Elemental Wars theorycraft Thread.

I decided to write this down after the discussion about classifications and/or conditions in this months highlighted map, the Desert of Exile, by Rising_Dusk.

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Introduction to the system:

The following describes a theoratical system to classify both attack damage, armor, spell damage and effects into diffrent catagories so they can be reconised and handled, to create more dynamic options in especially hero designs for AoS and Arenas.

Notice that the classifications i will use are mere examples to show the system, and the interaction between attack and armor classifications and spell classifications. From this point on i will refer to classifications as "classes".

In order for this to work, a fully plyable spell and buff system has to be in place.

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Classes:

• Normal (Physical)
• Magic (Arcane)
• Fire (Chaos)
• Water (Frost, mana)
• Earth (Nature, health)
• Spirit (Light or Dark)

This table for attack damages would extend to spells, meaning that each and every spell would come with a tag. Cast a Fire spell on someone with earth armor and its effect will increase by 25%.

I opposed Spirit against spirit like this becouse i would see opposed religeons deal additional damage to eachother.

Healing spells are not effected by negative armor bonus, meaning that an earth heal would still heal 100% on an earth target, while a spirit heal would heal 150% on a spirit target.

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To take some blizzard spells and and heros to see how they could be effected by this system:

The Archmage

• fire attack type (hey, he lobs fireballs!)
• normal defense type (hes just a guy on a horse.)
• Blizzard would deal Water damage
• Water elementals would have water armor and a water attack.
• Brilliance Aura would be Magic (in my scheme, the most neutral element)
• Mass Teleport would be Magic.

The Demonhunter

• Normal Attack and Defense types.
• mana burn would be Spirit.
• Immolation would be Fire.
• Evasion would be normal, and grant an equal chance to evade normal-type abilities.
• In metamorphosis state he would gain Spirit armor and Attack types additional to its regulair bonusses.

The Far Seer.

• Earth Attack type
• Normal Defence type
• Chain lightening would deal earth damage
• Far sight... Doesnt matter even one little bit, but i'd say spirit.
• Spirit Wolves would have spirit attack and defence types (duh)
• Earthquacke would be earth type.

The Lich

• Water attack type
• Spirit Defence type
• Frost nova would be Water
• Sacrifice move thing would be Spirit
• Frost Armor would be Water (uncastable on fire defence types)
• Death and Decay would be spirit.

Other Tricky Trciks to be had:

• Heros that rely solely on one class, like the Crypt Lord (Normal) and the Fire Lord (Fire)
• Items that manipulate only one effect. Like Resistance against fire damage.
• What to think of an ice passive or item that freezes someone solid on attack when recently effected or under the effect of a water type spell?
• Drunken Haze (Normal) not only being ignited by breath of fire, but by all fire effects, attacks and spells?

The main thing here is to add that little bit of fun to the mix. Its not something radical, it doesnt upset the balance of things too much. Its mainly there to open up options for more unique abilities and items, and to be able to add certain logical things that make you think "why didnt that do that before?"

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DISCLAIMER: I am in no way claiming this to be original, or completely mine. I'm just saying its a swell way of doing things, thats all.

The pokemon system, cute.
It could easily be ported to WC3, hell, it's basically the same thing I've already got made for a different type of map.

However, you know..
This is really way different from a global condition system, and would function nothing like it. The spell interactions would be TOTALLY different, you wouldn't do different stuff based on a condition, or what condition, a hero has on it, but rather by type. Mixing the two together would provide infinitely many possibilities for spell design, but would overcomplicate the map.

I think one or the other is the best way to go.
And to be fair, I really like the idea you've got going here.
I don't think your "balance" is very well done, but numbers can always be changed. Heck, this is how I would do it, pokemon to the extreme. Six seems to be a good number of types, though it doesn't allow for a lot of type diversity. You could manage this pretty well though if you plotted it out.


What did I change?
Well, I removed your magic, because spirit and magic are very close in my mind. What instead took its place was air, which allowed me to bring in that air (Mostly lightning spells) would not hurt earth types, but at the same time air armor means levitating or floating, etc, making earth attacks do nothing to them. They effectively nullify one another.

I also kicked super effectives to 2x damage and reduced resistances to 0.5x damage.
That way you can't just sail through the map ignoring types, they become a real strategic element in planning base attacks, ganks, and so forth.

I then also made spirit the only thing that beats normal armor and also still good against itself, but not so hot against the 4 elemental types. A fair trade off, if you ask me. The rest are sensible (Earth erodes in water, water puts out fire, so forth). I added more resistances and strengths to make it seem more varied, requiring teamwork of different types to do the best. (This is part of what made teambuilding in pokemon so awesome)

What I think is even better is the idea to take blizzard heroes and just update them to fit the system. You could take already made spells and change them to fit this and suddenly the map would be super fun again, like a new set of heroes. Of course you could also make custom heroes, which might be nice too.

