So recently I stopped my endless lurking on the forums and have started to join in. Shortly after joining in, I was coerced into making mods. Some very scary looking people by the name of Essence, Kazeto, Omninegro, and Lorrelian ambushed me, shoved poisened (but still quite delicious) cookies down my throught and told me the antidote would only come if I made some mods... Wanting to live a long, happy life of playing lots more DoD, I have decided to comply (note to attackers: Please find my home address and send antidote immediately, fingers already starting to turn yellow and my nose has taken on a distinctly drill like shape). So I am putting together a little mod based on the Seven Deadly Sins. Seeing as how there are 7 of them and skills can have up to 8 skills, I figured this was a natural fit. I figured it would be a rogue skill that any build could use, focusing more on melee, giving some utility, some of all the base stats, a strong capstone, and a decent amount of defense to help roughish types out. Because the sins themselves are all so different, the class will be a bit of a hodgepodge of abilities, but it's not designed to be your main source of damage or mana drain or what not, just something to fill in the gaps and give melee rogues more options. I figured it'd be different than a lot of the other "profession" based mods. Also, it sounded like a devilishly good time. I am currently working on it as we speak, just wanted to jot down some ideas I had and see if anyone had any good ideas to throw my way. I am shooting for underpowered (at least at first) rather than over powered. And since this is my first mod, I can use all the balance advice I can get. If it goes well, maybe I'll do a 7 Heavenly Virtues mod, focusing more on ranged combat. Rank 1: Greed, very small chance (5-10%) of Midas on hit, small (1-2) increase to caddishness (money is the root of all evil, so it's the root skill of the tree, the caddishness bonus should be obvious) Rank 2: Glutony, slightly larger increase (2-3) in stubborness (all that blubber is gana make you much harder to kill), ability, Hungry Enough to Eat A Diggle, spawns food, large chance (75%) to get level 3 or lower, small (20%) chance to get level 4-5, tiny chance (5%) to get level 6+, 45 turnish cooldown Rank 3: Envy, slightly larger increase (2-3) in nimbleness (gata be quick to take the things you envy from others), passive buff, Take What You Want (and if they don't give it to you, kill them and take it anyway), 20% chance to proc on hit, you find something nice that the monster doesn't want to give you, increases crit by 3 for 10 turns, stacks up to 3 times. On critical hit, 10% chance to steal a random gem from the target, Rank 4: Sloth, no skill bonus (being lazy gets you NOTHING), 1 resistance to existential, transmutative, righteous, and necromantic damage (you can't be bothered to care about those silly "exotic" damages), ability, Couldn't Care Less, self buff, Cease to Exists, invisibility and +75 dodge and magic resistance for 15 turns or until you move or take any action. 45 turn cooldown Rank 5: Lust, med bonus to savvy (like 3-4), ability, Everyone Wants You, very short term (5 turn-ish), single target charm OR smallish (2 squares around caster)PBAoE confuse OR single target pull-to-caster/force monster teleport (with long range, good for grabbing casters). Can't decide which to use, I like them all, both mechanically and thematically, but no matter which ability, small mana cost (maybe 12, can be reduced to 7 or something like that). If it's the charm, also smaller (15-20 turns) cooldown so as to not be spamable in a monster zoo or what not. Rank 6: Pride, med bonus to sagacity (3-4), ability, You Are Perfect, self buff, Perfection, brittle 4-7, gives block, absorption, magic resistance in small, but useful, amounts (maybe 3-4 absorb, 10-15 block, 20ish magic resistance), because you don't just think you're better than everyone else, you KNOW it (at least until some muscle diggle shatters your illusions and/or bones). 30-45 turn cooldown. OR ability, You Must Have Me Confused for a Lesser Being, reflect the insults back at the monsters, along with their spells and attacks, self buff, You Are Perfect, +50ish Spell Reflect and + 35ish Counter for 6ish turns, same cooldown. Rank 7: Wrath, larger bonus to burliness (4-5), ability, Fly Off the Handle, unleashing your inner demons. Short Range PBAoE moderate blasting damage and stun (10 + .35 burliness and maybe 2 squares on all sides, 1 turn stun to everything within 1 square), also applies self buff, REALLY ANGRY, bonus to crit (15ish), enemy dodge reduction (5ish), and crushing damage (5-8ish) and all attacks hit every target within 1 square, for like 10ish turns. 75-100 turn cooldown. Some notes. I specifically left the most useful rogue primary stats at the beginning of the tree (and therefore with the lowest bonuses). I figure you're already getting those stats from just putting points into the skill tree AND the point of the build isn't to make you a super rogue, it's to make you a more balanced rogue who is able to handle all situations. On that topic, I am very attached to the idea that 6 of the skills give a different primary stat bonus. It doesn't make sense for something like Wrath to give savvy or nimbleness to start with, and again, it's supposed to be about helping balance rogues out and make them less fragile. However, I am not necessarily attached to the pairings I mentioned above, those just seemed the logical choices. I also like having most of the abilities have click, but don't