Suited Base-Abilities for various uses

[Mercious]

Hello,

i am very new to mapping and i am currently trying to design some custom spells.
Nothing fancy, basically i just want them to deal stat scaling damage and thus i need some simples triggers to deal the damage.

However, i seem to have problems finding appropiate base skills that are easy to strip down off any unwanted effects.

Example:
I want a spell that offers a target area, adjustable.
I took Flamestrike, as it does exactly that.
Removed the Animations Names, etc., set all Damage to 0, removed the Buff effect, etc.

Yet, for some reason, the skill still applies the Flame-Strike effect to target mobs, even though i have deleted it from the specific field in the Object Editor.

I removed all durations too, which seems to result in the buff being permanent instead.

Now, i cant find any further field in the Object Editor of my Spell that would indicate this behavior and i am left quite clueless as to what causes this.

Question: What would be a more suitable spell and what causes the buff to appear anyways?

Another Question: What would be a suitable spell for the same behavior but the ability to add a stun? I have tried it with Flamestrike, by selecting Stun as Effect, which did debuff the enemy units with the stun debuff, yet they moved around and attacked freely while being affected by it.

 

[Nichilus]

Sadly, spells are hard coded. If a spell applies the buff, it will apply it no matter what. You could for example put different buff there and it may change the visual, but it would apply the buff nonetheless.

For most (if not all) spells if you set any duration-like field to 0.00 it means "infinity".

Buffs are just visuals. They just show the description, hte icon, the effect, but they do nothing else. Just because you used a "stun" buff doesn't mean the spell will apply stun effect, because that is set in the spell itself, not the buff.

For a base ability I always advise using the "Channel" spell. This spell was introduced for triggered/scripted custom spells and as such the ability by itself does nothing but offers a great variety of options (e.g. by changing a specific field you can choose whether the spell is an Area spell, single target spell or no target spell) that no other spell offers.

Another Question: What would be a suitable spell for the same behavior but the ability to add a stun?

That entirely depends on what kind of ability this is supposed to be.
For AoE stun you could use the Warstomp ability and just change the visual.
However if you wanted for example an AoE Banish spell (in other words changing a single target-only spell into AoE spell) you would need to script it.

 

[Mercious]

Ahh yea, now that you mention Channel something from a long time ago surfaces in the depths of my memory - cool.

That's basically what I wanted to know, I really needed a base spell to base custom spells on and it started becoming a real hassle to keep running into spells that turn out to have annoying, hard coded side effects.

I guess the stun thing has been wildly asked before, so i will issue a search instead of asking about that now.

Thanks a lot for your help!