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Still partway through reading the Warcraft 1 component of the LP and I just want to write that I'm really enjoying it, especially the additions with Isidora. I don't think I've played WoW since 2007 or 2008 (months before Wrath of the Lich King in either case) and it is bonkers discovering the amount of weird retcons and tacked-on details that are now floating around in the stuff from back then. I was always more interested in walking around and exploring than the story so I mostly recall a handful of broad strokes, but Shadowlands makes it look like they went off the deep end. They bolted an extra layer of cosmic-dimensional conspiracy onto the already-crowded cosmology, and this layer happens to be the most important one now. There's a lot of this new information that I don't know what to do with. 
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Jul 9, 2023 23:08
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anilEhilated posted:I could've sworn I remember Mirror Image doing no damage in the game (as opposed to most custom maps). Could that be a Reforged change? Mirror Image doing damage is actually a post-Reforged Change. The official "Reforged" Patch was 1.32. 1.35 changed Mirror Image to do small amounts of damage, but now also give minuscule amounts of experience as well when destroyed. Actually, on that note, a fun little note about that cutscene with Uther and the Blademaster's Mirror Image. In the original release of Reign of Chaos, Uther did not trigger his Divine Shield during that cutscene. In later patches, he started doing so. The reason for this is actually a change to the baseline behavior of how the AI uses the Paladin hero's Divine Shield ability. Originally, it would preserve the ability and only use it when the Paladin was near death. This was later changed to use the ability as early and as often as possible, a change that affected AI-controlled Paladins in the campaign, including Uther himself. That's why he now uses Divine Shield when engaging that Blademaster. That's not scripted, it's simply the AI reacting to combat during the cutscene; Uther is getting attacked, Divine Shield is available, so he uses it. BlazetheInferno fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Jul 9, 2023 |
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Jul 9, 2023 23:09
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Uther using Divine Shield so readily is a big pain too - Paladins, as noted, are a very tanky hero, and Divine Shield makes them invulnerable. Since they're invulnerable, they can't be attacked, and the enemy units will move on to your own warriors and buildings that are much less tough and will cost you to replace or repair, when Uther could easily take that damage no sweat.Rhonne posted:I assume this is yet another splinter group of the Blackrock clan since they still worship the Legion unlike the ones we see in WoW. I think another way they could have differentiated these guys from Thrall's Horde would be to have their buildings more closely resemble the Horde's WC2 architecture. Show how they're still fighting the same war all these years later. That's what the pig farms are for, right? Perhaps this would have been another thing that would have happened if Reforged had got its full remake treatment. But then, you could say that about virtually anything Warcraft 3 could have done better.
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Jul 9, 2023 23:35
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manglar posted:There's a lot of this new information that I don't know what to do with. In an order that makes sense to you: laugh, cry, insist that no it totally all makes sense, have a drink, write anti-Blizzard screeds on the internet, boot up WoW on free trial mode to see how it feels and see sexist, racist and homophobic slurs openly exchanged in trade chat, and google fanart for your favorite non-canon gay ship only to discover it's a vanishingly unpopular pairing. I leave it to your imagination what order I went through this process in.
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Jul 9, 2023 23:40
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Tenebrais posted:Uther using Divine Shield so readily is a big pain too - Paladins, as noted, are a very tanky hero, and Divine Shield makes them invulnerable. Since they're invulnerable, they can't be attacked, and the enemy units will move on to your own warriors and buildings that are much less tough and will cost you to replace or repair, when Uther could easily take that damage no sweat. If nothing else though, if there are a couple units fighting alongside him, the Orcs should go to them instead of the buildings, and Uther'll toss out heals to help keep them up. He's far from perfect about it, but he will do it. As tanky as they are, Paladins' abilities are really all about making everyone else around them tankier, and keeping them alive and healthy. Holy Light: heals other units, cannot be used on the paladin, so use Divine Shield, so units other than the Paladin are taking heat, allowing you to spend mana on Holy Light to heal it up quick. If the Paladin is tanking all the damage, his Mana pool is useless. BlazetheInferno fucked around with this message at 23:48 on Jul 9, 2023 |
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Jul 9, 2023 23:45
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Tenebrais posted:That's what the pig farms are for, right? They have the pig farms yeah, but they could have done more to the rest of it too. It's really funny how the Horde architecture basically completely changes each game. The Alliance buildings change too, but they all have the same basic ideas behind them. Compare the Horde Great Hall in all three games and they're entirely different from each other.