want to clutter the bar. I notice that when I play Rogue/Warrior hybrids, I generally have far less abilities than if I was playing something magey. Also, I just find buttons to click fun. Passives can be really cool and exciting (Avenging Executioner is a great example of this), but I am just partial to buttons. So yeah, please let me know what you think. I'll be around, working on getting my head around the XML and getting all the easy to put in stuff in first before I start tackling the spells. EDIT: Oh, and I totally forgot, left to my own devices, all the icons will be REALLY ugly stickmen or rage comic faces/standard skill icons. I am totally okay with that (I might even eventually try to tune them up myself, but I am pretty sure I will make it worse), but if someone was interested and wanted to do some very simple art for the skills and/or buffs, I would love you forever and give you cookies (if you're ever in Reno).
OH! And I had a question. When making skills, for the skill ID #...can I choose any number I want? Or asked another way, would 10029381123 work as a skill ID # or would that be too big of a number. And if it's too big, what's the limit?
You can just give it a name that will serve as an identifier. The numeric ID is kind of supposed not to be used now. Not that you can't use it if you really want to, but what for... And yes, any number would work. There is some limit, undoubtedly, but the value you proposed was still within the bounds.
Cool. I have numbers I really like, and I am pretty sure no one else will have used them, but they are 4-5 digests long. I feel that the ID number I ended up going with 13666 feels very appropriate
Been working on this for a bit (had to take a small break) but I have all the passive stuff taken care of. Now I just need to figure out all this crazy spell stuff. I am a little confused by exactly how scaling off of non-magic power stats works, but I think I understand it. That being said, I still have no idea which version of Lust and Pride I want to go with...will have to do those last. Any opinions anyone has on those two would be greatly appriciated.
Those are some awesome cookies. There is no cure, but withdrawal is what kills you. You need to keep eating the cookies. And for that you need a mod or ten.
This is probably a semantic issue, and can't say I've looked too closely at the actual balance of the proposed levels... but a single skill that makes you "able to handle all situations" is somewhat alarming as a design goal. Just sayin'. That objection having been spoken, the idea of a skill tree based on the 7 deadly sins sounds pretty darned awesome.
I guess I guess I sorta misspoke. What I meant was that currently, at least IMO, if you take mostly rogue skills with a couple warrior skills (which I do often) you either end up with a lot of utility without very good damage in any situation, or you end up with more of a warrior who has a little utility, and is mostly damage oriented. The idea here is to fill in gaps. Taking mostly warrior skills but like some of the rogue skills too? Great, this will help fill in some of the utility that you're missing. Want to take mostly or entirely rogue skills but realize you'll be lacking in good damage potential vs multiple targets that you would have if you took some wizard or warrior skills? No worries, this will fill in that hole too. Got damage and utility covered, but lacking in decent defense? Okay, you can turn to this skill to help there too. When brainstorming for this, I realized that anything based on a set of ideas that covers such a large range of human experience (these are the seven deadly sins here, they encompass all the bad in life) that the skill set wouldn't have nearly the homogeneity as say a skill set based around Kung Fu or being a Chronomage or something. The skills would each be touching on a different aspect of evil, hence they would each be doing something different and wouldn't, on the surface, seem to compliment each other as well as a more homogenized skill tree. So instead of trying to artificially forcing all the skills to work together, I figured that I would make this the sort of skill you picked to finish off a skill build, as opposed to one that you would pick to build a skill build around. Pick 6 other skills that are melee oriented that you like, figure out what you're build is missing, and chances are good this will give you those skills. It's not trying to fill all the holes (no real aoe knockback for breaking things, no teleport, for instance), but it has enough variety where at least 2-3 of the skills in it will be useful for almost any melee focused build (that isn't going full warrior in full plate, sorta thing). I guess what I am trying to say is that the design idea for this skill isn't to let you play the game using only this skill (aka this skill lets you handle all situations), it's more that this skill fills in the gaps in a build so that any build that uses this skill will be better equipped to handle all situations than a build without it that is more specialized. Edit: I almost finished the actual building of all the stuffs before I went to bed last night. Couldn't quite make it. Got 1 more big spell to finish off then I can post something. I am not going to have a lot of time to actually test it this weekend, as there is something that is terribly unimportant that I never-the-less REALLY want to do (Guild Wars 2 Beta weekend, YAY!). But I'll make sure it doesn't crash games and what not before I put anything up and then I'll do lots of testing on Monday and Tuesday.
