help me improve this unit

[Lord Alyx]

Just some units that buff themselves and have very good stats when fully upgraded, like the Oathkeeper units I've mentioned that have over 1000hp, devotion aura, resistant skin and can cast frenzy

 

[Lord Alyx]

Remember what I said long ago:

In fact if you want your tier 3 heavy unit to become even more powerful have Frenzy as a researchable upgrade.

Let's say you have a tier 3 heavy unit that has around 1,000 HP and deals 25-35 damage with 3-6 armor, giving it frenzy will transform it from being a strong unit to being a beast

 

[Lord Aiden]

It's a defensive unit, giving it frenzy would make it more offensive rather then defensive, a modified roar or something else which gives extra armor would be much better

 

[Lord Alyx]

@Lord Aiden ye. you're right, kind of a shame though as frenzy is such a great ability, I mean it increases both attack rate and the speed of the unit making it both stronger at attacking and faster at rushing......

There is no defensive equivalent to frenzy, but you can use the frenzy ability with its autocast and make it basically a dummy ability. When cast a trigger could be used to make the unit cast another ability continently hidden at the 0,-11 position. The other ability could be a modified roar, or an item temporary area armor bonus,

Also divine shield is something that comes to mind, someone suggested a negative aura, but that would be too op; auras cannot be resisted; it would affect all enemy units unless its specifically designed not to in the targets section


Maybe frost armor ???

 

[Lord Aiden]

Frost armor would not go with the theme, unless the thing is modified, but a great idea nevertheless

 

[Banelingline]

Looking at the Hardened Skin of the Dragon Turtle, there's a Chance To Reduce Damage value and toggles for whether melee and ranged damage work. So you can have them take considerably less damage from ranged attacks, but take normal damage in melee, or have a 50/50 chance of reducing basically any attack to a set value. Or it could be a literal damage gate, with a 100% chance to reduce damage by 99999, minimum 25.

 

[Rem]

Looking at the Hardened Skin of the Dragon Turtle, there's a Chance To Reduce Damage value and toggles for whether melee and ranged damage work. So you can have them take considerably less damage from ranged attacks, but take normal damage in melee, or have a 50/50 chance of reducing basically any attack to a set value. Or it could be a literal damage gate, with a 100% chance to reduce damage by 99999, minimum 25.

those are some very good suggestions, i will try some out

 

[cleavinghammer]

^^ Can the inverse be done, weak attacks do nothing so only strong attacks and spells take it out?

 

[Lord Aiden]

Back when I was working on Silventria, we had this unit called the "Lion Heart". It was a major Tank for one of the factions; had like 1580hp did crazy amounts of damage and had some abilities also

One of the abilities was this thing called "Defensive Stance" it was a variation of what @Banelingline mentioned, I believe it gave Lion Hearts like 30% or 35% chance to reduce an attack by up to 65 damage, or something along those lines

 

[ArchDuke]

look from a practical standpoint if you give it hardened skin. regardless of whatever idea is supposed to stand behind it. the unit will be very hard to take down with the exception of being hit by spells and power magic-type attacks because of heavy armor, so it will be vulnerable to spells and strong magic-based attacks but it will be very strong, possibly OP against all other attacks

On the other hand you can go with raising armor and making it take reduced damage from magic and spells. . .this make it less of a strong tank unit but it will be well rounded in the sense that it wont have as many vulnerabilities

 

[Lord Alyx]

Ok I was looking through some of my old maps, not exactly for this here, but just looking at the units and abilities; I've noticed a few things.

First off I remembered that there is a way to reduce damage from spells without effecting the damage from magic attacks: It's an item ability called " Spell Damage Reduction " it goes with the item rune bracelet or something of that nature, but again it allows you to reduce the damage from spells without affecting the damage dealt by magic attacks, also the icon is invisible; it does not display in the editor

With that begin said, you could combine the options previously proposed into one

First off Rem I believe you wanted a thorns aura type of ability with a buff that displays as a barrier over the unit, so like Lord Aiden said, modify thorns aura to only affect the self, and modify the buff and everything to Scarlet Shell, and give it whatever percentage of damage you want the unit to give back to melee attackers

Second give the unit the " Spell Damage Reduction " ability and modify the percentage to whatever you like

Third give the unit hardened skin, again modify it, and place its icon at the 0, -11 position in the editor as to keep it hidden, like Lord Aiden said

With this being done you don't need the unit to have a great deal of armor now, just like 5 or 6, maybe 7

This will make the unit resistant to both regular attacks and spells, however if the unit has heavy armor it will still take 2 times the damage from magic attacks, so although it will be strong against both ground units and heroes, it still wont stand up to heavy air units, which in my opinion is a sort of balance and safeguard from the unit being abused

Spoiler: Mechanics of Hardened Skin

let's say X is the ignore value of hardened skin

Let's say A is the attack damage

Let's say D is the percentage of damage the armor number (not type) let's through

Lets say T is the damage modifier based on the armor type and the attack type

Here is the formula for the actual damage taken by the attacked unit:


Actual Damage = (A-X)*T*D

Let's illustrate what you get if you get attacked by an enemy that deals 100 damage of magic-type attack to a unit with heavy armor, 6 armor and hardened skin of value 10 (X=10)

For armor = 5, D = 0.762 to Figure out D, use formula D= 1 - (0.06*Armor)/(1+0.06*Armor)



Actual Damage = (100-10)*2*.762

Actual Damage = 190*.726
= ~138


tldr:

Actual damage = (Damage from unit - hardened skin value)*(Attack type armor interaction)*(% reduction from armor value)

 

[Banelingline]

^^ Can the inverse be done, weak attacks do nothing so only strong attacks and spells take it out?

For this, you have an extremely low, if not 0, minimum damage value, so that attacks can be reduced to nothing (or close enough to it), then set the damage reduced amount to 20 or so. This will negate the damage t1 units deal, while stuff like Knights and Heroes, as well as spells, will deal a noticeable amount of damage. This does mean the actual raw health value needs to be low, for a tank, in the area of 500-700 HP, because most of the things that do anything to it are still getting damage massively reduced. The effective HP against even maxed Knights ends up well past 1,000, before armor comes into play, as Knights deal 43 average damage when fully upgraded.

 

[Lord Aiden]

@Banelingline : Nice idea, but this can also make the unit almost invulnerable