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Jul 10, 2023 01:16
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just going to pop in to point out that uther's pretty clearly the obi-wan to arthas' anakin, down to the part where much later on the people who own the IP release a story that completely demolishes their characterisation for no particular reason (uther came off better in this case, at least.)
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Jul 10, 2023 01:44
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It's funny to me that Mirror Image gets buffed well past the point where it's remotely relevant to the multiplayer balancing. It doesn't really change my feelings in that I think the Blademaster sucks. It's basically two-fold. The Blademaster is trying to be a melee DPS hero, which is just.... eh. I already spoke of the problems of heroes being damage dealers. The other problem is that I feel it's way too micro-intensive for the output you get for them. BlazetheInferno posted:If nothing else though, if there are a couple units fighting alongside him, the Orcs should go to them instead of the buildings, and Uther'll toss out heals to help keep them up. He's far from perfect about it, but he will do it. I generally prefer to pop Divine Shield right when I notice the enemy player actually trying to kill the Paladin. For additional fun, drop an indiscriminate aoe spell where the Paladin is standing right after popping it.
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Jul 10, 2023 02:13
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The paladin, for the record, is one of the two Alliance heroes I don't really use in skirmish, along with the expansion hero. When I get a paladin, it's mostly to just be a buffbot with devotion aura later in the game.
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Jul 10, 2023 02:16
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There are custom maps, most notoriously DotA, where mirror images are absurdly powerful if you have certain effects. Specifically, Orb effects, which are effects that modify your basic attack. We've only seen one orb effect so far (the orb of fire), but suffice it to say that there are others in the game. Interestingly, there are some weird hardcoded limits on what can be added onto a basic melee attack and what cannot. As orbs were a big part of DotA itemization and hero abilities (many heroes had a variety of passive skills that added orb effects to their attacks), the limitations were arcane and incredibly important to understand for certain heroes. The fun part of images is that one such orb effect, mana burn, applied at full value across all images, and a few heroes were built around the idea of making images and then shredding enemies with mana burn. I'm not going to get into too much detail because we haven't seen the orb effects that are available in the campaign, but the implications of being able to take a hero unit and modify how it does damage are very large, and changed how custom maps worked in Warcraft 3. In Starcraft, nothing like that was even remotely possible. Units were hardcoded, and while you could do things like modify their damage value, their range, attack speed, armor type, attack type, special abilities, etc. were all locked in. RPGs had to make use of specific resources for mana (usually one of the currencies, like minerals or gas), and often used a unit in the corner of the map to trigger an ability by having it walk onto a beacon or something. The freedom to modify just about anything and everything about a unit, give it any skills you wanted to (including some custom skills, near as I could tell from DotA), and then modify it further in game with items was amazing and really allowed custom maps to flourish. There's a reason that WC3 is probably my most played game ever (though Starcraft and WoW give it a run for its money), and I hardly even touched the campaign or the vanilla multiplayer.
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Jul 10, 2023 03:12
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 This man saw the prologue campaign, and he knows who the true terror on this map is.
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Jul 10, 2023 05:11
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Cythereal posted:In an order that makes sense to you: laugh, cry, insist that no it totally all makes sense, have a drink, write anti-Blizzard screeds on the internet, boot up WoW on free trial mode to see how it feels and see sexist, racist and homophobic slurs openly exchanged in trade chat, and google fanart for your favorite non-canon gay ship only to discover it's a vanishingly unpopular pairing. I guess trade chat hasn't changed that much since 2007. Oh God, trade chat hasn't changed that much since 2007. I think I did try to play the WoW trial a couple years ago and I couldn't get into it. There's a phantasmagorical feeling I mostly get in live-service games where I can remember some things, but the things that are now different keep me disoriented. It was way worse in WoW than in any other time I've experienced it thanks to all those vague but different memories, I couldn't get my bearings at all.
