[MONSTERS] Champions Mod v1.06

[Saros]

Awesome, fantastic fun!

No longer mindlessly using one tactic on all Champions (Dervish, Haste, hold Left-click until it's dead). The spiderlings are seriously fun, they remind me of those Maggot thingies in D2 that you have to deal with quickly or be swarmed with maggots. I don't find them overpowering at all. In fact, whenever I see a big slow moving spider champion, I make sure never to get close to it. It's SURE to be devastating in melee. I've never actually been hit by it before so I don't know how much damage it does, but judging from some of the posts here it sounds like it hurts (time to bring out the VD spam).

I like the entropic aura effect, it seriously made me go "oh shit" for once in a looooooong time (nothing in vanilla Torchlight is a real threat sadly). I once had a spectre champion with entropic AND extra strong and it critted me for more than 6k, not sure if it was double hit crit or single though. Ah, good fun. Well, the next time I made sure to check Champion stats before I rush in with a Melee Vanq makes me really appreciate Haste and Faster Movement items for once.

This mod adds a great deal of depth to combat tactics and I wish to thank you very much for making it.

[Velari]

Thanks for the kind words, I'm happy to hear you're enjoying it

The Spectres are sort of in the same boat as Widowmakers and other enemies that do mostly - or solely - elemental damage. Say, Elementals, Zealots, Crawlers, etcetera.
They have elemental components to their normal attacks, and also for some reason tend to trigger lightning effects on their attacks. I've never bothered to investigate why, all I know is that their basic damage does not contain a lightning component, and that it hurts a ton when it happens. So yeah, they tend to hurt a lot because it's harder to itemize against elemental damage.

[Saros]

Lightning effects? Do you mean those bolts that appear and randomly swirl around like the Vanq's Lightning Bomb?

If I am not wrong, any time you do an elemental damage type, it has a change to trigger those effects. Like, if you do Fire damage there is a change of the Burning effect. So I'm guessing most of the mobs do Lightning damage.

It would be nice if resists spawn in much higher numbers in TL... since they do not reduce by a percentage.

[Velari]

So I'm guessing most of the mobs do Lightning damage.

Ha, I've just noticed I'm an idiot I've apparently never checked the normal Spectres, just the champions. Which kind of makes sense, I guess, since I've never done anything with normal Spectres and I have done something with champion Spectres.
So, anyway, champion Spectres don't have any lightning damage - they do physical, poison, and cold. For some reason that made me assume it's the same for normal Spectres. Which isn't that weird of an assumption, I feel. It is an incorrect assumption, however Apparently normal Spectres do have a lightning component in their normal damage.
So yeah, I was thinking it's weird that they caused the lightning effect because I assumed they don't do lightning damage, which is true for the champion Spectres, which is apparently all I've ever looked at. Sorry for the confusion >_> <_<

[Xandaku]

I just downloaded all your mods. WOW! spectacular stuff. I am in the middle of an arcane vhhc alchemist and i was in a map portal half way through, and I ran into a brood mother and the charging spiders. My heart was pounding! this is a spectacular mod. I haven't even seen the other 2 mods in action yet but i expect they will greatly add to the games depth. I combined this with the camera mod, which saved me from brutal death by that brood mother. I love this mod and I think you prove your self a great designer in this area!
Sincerely thanks,
Xandaku

[Velari]

Thanks. I certainly recommend being very careful playing VHHC, since some of the stuff in the Champions Mod can be rather dangerous, heh. I wouldn't say that Crouching Pet, Hidden Beast and Weapon Booster V add greatly to the game's depth, though >_> <_<

[Alph]

Thanks for this mod.

Can you make one where every monster has one (or sometimes more) special buff (D2-like), instead of only some bosses ?

Also adding random spells and auras to them would be fun

sincerly,

[Velari]

Can you make one where every monster has one (or sometimes more) special buff (D2-like), instead of only some bosses ?

... By "every monster," do you mean champions only, or actually normal monsters as well?
If you mean the latter, that would require a lot of work
If you mean the former, the reason that there are champions without added traits is because the original Torchlight champions can still spawn, and they tend to not have anything special. I kept them in because I'm not too big a fan of altering or removing the original material - I'd rather add on to it instead of change it if possible. If you don't want champions that don't do or have anything special, though, I could make a version that does just that for you. Wouldn't take much effort.

[Alph]

I'd rather delve into modding myself, and see if it's possible to just make normal creep not to spawn at all.
I know it's totally different from what I just said, but imagine levels filled with special stuff; woot!
It would need balance though, in order to make a playable game

[Velari]

Assuming you want a creature to have one of a variety of bonuses, rather than just, say, have all Ratkin have the same bonus, that would be a truckload of work.