You started here recently. And you are already modding. Well done! I drug my feet for months before I finally made Elvish Reality, and it is nothing more than changing a dozen or so numbers in one file that already exists. Pat yourself on the back and have another cookie.
Oh no, don't give me too much credit. I've been lurking on this forum since the very first day DoD was released. I think I even posted once or twice a long time ago about this or that. And I've been wanting to mod something (anything) for a while now, I just never found the communities of modders for other places to be nearly as nice, encouraging, or helpful (this page, for instance, is amazingly helpful:http://community.gaslampgames.com/threads/visual-spell-templates-and-other-quick-references.2335/) as this community has been, so yeah. Also, this game is just silly fun, and mods just make it even better. So getting to be a part of that sounded like a really good time (and so far, modding really HAS been fun...we'll see if that continues when my mod crashes repeatedly for no reason LOL). EDIT: nomnomnomnom...yay cookie EDIT2: Now I have to mod in a cookie that has dangerously addictive properties...
Question...we have to use things like ' to get ' to show up in descriptions and what not, right? Well, what if we are referencing an object, like say the Root of T'Char? Should it be <option name="Root of T'Char"/>?
After taking a quick look at the game's files, I can tell you that no, we can just use ' normally. Even the root just uses ' in the code.
Thanks for the info...I tried the &apos and ran the mod and it also works, and they are all in there like that, so I think they are just gana stay LOL. As for the mod, first couple times I ran it (without a spellDB cause I just wanted to see if it would show up in game and give the proper passive buffs before I started working the spellDB) it worked fine. All 7 skills showed up. I am not sure what I changed, but now only skills 0-3 show up and skills 4-6 do not...I have no idea what I did! Any advice? I also am having another (probably really easy to fix) issue...I did finish the spellDB just a bit ago...and it has no affect on my mod...like, none of the skills have any non-passive abilities...
I'd wager a guess it's something at the end of the 3rd skill tier. But without seeing the code I can just guess. As for activated abilities not showing, did you make sure to add the abilities to the appropriate skills tiers? Without that, it won't work.
Here are the files. From what I can see, I didn't do anything differently after Sloth (skill 3) than I did anywhere else. And I checked a LOT of other skilldbs (from other mods, MAN it's handy having so many different pieces of reference material to look thru. "How do I make my spell do this? Oh! I remember this spell doing something similar, lets go look it up." DAMN that is soooooooo helpful!
Reading through it I see nothing that looks wrong. Other than a typo or two. "rad sause" should probably be "red sauce". Time to try it our. Be right back. *Edit* Oh, should this line actually have amount zero? Code: <effect type="trigger" spell="REALLY ANGRY" amount="0"/>
Sadly, I cannot even get it to load. My game crashes every time. I am going to check via Steam to verify my game version is as it should be. (Then I will likely get a nap. But I will be back.)
The files weren't ready for use! lol, I was posting them to get help with the issues I have files that are not ready to use. I will be putting it up shortly. However, before I do, I have a question. So, when a skill (say Philosopher of the Axe) gives an ability (like PoA does) I noticed that the icon in on the ability bar and the icon in the skill screen are different. I like this, as all my abilities have different icons from the skills on the skill screen. However, they have the same name and text. Is there a way to make those to features different? For example, instead of PoA with icon A and description X putting PoA with icon B and description X on your ability bar, could PoA with icon A and description X instead put Big Axe Smashy Thing with icon B and description Y on your ability bar?
No no, rad sauce is correct, but I am sure there are a couple other typos...and no, it shouldn't but I already fixed it...lol