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Jul 10, 2023 06:39
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I don't remember trade chat much, but maybe it was different on the server I played? Or maybe the Horde capital cities weren't as bad since they had Barrens chat. (That said, I preferred hanging out in Thunder Bluff compared to Orgrimmar when I had the chance.)
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Jul 10, 2023 06:41
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manglar posted:I guess trade chat hasn't changed that much since 2007. Oh God, trade chat hasn't changed that much since 2007.
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Jul 10, 2023 07:17
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anilEhilated posted:I could've sworn I remember Mirror Image doing no damage in the game (as opposed to most custom maps). Could that be a Reforged change? Two decade old memory, but they had a 0.2x multiplier to damage done and 2.0x to damage taken so it became real obvious real quick which ones were fakes. That said, I'm sure there's a wiki somewhere with the actual information
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Jul 10, 2023 08:39
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Oh, yeah, speaking of the Blademaster... I feel like their aesthetic remains super weird. They're clearly inspired by some Asian/anime aesthetics, but I never feel like anything else in either WC2 or WC3 has any similar inspiration, so to me it always made them look, aesthetically, like a weird stand-out that didn't quite fit in.
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Jul 10, 2023 09:59
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PurpleXVI posted:Oh, yeah, speaking of the Blademaster... I feel like their aesthetic remains super weird. They're clearly inspired by some Asian/anime aesthetics, but I never feel like anything else in either WC2 or WC3 has any similar inspiration, so to me it always made them look, aesthetically, like a weird stand-out that didn't quite fit in. Yeah, it feels more like something out of Battle Realms than Warcraft.
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Jul 10, 2023 10:20
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PurpleXVI posted:Oh, yeah, speaking of the Blademaster... I feel like their aesthetic remains super weird. They're clearly inspired by some Asian/anime aesthetics, but I never feel like anything else in either WC2 or WC3 has any similar inspiration, so to me it always made them look, aesthetically, like a weird stand-out that didn't quite fit in. That's because the Chinese government told Blizzard to stop making Pandaria into fantasy China but the pandaren into fantasy Japanese complete with samurai and ninjas. Some of Blizzard's artists are and were weebs, full stop, and Blademasters are orc samurai because that's what they wanted to draw. Torchlighter posted:There's not a single Blizzard game where General Chat isn't the most virulently toxic lovely thing. It's basically comprised of all the people insufficiently ironic enough for 4chan so they compensate with extra edge. Even Starcraft 2 general chat is unreadable. One of those little moments that contributed to me giving up on WoW was seeing a guild named <Dicks Cure Dykes> advertising in trade chat, me reporting their guild name, and the GM telling me that they didn't break any rules with that name so nothing would be done. Sad part is, WoW isn't even the MMO I've been sexually harrassed in the most. One oddity I've noticed in my time playing MMOs: a lot of people online assume I'm a woman because... I type in complete sentences with good grammar most of the time. Apparently this indicates that I'm a woman, not that my mother was an English teacher. 
Cythereal fucked around with this message at 12:22 on Jul 10, 2023 |
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Jul 10, 2023 12:13
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PurpleXVI posted:Oh, yeah, speaking of the Blademaster... I feel like their aesthetic remains super weird. They're clearly inspired by some Asian/anime aesthetics, but I never feel like anything else in either WC2 or WC3 has any similar inspiration, so to me it always made them look, aesthetically, like a weird stand-out that didn't quite fit in.
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Jul 10, 2023 12:23
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Simply Simon posted:Excuse me? He clearly studied the blade Except Grom. He’s not a weeb but somehow *more* insufferable.
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Jul 10, 2023 13:53
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One I'm sad the Uther lore post isn't "The Light and How to Swing It" because he's Uther. Two I would like to suggest, Cytheral, that you take some time show and talk about something WC3 did that the previous games didn't: Damage and Armour types varying amongst units and armies. This mechanic was not only neat for it's time but actually kind of important in how unit selection works for the game.
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Jul 10, 2023 14:08
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Gridlocked posted:One I'm sad the Uther lore post isn't "The Light and How to Swing It" because he's Uther. If there's a joke or reference here, I'm not getting it. quote:Two I would like to suggest, Cytheral, that you take some time show and talk about something WC3 did that the previous games didn't: Damage and Armour types varying amongst units and armies. I pay very little attention to this kind of thing. If someone who actually knows how to play the game well wants to chime in, be my guest.