I mentioned it earlier in the thread, but how I do this is by having multiple copies of a champion, each altered with a bonus (or more than one), and then, if the game spawns a champion creature, to have it randomly draw from a pool containing all these variation of that champion type - and all other champions that can appear in the area.

So to accomplish the same for normal enemy, you'd have to make a separate copy of pretty much every enemy in the game for each and every variation of bonus you want to apply to them, and then set up spawnclasses so that it randomly draws from a pool of all of these variations of the monsters that are relevant to the area. It's not a lot of fun to do

[Velari]

1.05 Time!

New enemies and champions!

Spoiler: show

MIMIC CHAMPIONS!
Pandora
Pandora champions
Splitter Gel
Splitter Gel champions
Tu'Tara Voltrunner
Tu'Tara Voltrunner champions
Tu'Tara Dreamreaver
Tu'Tara Dreamreaver champions
Tu'Tara Scalepiercer
Tu'Tara Scalepiercer champions
Blade Mistress
Blade Mistress champions

Most of these have drop classes specific to them, much like I added to new enemies/champions in one of the earlier versions. So, for example, when a Tu'Tara Scalepiercer drops a weapon, it will always be a crossbow. Which is nice for people who like crossbows, as they're stupidly rare compared to the other weapon types

As always when I add enemies, a preview video has been made, and can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efP7RSASuh8

Other changes:

- Added an NPC to town. This NPC will mostly talk about things the Champions Mod adds to the game, such as the added enemies and whatnot.
- Put cooldown on enemy Hexfire (used by Goblin mage champions and now also Pandoras) to make it less spammy
- As mentioned a couple of times earlier in this topic already, reduced elemental damage on some monsters (spiders, Embershard Golems, etc.).
- Changed Enrage Tu'Tara skill (Tu'Tara Soulmender - Oathmaster champion) to target Tu'Tara Voltrunners and Scalepiercers in addition to Shieldsnappers, Warcutters, and Edgebreakers.
- Changed LizardmanHealFriends skill (Tu'Tara Oathmaster champions) to target Tu'Tara Dreamreavers, Voltrunners, and Scalepiercers in addition to Shieldsnappers, Warcutters, Oathmasters, and Edgebreakers.
- Changed PriestessHeal skill (Dark Priestesses and Dark Priestess champions) to target Blade Mistresses in addition to Blood Disciples, Corrupted Disciples, Dark Zealots, Darkelf Warriors, and Dark Priestesses.
- Changed Brood Mother behaviour. Only slightly, though, but, you know, I have to do this every update. Wouldn't be a true Champions Mod update if I didn't
- Added a glow to Brood Mother's Spiderlings in the vein of the pet Spiderlings in Crouching Pet, Hidden Beast.
- Lowered drop chance on spiderlings.
- Changed names of various Tu'Tara champions to better fit with the naming scheme Runic used for the Tu'Tara in standard Torchlight. Obviously a very important change!
- Noticed that Dwarven Wights have animations for attacks with an off-hand melee weapon. Subsequently gave Dwarven Wight champions a secondary weapon.
- Gave Shenk the Overseer (Deathwalker Battlemaster champion) a secondary weapon for pretty much the same reason.
- Modified PRIESTESS_MINIONS spawnclass
- Revisited damage values on elementally enchanted and spectral hit champions.
- Noticed and fixed an issue with damage on Widowmaker champions that likely made them do about double the intended amount of damage xD I debated leaving it unchanged
- Modified Blood Skeletons dug up by certain Graverobber champions to not just be the Blood Skeletons summoned throught the Summon Blood Skeleton Skill (the latter being VASTLY tougher). I was lazy originally
- Lowered Brood Mother appearance rate in first floor of Caverns
- Changed defensive trait. Blocking didn't always work for some reason. I don't expect to have fixed that, but oh well.
- Corrected speed issues with Small Troll champion
- Fixed a few typos
- Lowered appearance rate of Embershard Golems in the Fortress section a little
- Changed Embergear Golem skin
- Changed Embergolem champion skin
- Changed Brood Mother champion skin
- Beefed up the Depth Dweller a little
- Added new enemies and champs to Phase Beast portal rooms. Don't know why I never did that before.
- Changed the display names of the standard Map Scrolls so they now tell you where they lead. For example, the one that leads to a dungeon with the Mine tileset is now called "Map Scroll - Abandoned Tunnels"
- Had to redo the Dark Priestess skin for some reason? I have no idea why, but one day I was in the Black Palace and everything was fine, the next every part of the Dark Priestess that had always been transparent was suddenly white. I checked the skin and those parts were actually not transparent anymore for some reason, even though I haven't touched that skin in months. I went through all the old versions of the mod, the folder that has all the skins for both the Champions Mod and Crouching Pet, Hidden Beast, and downloaded a copy of 1.04 off of RGF only to find that there was no transparency in any of them. Now, I'm going to assume I'm not going insane and that someone would have mentioned seeing this amazingly blaringly obvious graphical screw-up while playing, leaving me with the simple conclusion that this computer is having some issues >_>

I think there are a few changes I might be forgetting. I'll add them to this list if that happens to be the case and they come to mind


As is traditional by now, some of these changes may find their way into my other mods in the near future. Such as the unused Spectral Blade weapon that I previously purposely left out of Weapon Booster V because I wanted to use it for one of the new enemies here

[TormakSaber]

Tu'tara are officially the best monsters in the game. I love the hand to hand fighter!

