Random Tidbits: Champion Changes

[Nefarius]

Most of the champions still function like they do in the vanilla game ( with the exception of stat changes of course! ), however a few things were fixed. Firstly vanilla has two bugs related to champions, when a group of champions spawns, the modifiers aren't picked randomly for all of them, the first unit spawned gets a random modifier, the subsequent ones aren't initialized the way they should, which results in the '1 + 3 champions' issue vanilla suffers from. In MetalStorm groups of champions are entirely random, that is, they're composed of all the possible champion modifiers in the game picked at random for each of them.

The second bug ( its actually two more bugs ), are related to ghostly champions, one of them has no influence on gameplay, but it looks horrible visually. Ghostly overloads the natural translvl of the unit, this is not an issue if the unit is opaque, however the combination of Ghostly + any unit with transparency ( like ghosts or willowisps ) will mess up alpha blending, resulting in a unit with black outlines. This mess is of course fixed. The third bug, also related to ghostly champions, the init code overwrites their physical resistance without taking into account their base resistance may be higher, which again leads to things like Wraith's that in vanilla should be physically immune to actually have less resistance then without the modifier.

With that out of the way, Ghostly champions are now regarded as ethereal by the game, (refer to the ethereal plane post for more information about that) rather then physically resilient.

The second major change is a new subtype of champion (alongside Champion, Possessed, Berserked, Fanatic and Ghostly):



These units have an elemental affinity with fire (not resistance), they have a constantly active blaze trail and an appropriate color, they were designed mostly as the opposit of the Ghostly champions.

[Rheikon]

Nice update, more variety and bug fixes.

[DemonicAngel]

How is a fire champion the opposite of an ethereal one?

[k0r3l1k]

i would think that since in many myths ghosts are vulnerable to fire, and in many games the only way to hurt ghosts or other "ethereal" beings is with magic, that is would make sense.

[Nefarius]

The ghostly champions, beside being ghostly, have cold resistance and cold damage, so I wanted to add something of the opposit element to make it less monotonous --- that being said, just making a champion with fire damage would be kinda pointless, especially since the ghosts also have the ethereal status, so I made it elementally affine to fire + the blaze effect.