[General] Thorns Aura for Ranged Units?

[Yours Truly]

Basically, I want the thorns aura to reflect damage to ranged units also. I tried to trigger it but it doesn't work as planned. WIII generic Thorns aura ability only affects melee enemy units, as said in its description. Thanks,in advance.

 

[Jampion]

I think you will need a DDS (Damage Detection System) for this. Vampiric aura, thorns aura and spiked carrapace are hardcoded to only work for the weapon type "normal" (melee).
With a DDS it should be rather easy:

event - a unit takes damage
if(damaged unit has buff Custom Thorns Aura)
deal 30% of damage dealt to damaging unit

This is just an example and has to be improved obviously. You need to filter, that it only affects attacks (which will also avoid infinite loops, because thorns damage won't be attacks).

 

[I-MASS-FIENDS]

You could also try tweaking the "Defend" ability that the Human Footman has in normal games. Change the % chance to 100% then tweak the numbers a bit? That might allow you to simulate a ranged thorns aura and it might be the easiest solution. That could work for a single unit but I have no idea how you would make it an aura though...

 

[Kaijyuu]

Unfortunately Defend *only* works with the piercing damage type. Not suitable for any map that uses more than 1 damage type with their ranged units.

 

[Yours Truly]

I think you will need a DDS (Damage Detection System) for this. Vampiric aura, thorns aura and spiked carrapace are hardcoded to only work for the weapon type "normal" (melee).
With a DDS it should be rather easy:

event - a unit takes damage
if(damaged unit has buff Custom Thorns Aura)
deal 30% of damage dealt to damaging unit

This is just an example and has to be improved obviously. You need to filter, that it only affects attacks (which will also avoid infinite loops, because thorns damage won't be attacks).

tried that with Bribe's DDS. Thing is, a unit takes damage event refers to any source of damage (eg:spells,basic attacks, even triggered/default thorns aura damage)

You could also try tweaking the "Defend" ability that the Human Footman has in normal games. Change the % chance to 100% then tweak the numbers a bit? That might allow you to simulate a ranged thorns aura and it might be the easiest solution. That could work for a single unit but I have no idea how you would make it an aura though...

Defend wont work, its a very hardcoded ability. Changing the chance to 100% wont change it, it will still count as its original 15%.

 

[Jampion]

tried that with Bribe's DDS. Thing is, a unit takes damage event refers to any source of damage (eg:spells,basic attacks, even triggered/default thorns aura damage)

An easy solution is to use his boolean "isSpellDamage" (don't remember the exact name). In warcraft 3 probably all abilities use spell damage (I can't think of any ability that does not use spell damage at the moment), so you can distinguish between damage from attacks (no spell damage) and damage from abilities (spell damage). If you have custom abilities that deal non spell damage or attacks that deal spell damage that won't work anymore.
Furthermore you can determine attacks by using a dummy buff placing attack modifier. Use attack of corruption for example. Whenever a unit takes damage and his this buff, you know it was an attack and you immediatly remove the buff. However this has a lot of downsides, which require a lot of work to work around them.
As the ability does not stack with other orb effects, you will have to trigger all of them. Also it does only work for non-aoe attacks. For aoe attacks you can use frost wyrms frost breath ability, so you see you will have to do a lot of things for it to work correctly.
If you have a map that is close to normal warcraft, you can probably use the first solution. If not a lot of work arounds might be necessary.

 

[pick-a-chew]

tried that with Bribe's DDS. Thing is, a unit takes damage event refers to any source of damage (eg:spells,basic attacks, even triggered/default thorns aura damage)



Defend wont work, its a very hardcoded ability. Changing the chance to 100% wont change it, it will still count as its original 15%.

What Jampion said. You can distinguish between spell damage and non-spell damage with the DDS. There's not a massive reason to not reflect physical ability damage (and wouldn't make sense if you can reflect physical damage from attacks but not abilities). You don't have to be that good with triggering to avoid the custom thorns aura from triggering itself.

The only weirdness i can think of is if your ranged unit has a physical damage ability that is melee; then you'd have to get creative on how to avoid your thorns aura trigger from picking it up.

 

[Dr Super Good]

It is important to note that Thorns reflects a fraction of the damage dealt by a unit attack, and not the damage taken by the aura unit. This means that aura unit armor and other reduction sources do not reduce thorns damage from the aura unit towards the attacker.

 

[Yours Truly]

I think i'd consider to using the orb of corruption method, since my map is nowhere near to being a vanilla warcraft map. I'll give it a try with a triggered thorns aura. I'll post something if the method doesnt work or having issues with it.

 

[Kyrbi0]

Defend wont work, its a very hardcoded ability. Changing the chance to 100% wont change it, it will still count as its original 15%.

That is not true; 100% chance will indeed reflect 100% of piercing damage (check my Hero Contest entry ("Windlord") for proof).

However, Defend (& it's sister abilities: Magic Defend (unused Spell Breaker ability) & Elune's Grace (passive for Archers)) are indeed frustratingly hard-coded on some matters.

 

[Yours Truly]

That is not true; 100% chance will indeed reflect 100% of piercing damage (check my Hero Contest entry ("Windlord") for proof).

I tried that for a scarab thing i did in one of my dead maps,i couldn't see the the difference. Still, I was a complete jackass warcraft editor at that time. If it does work, I may use it.