[Velari]

I originally planned for Voltrunners to dualwield maces. I made a slight mistake somewhere, though, and they spawned without weapons. That's where I discovered their unarmed attack animations, and I pretty much had to use that, then
So now only champion Voltrunners use maces, while normal Voltrunners are unarmed.

Tu'Tara need to be playable in the MMO >_> <_<

[Velari]

So I don't know about the rest of you lot, but I've changed the download links in all my mod topics to point to their new locations on the revamped RGF.

[Velari]

While fooling around in the Shadow Vault, I came upon a Palace floor that had a stupid amount of Darkelf Warriors, including about a dozen on the starting screen. Considering they're supposed to be somewhat uncommon ... huh. This also caused a much lower fps than I'd normally have, by the way.
I'd love to fix this and update it on the fly (especially since Torchleech doesn't have 1.05 yet), but I can't be sure if it's an error on my part or just a weird unfortunate general bug or glitch. I know exactly what spawnclass was used to populate the floor, but I can't find any problems with it, nor with the Darkelf Warrior itself. Also of interest is that all other enemies from the spawnclass do not spawn - it looks like every time the game wanted to use a monster from that spawnclass, somehow the Darkelf Warrior overrode the five others.

So yeah. Not sure what was going on there, and if it's something that I can fix. Or even need to fix. I mean, if it was just a weird thing with Torchlight and not specifically the mod, there's not much I can do about it >_>

[bibikat]

i really have to say thank you for this great mod. you did some great work! i just had to download 1.05 even if its still unsupported on torchleech. why is that, by the way?

i have one request, though. is there any way to combine/mash-up the features of Shadow Vault + and the Champions mod? im trying to grind all my characters to 100/55 so im constantly looking for stuff to remove the tedium from the original shadow vault and i love both your mod and sv+. i really wish i could have both together!

if it's too hard to have the boss floors spawn the way it does on sv+, maybe we can have the storyline bosses spawning as champions in the sv instead? that would be awesome, too!

thanks and keep up the good work!

[Velari]

i just had to download 1.05 even if its still unsupported on torchleech. why is that, by the way?

Torchleech hasn't seen much in the way of updating for months, as most of the people who originally worked on it were developers and development on Torchleech is basically done, leaving very few left to work on it. From what I've read, two folks on RGF have volunteered to work on keeping it updated, so maybe at some point, after the technicalities are resolved, it will see more frequent updates again.

As for your other question, both are possible. Well, making rare champions out of the bosses is certainly possible, I might consider that for 1.06 Combining it with the other mod is probably possible, although I'd have to give it a look (I don't use it myself so I'd rather look at it first before saying if it's possible or not ).

[Velari]

Oh, it works as I had expected. Well then.

https://www.yousendit.com/download/WTNK ... VW14dnc9PQ

Go to /Champions Mod/media/dungeons, remove the file randomdungeonpool.dat.
Take the file in that zip, go to /SV+/media/dungeons, put it there. It will ask you if you want to overwrite RANDOMDUNGEONPOOL.DAT (I don't know why he used all caps ), do so.

I have no idea how that will work out for any characters you have that are currently in the Shadow Vault, though. I imagine it'll be okay, but I only use one mod that affects it, and I'd rather not give out guarantees if I'm not 100% certain.

[bibikat]

you are just AWESOME, velari. im really glad that youre still developing this mod.

im going to test this out right now. ill let you know if anything weird happens.

im assuming i have to delete the RANDOMDUNGEONPOOL.DAT.adm file as well, right?

oh theres another thing i noticed. the new champions appear to always spawn with unique names that dont follow the usual "[MONSTER_NAME] the [TITLE]" format. was this intended? im guessing it could be, so as to give players warning that they would be facing a more dangerous champion, but i think it would be more sinister if they random-ed their names as well.

thanks again for all the amazing work!

[Webbstre]

Torchleech hasn't seen much in the way of updating for months, as most of the people who originally worked on it were developers and development on Torchleech is basically done, leaving very few left to work on it. From what I've read, two folks on RGF have volunteered to work on keeping it updated, so maybe at some point, after the technicalities are resolved, it will see more frequent updates again.

Yeah, we've got the volunteers, and they are both waiting for instructions on what to do.... but the main TorchLeech guy hasn't been back in a while to train them. *sigh*