Detecting and altering a unit's damage or armor

I spent two hours looking for this, with no success. The trigger editor doesn't seem to even see damage and armor as integer values (checked reals as well), and there's nothing I can do with the trigger editor besides adjusting hit points, mana and the movement speed. Mind you, I'm not trying to decrease the base values (which I suspect can be accomplished only through upgrades), but give penalities. I tried creating a bonus damage ability with a negative value, but the editor didn't let me go below zero. I also looked through the forums for an aswer, again with no success. Is there any way to directly substract armor and damage at all? I'm using this for a passive, attack-triggered ability, meaning that I can't base it on the pit fiend's howl.

I *think* I can do this in a more complicated way, so that the debuffed unit's attack does a small ammount of healing equal to the damage that shouldn't have been done, but it would be impossible for me to base the healing value on anything besides the attacking unit's standard damage and the defending unit's standard armor. In order to get a semi-accurate value, I'd have to keep track of every spell effect that adjusts damage and armor, then introduce it in the equation. This would take an enormous ammount of time - too much for a simple ability that reduces the damage inflicted by the target. Besides, even if I were to do all this, the ability would still be partially flawed, as it would only heal after the blow had been delivered. On a unit with fewer hit points than the unmodified attack, it would have no effect, as the unit would die before being healed.

I'm still hoping that maybe, in some cobweb's shadow in the corner of the trigger editor, there was an action or condition that I've missed.

Did you have "Allow negative real values in editor" checked when you tried making a negative damage bonus? That might make a difference...

(EDIT) oh and you could also try taking an ability like Critical Strike, giving it 100% chance to work and changing the damage multiplier to something between zero and 1.

Actually to do this, you can eather use the triggers in WEU, or change the AbilityMetaData.slk, so that it uses -999999 as a minimum value under damage addition.