First attempts at spellmaking

Dear Experienced forumites,
I've just started trying my hand at spellmaking for the first time and am mucking about the tutorials as we speak. I am attempting to make a hero with all new abilities for use in a map for my friends to play. I successfully made one skill, but am having trouble with the second. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Note that I do not know the first thing about JASS yet (gasp!).

The ability is called Ervenski's Assault and I intend it to do the following:
-Be toggleable like defend
-Add a bonus to damage based on the ability's level
-Add a bonus to attack speed based on the ability's level
-Increase the damage the user takes by 30%

Drawing upon the knowledge I gleaned from the tutorials, I made a dummy skill based off of Defend and gave it to my hero. Then, I made an ability based off of a Claws of Attack ability for the passive strength bonus and an ability based off of the Berserk (item) ability for the damage taken increase and attack speed increase.
I then made an ability based off of Spell Book (Item) and disabled it for all the human players. I added the two stat-modifying abilities to the spellbook and made two triggers that add and remove the spellbook from the hero when the order is given to enable and disable it. It works great save for the fact that the berserk-based mods are not applied to the hero while the bonus strength is.
To experiment, I made an ability based off of the item attack speed bonus, which worked fine. Is there something I'm not understanding with the berserk ability?

Thanks again for the help!

The berserk ability is an active ability - the unit has to cast it in order for it to take effect, unlike the passive abilities like the bonus damage one that have a constant effect. This is an issue because if I recall correctly you cannot order a unit through triggers to cast a spell in a spellbook, and even if you could you have a disabled spellbook here so it wouldn't work anyway.

I am trying to think of other passive abilities you could add to your spellbook that would cause the unit to take more damage, but the only thing I can think of is an armour penalty. This will not increase spell damage, as spells ignore armour. You could also try elune's grace, but that can only alter the piercing and magic damage taken. The easiest solution would therefore be to rework your spell to include an armour penalty instead of a "takes more damage" penalty.

Item Spell Damage Reduction with a negative value.

Thanks for the replies. Is there a way that I could base my spell off of Berserk to get the damage increase and still make it toggleable like defend?

*Edit - It's odd that this game doesn't just let you select "active spell" "passive spell" etc.

*Edit again - It doesn't seem to let me input a negative value into the spell damage reduction.

Click the field once, then hit shift+enter. This allows you to input any value you choose in fields, including outrageously large numbers and negatives.

Ah, that will help greatly for future abilities. Thanks again for the assistance.

You cannot calibrate how spells behave outside of their object editor stats, so no, you can't make a toggleable berserk. The great variety of spells in warcraft together with the numerous ways you can enhance them with triggers allow you to do almost anything, but occasionaly you stumble on something that is impossible (or, rather, difficult) to make.

In this case, you could trigger the damage increase with a damage detection trigger that would deal additional damage (of course, it would turn itself off first to avoid triggering itself infinitely, and then back on after dealing the damage), but since "unit takes damage" is only a specific unit event it means that your spell has to be limited to a single or few units/heroes or you have to use dynamic triggers (since adding a bunch of specific unit events to a single static trigger can get laggy over time) which requires Jass.

Hah! Armor reduction it is then. Thanks for the clarification.

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Well, it seems I have encountered a problem. I have a spellbook with three effects: +damage based on level, +attack speed based on level, and -10 armor.
The bonuses are applied fine when I enable the mode; the damage and armor mods appear and I swing faster. However, I deal no damage to targets while in the mode. This rather defeats the point! It's probably a noobish mistake somewhere along the line.

*Edit - Haha! I set the % damage deal to "0" when setting all the stats for the dummy ability. I'm such a noob right now!

Edited because: Try not to double-post, and you obviously know how to use the edit button :) ~Pyrogasm.

Welcome to the forums, Arvenius; I must commend you for using good grammar!

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For the passive increased damage thing, can't you use the Mountain Giant's Hardened Skin ability with a negative reduction and the "Stats - Percent Increase" field set to true?


Additionally, if you set the duration of Berserk to "0.00", it should last indefinitely. Just detect when a unit toggles the ability on (When it's issued the order "defend") and order a dummy unit to cast said modified Berserk on the hero. Then, detect when the ability is toggled off (when it's issued the order "undefend") and remove the buff of Berserk.

Why not use immolation with no mana drain per second?
It leaves a buff on its own.

I wasn't saying to use berserk for the visual buff icon, but for the actual damage increase. The reason I said to remove the buff was because if the buff is removed, the effects go away too.

One problem: berserk is not a unit targeting spell, but a self targeting.

However, the mountain giant's Haredened Skim might be able to get the job done, I completely forgot how customizable that skill was.

The Hardened Skin ability would be perfect for a flat increase in melee or ranged damage taken; a situation like "Whenever you take damage, that damage is increased by 5." I may end up utilizing that idea for future skills.
For this skill, I am just using a negative value in the defend dummy ability for the percent piercing damage reduction. This results in the skill's penalty being "you take double damage from piercing attacks." Whether or not this is balanced will take testing and depend on the foes in the scenario.
I think I should take some time to poke around all the different abilities to get a better feel for what is possible.

I wonder if the option to turn off Berserk is within the Game Constants...? It has plenty of things that can be toggable to be turned on/off. Bladestorm has an option, I believe. Of course, most of them are intially off.

It's not there. It took me 30 seconds to check, probably less time than it took you to specualte about it. ;)