I really like this idea, Erwt.

EDIT:
Had another spiffy idea.
What armor type a unit has could reflect its base stats as well. Earth types move the slowest, but have the highest base armor. Air types move the fastest, but have the lowest armor. Fire type attacks have high base attack damage, possibly splash. Water types attack really fast but with low attack damage, air might have high damage potential, but a huge damage range. The types could impact other stats as well, perhaps spirit type units gain extra bonuses from spirit type items as well?Maybe you could have an item that makes you count as a "second type" as well? Maybe that would be too powerful depending on the combo.
Who knows? But hey, it has room to breathe in design.

Yeah i know its diffrent. My point was more like, you put this great technology in your map (the plyable spell damage and buffs) and make these conditions with it, while i thought there was much more possible with that technology. I never wanted to badmouth your map or your systems, i knew they couldnt co-exist. I just thought this would be more fun. Maybe not for DoE, but a more fun thing to do with plyable spells.

Allthough those are all good points, i think its a mistake to take it to the extreme. 200% damage is a lot, and such a big diffrence in power will always result in someone getting pooped on, and thats just something i want to avoid. I dont want this to be a radical something, just a thing that adds more fun and dynamics to the mix. In pokemon you can do such a thing becouse its one player in control of the entire team, but with 6 players in a team, unexpected things tend to happen. Its going to be really annoying when mr. Fire guy keeps jumping mr. water caster and taking him out in two nukes, just becouse he can.

I like your takes on the elements there as well, i must say. I tried to relate my elements table to blizzards heros as much as i could, just to get a measurement, and there just wasnt that much air to play with, and there are some spells that you cant really pin to an element.

Actually i was thinking the same thing. Blizzard made a lot of cool heros that now never get used anymore, or even get shunned, becouse custom heros is a must. A system like this gives a fresh take on those heros and lets them be used again. A couple of customs never hurt anyone, though.

Thanks, that means a lot to me.

These features are more things that, i think, should be individually decided for each hero. You can force-feed these things to fit your elements, but if it it just doesnt go with the hero... Then i'd reather do it diffrently. I want attributes to have nothing to do with the whole jibber-jabber as well, just so that you are not entirely dependant on the element.

Like i said, i see it as something that can add a lot of fun, a bit of logic, and new types of gameplay. Still i dont think it should be too dominant, its just too easy to take a nosedive if that happens.

When giving blizzards heros these classifications, i also looked at the hero itself, not how it would benefit the system. Its nice and all to give a dude on a horse water type armor, but it doesnt really make a lot of sense. Pretty much every hero, firelord aside, would have normal armor, and only some a special attack. However, moves like devine shield and fire arrows change that.

No hard feelings, I knew what you meant. I just realized that we were talking about totally different things. I guess the fault here is really miscommunication. No biggie, 'sal good.

And well..
Lich would have spiritual, I'd give the demon hunter in morphed form spiritual, Firelord would have Fire, and so forth. But like you said, custom heroes. Maybe you made a golem hero, well he could have earth armor! Or maybe the Dwarf in Avatar could have earth armor too.

You could also maybe hire different creeps with different types of armors or attack types, meaning "Oh shit, they hired some fire guys, let's hire the water creeps!" and so forth. Wouldn't that be fun? Also, I feel if you're going to go through with a system, it needs to be important and play a large role. I hate adding systems to a map for the sake of adding systems, it doesn't change anything. And maybe 200% sounds like a lot, but for the sake of balance --

Say you had a weakness to water, but you bought an item with 50% reduction to water. That's <DMG> * 2 * 0.5, meaning you get just <DMG> back. So it's as if you weren't weak to it at all. If you use your numbers... <DMG> * 1.25 * 0.75 = 0.9375*<DMG>. You don't quite get the same back, you get less, this is what makes flat multipliers more desirable.
Yanno?

changed a couple of things on a "what makes sense" kind of bases.

I made Normal so that it is a completely neutral element. We'd use this for spawnies ofcourse, and for all physical things that just dont have anything to do with elements or magic.

I made the four main elements have a triangle of love, only the trianle is now a square. Its basically the rock paper scizzor stuff, nice and easy.

Spirit is being emo again, and gains a slight damage bonus to normal. I guess.
Or now that i think about it, it might make more sense to make spirit deal more damage to the elements, and less to normal. Hmm...

The critical decition that needs to be made is, how far to take this? are we going to take this quite literally like my examples in my first post (dude lobs fireballs thusly has a fire attack, dude wears a robe and rides a horse thus has normal armor) Or are we going to make these things more of the spiritual kind of tags, so that elemetal attacks and armor is much more divided amongst the heros. The first makes more sense with blizzards heros, and sees the system as a nice tasty extra to play around with, the latter fully intergrated the system as the spinal core of gameplay.

