Skill ideas need assistance

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GreenHeaven
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Skill ideas need assistance

Post by GreenHeaven » Thu Oct 21, 2021 8:34 am

At the moment I am completely reworking the DRUID to make him more evil because nature is hell ^^

The class is now called "Demonist". Basically it's a "fight evil with evil" theme, summoning lower demons, shapeshifting into council member, fighting ranged with crossbows. A warlock class, like a demon necromancer. (Goat pelts for the win !)

I am having a blast reworking most the skills to balance the vanilla druid which is very slow and boring, leaving demons summons for the last part (hardest mod)

1) I would like to make a ranged rabies skill. Either a curse or a crossbow skill. I know rabies is a null missile but so far I couldn't make it work either cloning a curse or a missile spawning a submissile.

2) I really want to use diablo's Bone Prison because it fits the warlock theme so well. I know it is a monster (boneprison1/2/3/4 in monstats) but I am new to monster editing and I have no idea how to make it work as a damaging skill. I'd like it to deal either physical damage when cast or timing it so it explodes for mass AoE dps.

3) I want to make Grim Ward a static totem with a small conviction aura. I know it is hardcoded to make monsters flee and I have been toying with traps without results, it is beyond my modding abilities. Any suggestions ?

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Cypress
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Re: Skill ideas need assistance

Post by Cypress » Thu Oct 21, 2021 6:12 pm

(1) Rabies is tricky, I've been unable to get it to work without using its default functions (srvstfunc=57,srvdofunc=121). One way you can get around this issue is using an invisible pet that immediately attacks once with Rabies then disappears. You could also make the pet cast the curse with a chance-to-cast given by monprops. Not sure if there's a good way to make it work as a crossbow skill though.

(2) I think Diabprison is rather hardcoded, I've been unable to make it spawn anything except boneprison1-4 and it doesn't seem to accept sumskills, so it likely isn't possible to give it skill levels (meaning that, if you can't tell it what level the skill is, then you can't tell it how much damage it should deal based on level). Using Bone Prison would be a lot easier since you can give it sumskills and aurastats/passivestats. If you don't like the larger prison shape of Bone Prison, then it might also be possible to make a tighter version of it with bonewallmaker using a low range nova to spawn the pieces around a target.

(3) Grim Ward isn't hardcoded in that way. The action of Grim Ward is entirely on its missile, which uses a defined srvdofunc. I believe by default this is set to 30 (the same as curses). If you were to change it to 65 or 66, then it would become an aura.

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GreenHeaven
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Re: Skill ideas need assistance

Post by GreenHeaven » Thu Oct 21, 2021 9:04 pm

Hey Cypress thanks for your reply !

Using diaprison & ranged rabies is therefore out of the question since they both cannot be used easily for heavy skill modding.

(3) I cloned Grim Ward. I used 66 = srvdofunc. So far it looks like the missile applies conviction for half a second, and the ward itself does nothing. Maybe I should use the graphics for another skill mechanic

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Cypress
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Re: Skill ideas need assistance

Post by Cypress » Fri Oct 22, 2021 1:40 am

Whoops, I should have tested it myself first. There are a few oddities, but it works well when they are figured out.
(1) You need to change the missile's function used, NOT the skill. Go to missiles.txt, find grimwardsmall/grimwardmedium/grimwardlarge and change their param2 setting from 30 to 65 (66 causes a crash).
(2) For the Grim Ward skill in skills.txt, you'll need to give it the settings for an aura. Set aurastate=none (any other state I tried caused a crash, probably because missiles aren't units and can't have states) and perdelay=50 (this controls how often it re-applies and how long the state lasts).
(3) Now you can set the aurastats like any other aura. You can confirm for yourself that it is working by setting aurastat1=velocitypercent and aurastatcalc1=-50. Monsters will be moving a lot lower while affected by the Grim Ward's aura.

With all that done, you should now have a functional Grim Ward aura that debuffs enemies.

Thinking about it, there are a lot of potential applications for this Grim Ward missile, and as far as I know no mod has made use of it. It lets you cast many types of skills using only missiles which 99% of skills can release without interfering with their regular srvstfunc/srvdofunc given behaviors. It could be used to stack additional srvdofuncs onto skills that already use one, or to add some extra flavor to otherwise plain missiles (e.g. it might be possible to make Ice Bolts explode into cold Static Fields or Fire Bolts into hydras).

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GreenHeaven
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Re: Skill ideas need assistance

Post by GreenHeaven » Fri Oct 22, 2021 10:46 pm

What a sick tutorial. It is 100% working now. Thanks!

It needs some tweaks here and there to make an original aura rather than using vanilla conviction. But the skill really fits the demonic theme, like the voodoo totem applying buffs to the witch doctor's party in D3.

I read again and again both missiles/non missiles function guides and there might be indeed a lot of potential. If you're planning to test other grim ward applications please share the results :)

Edit: With a short range of 9 and a small duration of 400 the skill is really good. It forces you to reposition all the time if you play ranged to lure the ennemies into the grim ward area. Definetely a keeper in the skill tree !

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Cypress
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Re: Skill ideas need assistance

Post by Cypress » Sat Oct 23, 2021 10:13 pm

Unfortunately, my testing only reveals niche uses for this grimward missile. It can't use synergies (it only knows lvl, ulvl and damage stats; it knows nothing about your other skill levels) and it doesn't work with most srvdofuncs. From my testing, these are the only easily working srvdofuncs:

srvdofunc=6, inner sight & slow missiles
srvdofunc=20, static field (lets missiles explode into static field damage)
srvdofunc=30, curses (this is what grim ward uses by default; lets a missile apply up to 6 aurastats within a defined radius)
srvdofunc=47, cloak of shadows (allows a missile to blind targets within a radius and applies up to 6 aurastats; lets you cast cloak of shadows without the annoying delay)
srvdofunc=51, mind blast (lets a missile deal damage in a radius, apply random knockback and apply conversion)
srvdofunc=61, confuse (lets a missile confuse enemies in a radius)
srvdofunc=65, many auras (lets a missile produce an aura)
srvdofunc=71, taunt (lets a missile taunt targets, note that the grimwardmissile itself doesn't move even if you apply velocity, but you could make it so a missile produces a bunch of short-lived grimwardmissiles in a row in sequence, so that it lures enemies in the given direction)
srvdofunc=112, moncursecast

Summoning skills (except for Valkyrie, Raise Skeleton and Iron Golem) also work, but the pet that is summoned must not have a leashing AI or you will suffer a crash. The summoned creatures can be somewhat scaled based on the player's stats, since it can reference lvl, ulvl and damage stats, so this is somewhat more useful than the missile func that spawns a monster (srvhitfunc=6).

I only tested a few cases for each, but I couldn't get any melee attacks, missiles or target-specific skills to work.

Also worth noting that, since the srvdofunc is defined by the grimwardmissile, you can make it so a missile that creates a random missile (baal taunt control) will produce a random effect.

Overall, it could be fun to play around with, but it being unable to reference other skills and stats limits its uses greatly.

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