Elemental \ Spell Damage

I Was wondering if spell and elemental damage actually exists.
like for example certain armor wouldent be hurt by cold attacks like cold arrow\fire arrow and some types of spells lets take blizzard for example wont effect a water elemental and such.
if it doesnt exist, is there any way to determine what type of damage do spells do ? ( pierce \ siege \ normal )

Moving this along with your other thread to Map Development forum. You'll get more answers there.

Such things don't exist as you imagine them. There are 2 solutions depending on whether the map in question is single player or multi.

In single player, you can screw with miscdata.txt and make piercing/siege/normal damage be elemental affinities (by altering the names and the multipliers) instead, and correspond to armor types (siege would be fire resistance, say).

In multiplayer, you can use triggers to add extra damage to certain spells when used against certain targets. This is a bit cojmplicated, and has some drawbacks, but I think it's the only way to design an affinity system.

I though all spells do "Spell" damage. If I'm not mistakened, Hero armour class has some resistance to Spell damage. I don't think there's a build in system that differentiates the elemental types.

A unit cannot only not be hurt by spell damage when it is immune to spells.

No, currently there is no 'spell' damage. If you look at spellcasters (Sorceress, Witch Doctor, etc) they all have 'Piercing' damage attacks. This is being addressed in Frozen Throne . They will have 'magic' attacks (thus magically immune creatures will not take damage from them). Overall that's an interesting post, so I would suggest anyone to read over it.

A long time ago I've started a thread about this but I'm gonna repeat it here:

What if a campaign map has sth like this:
You control like 8 priests and have to kill some Archimonde (or sb /w spell immunity). Normally this wouldn't make any problems but imagine playing the map in FT. It would be screwed cuz the priests would have spell damage as default therefore they wouldn't make any damage to their enemy.
I hope they'll stay /w piercing damage though.

Martinez

I totally disagree... I mean they are lobbing little glowing balls at their targets and it sure doesn't look like they're piercing anything to me. After Frozen Throne, having a map like that would be very silly, so don't make one. That's like making a map now where you have 8 Footman and you have to slay a Red Dragon. The map idea is silly, so don't make it. I personally think this is one of the better things they have done for the expansion.

OK you're right but what I really would want is that the old maps that were created in RoC would load the default data from RoC for the unmodified fields in the UE. I never planned to do sth as stupid as said, it was just ment to be an example.

By the way - many changes are coming along with FT and some maps loaded there would be sometimes played differently than they were before in RoC.

Martinez

So, aside from the spellcasters' attacks, what kind of damage do their spells do? For example, what kind of damage is starfall? Or Storm Bolt? Or Unholy Frenzy, for that matter?

those aren't catagorized... basically, they do straight damage. If death coil says it deals X damage, then it does X damage. Same with starfall, entangle, etc. This isn't going to change in Froze Throne, either (to my knowledge).

I wanted to do this new style of map where you have some Paladins and have to kill a very strong death knight /w Divine Armor and the only chance to win against him would be to use much Holy Light on him.

It didn't work cuz Holy Light really DID NOT DO X damage as was written in AbilityData.slk.
EDIT: Holy Light took him away maybe only 10 or 20 hp.

So as you see -> it really does have a damage type of its own.

Martinez

yah i was going to use normal armor and attacks to define elementals, my main question was whether spells had damage types. i hope someone will find this out evantually

excuse me... Heroes DO take less damage from direct damage spells (a third less). Everything else takes full damage.

It's a 'damage type' in the sense that it is delineated within the game as different, but it is not a 'damage type' in the sense that Normal, Piercing, etc. is.

ah, semantics...

Either way, I don't believe there is a way to work with damage dealt from direct damage spells as a damage type within the game (other than some very in-depth trigger work). If there is, I would be interested to see it.

Well I guess you're wrong. I've just gave my non-hero custom unit Divine Armor, casted Holy Light on him and it only took 15 damage when it should normally take 300 (he's an undead of course). Guess a different armor type does have a meaning to the amount of damage dealt by spells. Or at least Divine Armor does.

Martinez