EDIT HANG ON, didnt see your post there, give me some time to react.

I really do think double damage will come back to bite you in the ass. Its just really, way way way too much. And nobudy said you'd be able to perchase a 50% redux item, maybe its 25%, or 10%. However i think its reather desireable that you would be able to overcompensate so much through items that you actually gain resistance instead of weakness :P

That would ofcourse mean that you've spent all your money and inventory slots on an advantage that most of your teammates allready have, and you didnt get even one bit more powerfull. While by this time, your fireball could have dealt 200% damage xD

The main question at hand would be, what kind of map would this be? if its aos, wich i prefer, how are towers, buildings and creeps handled? You know, do we want towers and creeps to be neutral (thusly, normal) so everyone has an equal chance of killing em?

Enough rambling now, its tired, i must bed. But it's an idea worth looking into.

btw, mountain king becoming earth in avatar is a total rocker.
Let there also be no doubt about the fact that this map will totally need the panda, there is no hero more perfect :P

This is basically what WC3 already has, with the classes extended to abilities. Personally, this is how I would have preferred it. I don't like that physical damage resistance (armor, 1 point equals a % bonus to effective HP) uses one system while magic damage resistance (flat % reduction) uses another one. We've already discussed this ad nauseum though.

The advantage of what you're suggesting is that it does away with the physical/magical split in WC3. The only relevant information about a damage or effect source would be its class. It might be an attack, or it might be an ability, or it might be something novel; in any case, it would be governed by a single system and not split between two or more continua, and that's a good thing.

That is exactly why i'd find it interesting to use souched-up blizzard heros instead of custom ones.

Armor is something i hadnt even really thought off. If you'd apply this like its written down now, armor would still only handle physical attacks regardless of element, and magic resistance would handle spells regardless of element. The only thing that really changes there is that we'd do a type check for spells to see if theres any extra damage being dealt.

We could ofcourse have armor increase resistances too, and drop blizzards "normal" resistance sistem. You are generalising all defence into one variable then. You would ofcourse, on the side, still have items or abilities might increase one individual resistance.

OR, we could have armor of a certain type just increase its resistances against the classes it is strong against. This enforces the whole RPS stuff even heftyer, but does create a bigger diffrence in power the bigger levels get.

And how about attack damage? You could have the attack damage of an elemental attack directly effect your spells of that element, but that doesnt seem entirely fair as well. What about a guy like the archmage who has a fire attack, but mostly water spells? Or all those guys that have a Normal attack but fight with magic?

The idea of armor handling all defence, plus having optional resistances through items or abilities kind of appeals to me.

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The verry most important thing that this system would do though, in my opinion, is not create power shifts, is not force-feed some more RPS dynamics, it is being able to see spells, abilities and attacks for what they are. How does it make sense for the archmages magical fireball attack to be counted as physical damage? not verry much. But to count it as fire damage, that makes sense. Every fire spell in the game setting drunken haze on fire instead of just breath of fire, that makes sense. Evasion being able to evade fan of knives, that makes sense.

Yeah, that does make sense, but why not change gameplay a bit too?
Why do all this work just so you can sleep at night knowing your fireball did fire damage, yet it really didn't matter at all what type of damage it did at all? I mean really.

I'm not sure about this kind of thing in an AoS or RPG setting where you control one unit. Unless each class only had minimal advantages/disadvantages (as they do in erwt's model), then it would just be annoying - one hero would always beat another, but then always lose to others. However, I think with only minimal advantages and disadvantages it won't change gameplay much or force players to make decisions - they can just ignore the classes and still do alright (which might be a good thing for new players). So, I think this would be better suited in an environment where players control multiple numbers of units. I'm thinking around 3-8 units would be best, which coincidentally is right around where Pokemon falls in. That way, you could choose what units you control and try to balance their strengths and weaknesses. I think a map of this style is really the only one where these classes would add strategy to the gameplay without making it extremely frustrating.

Becouse i wasnt out to "reinvent the wheel", a populair phrase you always use. I dont want to be a system like this to be overbearing, becouse i think it would hurt the gameplay more then it would do it good.

As you might have noticed this stuff is remarkably simulair to blizzards armor and attack type schemes. Becouse it is that system but with diffrent names, and extended to include spells. Blizzard didnt make the diffrences too extreme becouse that would push you in the corner too much, make certain stragegies a little too effective against eachother.

We're not trying to be pokemon here, we're trying to be a fun fantasy RPG/RTS.

That aside i think that, for example, the abillity to stun someone should still be far more important then the fact that your default fire attack rapes that dude with earth armor.

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yub. Wich is exactly how i would want it to be. You are stuck with your character, and there is no way to change that. You can build upon it with items, but you're still stuck with a dude that has fire spells.
I agree with you that a system like this would be better suited for such a map or game, if it where taken to the extreme. But i'm just not interested in making that kind of map, to be perfectly honest. I theorycraftet this around the idea of it being used for Single-Hero gameplay, and the stats and dynamics i wrote down are the result of that.

