify hardened skin like that

 

[Lord Esdin]

You just need to be creative and resourceful


Also you would be surprised how much custom abilities you can create with triggers

 

[Reon]

@what was your inspiration for creating the advanced footman unit?

 

[Lord Esdin]

?

 

[Reon]

The unit you mentioned you created in one of your earlier replies to this topic

 

[Lord Esdin]

Oh, I was playing some custom campaign long ago and this was one of those missions where you had to destroy a hero and his base to win, and it's a long way to the heroes base since you start off on the southeastern end of the map and I believe the heroes base was in the mid north. Now I make my way to his base and I've noticed there were these units there, they were identical to footmen except had darker skins and slightly more hp (i think it was 550 or 600) and had resistant skin which made them a major pain to deal with. I never encountered anything similar to this and it gave me a few ideas, one of which was the creation of the advanced footmen that I mentioned,

 

[Reon]

Elite footmen?

 

[Lord Esdin]

Something like that, I cant remember what their name was in the mission, but the concept stuck.

 

[Reon]

interesting, I played a campaign that had these hydra units, they were effective only against air and buildings. I had thought about coming up with something similar. but never got around to it

 

[Lord Esdin]

It was a hydra with one piercing and one siege attack?

 

[Reon]

no, it was two piercing attacks, but the hydra had an ability that did damage over time to buildings, like envenomed weapons but affects buildings only

 

[Lord Esdin]

Interesting

 

[Reon]

ye. I did not know it was even possible to buff or effect buildings before this, hey what was the problem with the hero abilities you mentioned??

 

[Lord Esdin]

The bolt thing?

Basically we had 3 different abilities all derived from modifying storm bolt, originally it was 2 but we had to create a third. The original two just had to do with hero theme, one was an a ability for a mage where an energy bolt served as a projectile and the 2nd ability was called heavy strike or something like that where there was no projectile so you had to be within 150 of the target to use the ability but it stunned the unit for 7 seconds. Now the problem was that we had a melee hero and he needed at least 1 ranged attack spell, so we came up with another bolt spell that fit his theme, however the whole debate was that it could not have a 7 second stun, but we let it do more damage in order to balance it. Also with these strength themed heroes you need to have the spells consume as little mana as possible because they run out and it takes them a long time to replenish it, unlike intelligence based heroes.

We had another hero and had a hard time deciding on whether she should have offensive spells since she was mostly healing and revival themed. I mean if you dont care what abilities to give your hero then w.e. but that was a major point of importance for us.

 

[Reon]

seems like a lot of effort for just a single ability

 

[Lord Esdin]

The people I was working on this with were nit picky about some aspects

It was a long time ago too...Seems like we had all the time in the world back then

 

[Spear]

@Lord Esdin

Was the project you were doing one of those campaigns where you have like 3 missions but they are jammed packed with quests and storyline like the dwarf campaign

 

[Lord Esdin]

No, it wasnt like that at all. In fact if I remember correctly it was originally planned to be 12 or 14 playable missions (not sure how many cinematic missions we would've had) but then once we got more involved it got extended to about 18 missions in order to fully conclude the story. The character design had nothing to do with the campaign length, its was just that we wanted some of the more important characters to have distinct and memorable abilities, which is not the easiest thing to create.

 

[Spear]

I personally see nothing wrong with using original wc3 abilities for custom heroes in a campaign

 

[Reon]

I personally see nothing wrong with using original wc3 abilities for custom heroes in a campaign

Creating new ability puts a sense of novelty into the gameplay, also it can for a lack of a better term make some heroes stand out, idk overall I prefer playing campaigns where the heroes have new abilities rather than ones where you just have the old ones reused-i dont believe im the only one with this opinion on here

 

[Lord Esdin]

@Reon Exactly, and honestly it was a really ambitious project, we tried to create all kinds of things to make it interesting, ultimately that's what lead it to never being finished, but hey I learned a lot about the mechanics of the editor and had lots of fun working on it

 

[Reon]

so on your project you just created abilities?

 

[Lord Esdin]

I did a lot of things, but my main focus was on units and abilities. I also did some triggers but most of those were ability related rather then in game events or cinamatics or anything of that nature.

I was not the person importing models or icons into wc3 if that what you're trying to ask me about, I was the person who tweaked unit's hp, mana, abilities, attacks, etc.

 

[Reon]

so just unit balancing and creating abilities?

 

[Lord Esdin]

Yea, that was my main focus, I tried some terraining and had some input on the overall story, but those were my main roles

 

[Reon]

you don't like terraining?

 

[Lord Esdin]

I never said that, it could be fun, but it requires a lot of attention to details and it also depends on the map you're making.

I mean the map literally shapes how the battle plays out.

What we did back when I was working on the project is first draw a rough sketch of what we wanted the map to look like, then if we all agreed to it my buddy would go and add all the fine details into the drawing and then he would actually create the map in the editor. There is a lot of stuff you need to consider when making the actual map. Plus on top of that you had to decorate the landscape with doodads and destructible to make it look nice... and that can be really tedious work.

 

[Reon]

I find terraining to be fun

yes you have to add the fine details . . . but thats what make it look nice and you get to see your hard work and feel good about it

 

[Lord Esdin]

Like I said I had nit picky partners.

Also there were certain things in the terrain editor that they were better at doing than i was. I mean I couldnt spend 5 hours sitting there and making sure that an area of some village looks picture perfect....that's what one of my friends essentially did