You are absulutely right that a sytem like this would be fun in a squad map as well. I'm a little fearfull for a clickfest though, the one that gets his fire character to attack the others earth character (and so forth) the fastest, pretty much wins. Thats just not a type of gameplay that sounds verry appealing to me.

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Keep in mind too that i would want to do this with blizzards hero designs, or heros greatly based on those. (i mean, far sight is just too shitty for a hero map.) Thusly, most heros would end up with a normal attack and normal armor anyway.

Actually this is used in MT ENFO map to separate classes of heroes,
since there are melle fighters, casters, and support heroes
thay each have different armor and attack types, witch prevents
casters for fighting in melle because they would die very soon,
and it should be that way - fighters in first rows and mages behind


PS: I always though that taking more than 100% dmg was idiotic.
Especially since you can always scale all your numbers down
to achieve the same affect.

You never take more than 100% damage; it's just a way of representing the modifier. Instead of saying 'attack x does 50% damage against armor y and 150% damage against armor z,' you could just as easily say 'attack x does -50% damage against armor y and +50% damage against armor z.' It's templating.

edit: and now erwt.

Honestly? I would replace Water Elementals with Fire Elementals, and replace Blizzard with Rain of Fire. Then I'd rename the game to Warcraft: Orcs & Humans.

And that would be relatively simple to implement, whether you keep Blizzard's armor system or recreate it so that 1 armor = 1% resistance. Either way, you have a generic value, and then bonus values for your classes. A Water Elemental might have +20% resistance in general, but +60% resistance to fire (for a total of +80% against fire), and -40% resistance against earth (for a total of -20% against earth). This way it's much easier for the player to eyeball.

My thoughts at least... It's kinda a double RPS showdown, with cross-group relations. It makes sense to me though...

The problem with mine is that it doesn't fit Melee. The table is notably lacking a 'Water' field, but I like triangles. The basic premise is this:

There are four magics:

1)Storm
2)Earth
3)Fire
4)Arcane (magick :p)

Storm, Earth and Fire play out in a typical RPS environment - provided that fire (heat) melts rock/metal, earth doesn't conduct electricity, and wind+water puts out fires. While the relations are shaky at best, the elements fit the themes I like when I look at an AoS (which I would say this is most suited for).

Storm - Quick, Agile, low damage but lots of conditions
Earth - Slow, Strong, good damage and AoE (around self) abilities.
Fire - Mid, Smart(ish), good damage with high damage spells (nukes especially)
Arcane - Mid-low, Smart, average damage with... manipulative spells (these heroes are based around a mechanic usually, that they bring into the game with their abilities).

All the magicks get a +25% bonus against each other (just because I think of magic as a weapon, not a shield), +25% bonus to spirit (being 'magical' itself), and a +25% RPS bonus (for the elements). Arcane falls into the first RPS group, where it beats up Spirit, but loses to normal. Why? Well, once again, I think of magic as a weapon, not a shield. It is my thinking that because many arcanists focus only on things of magickal nature, they lack the abilities of hand-to-hand combat. So, normal comes in, and kicks its ass. Of course, Spirit gets a bonus against normal, because it's so damn hard to hit an apparition with steel, and that completes it mostly.

I really focused on the mechanic more than the explanation, but all in all, it (sorta) makes sense.

Fuck, make it a warcraft 1 map... That would require a lot of customasation still then, though, to get the right amount of characters. Cant do everything with existing material. Still for this we'd more likely go for the HU+NE vs. ORC+UD setup, it simply has a much wider array of used spells and elements.

I must admit, i've never really played orcs and humans though. The 4 unit selection limit kind of killed it for me xD

to herbs-n-trolls:

You're just theorycrafting out in the wild now, detatched from the actual game. We're trying to aim for a system that could be overlayed on the current engine, and support the geneal aestatic of warcraft. When it comes to the diffrent elements present, i think dusk hit the nail on the head. When it comes to numbering, i think mine works best.

Also, everything is a weapon. I dont see why "magicks" should deal additional damage to other "magicks" classes, just becouse magic is meant to be used as a weapon. (wich isnt even always the case.)

Thats not a verry effective way to build a map, actually. It all sounds great in theory, all that "casters meant to be in back line" nonsense, but that plays out regardless of special armor and attack types. You see, casters tend to have a lot less armor and HP as it is, thus agility mellee types usually tend to have a large enough advantage over them as it is. Especially if said casters dont know how to keep a distance.

Also, this isnt just about custom attack and defence types. Thats common ground, and has been explored noumerous times. This is about extending that into spell classifications, and having the two interact with one another. In a way, elimating the diffrence between attacks and spells.

So this thread is done then?