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Jul 10, 2023 14:10
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Cythereal posted:If there's a joke or reference here, I'm not getting it. It was the title of a book that Uther wrote for Arthas, which appeared in WoW (classic) as a class quest item for Paladins to get a really powerful trinket (for the early raids); it self being a classic Blizzard parody name/item/title of the Tom Jones Album The Lead and How To Swing It The item name became a bit of a running joke for Uther.
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Jul 10, 2023 14:31
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I mostly know the armor types, but I really don't play well. This is purely from my memory so I'm not fully certain and might be wrong: Hero attack: -less against fortified Hero armor: +takes less from ranged, magic and siege Melee attack: +extra damage to medium -less against fortified Ranged attack: +extra against light and unarmored -less against medium, fortified and hero Siege attack: +extra against fortified and unarmored -less against medium(?) and hero Magic attack: +extra against heavy and light(?) -less against fortified and hero Unarmored: -extra from ranged and siege damage Light armor: -extra from ranged and magic(?) Medium armor: +reduced from ranged -extra from melee Heavy armor: -extra from magic Fortified armor: +reduced from almost all damage types -extra from siege Please note that magic attacks are completely separate from spells. The paladin's holy light is not affected by armor type but the base attack of the shamans and witchdoctors we saw in the orc prologue is because they deal magic damage type. There is also one additional type of damage and armor but they are rare and we haven't seen those yet so I left them out. Poil fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Jul 10, 2023 |
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Jul 10, 2023 14:33
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Dirk the Average posted:There are custom maps, most notoriously DotA, where mirror images are absurdly powerful if you have certain effects. Also yes orb effects and their intricacies were so important to proper DotA play, one of the worst things for newbies to understand and such easy mistakes to make, like the basic fact that you can only have one orb effect active at a time so people buying e.g. the lifesteal orb item on a hero that added an orb effect to their basic attack immediately revealed themselves are incompetent pubbies how dare you even think about joining this game and especially my team Also also, getting encouraged by my more competitive buddies to learn how to orb-walk and first hating it as tryhard, then getting actually good at it, fun times I played a lot of dota back in the day
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Jul 10, 2023 14:43
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Gridlocked posted:It was the title of a book that Uther wrote for Arthas, which appeared in WoW (classic) as a class quest item for Paladins to get a really powerful trinket (for the early raids); it self being a classic Blizzard parody name/item/title of the Tom Jones Album The Lead and How To Swing It Ah, that would do it. Didn't seriously play with a paladin until after Cataclysm and I've never heard of Tom Jones or the album.
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Jul 10, 2023 14:54
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Cythereal posted:I've never heard of Tom Jones or the album. Xander77 fucked around with this message at 16:02 on Jul 10, 2023 |
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Jul 10, 2023 15:58
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Tom Jones is a cool guy imo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAVpqOG-HDY
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Jul 10, 2023 15:58
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Xander77 posted:Come, not even from pop culture osmosis? The It's Not Unusual / Delilah guy? Nope. Turns out I've heard bits and pieces of both songs but never knew their titles or who did them. That's my mom's car music.
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Jul 10, 2023 16:02
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Poil posted:Good stuff Note that these are Frozen Throne armor tyoes and stats, which got backported into the Reign of Chaos with Reforged. They won’t be that big a deal for how the game plays… except for a couple missions.
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Jul 10, 2023 16:19
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To add to the armor type discussion, I'm going to list the broad unit types that use the armor types and the broadly encouraged tactics implicitly encouraged in the unit counterplay. Light Armor is generally used by flyers, so they want you to be using your archers and mages to shoot them down with that bonus damage. Note that since ranged heroes get their own damage type, they don't get this benefit. Medium Armor is generally used by the ground-based ranged units, so the riflemen for example. Said units take less damage from the commonly ranged attack types, but more damage from ground-based melee units, though they also take less damage from raiders as a note. Here, they incentivize getting your ground-based melee up to the ranged units faces and hacking away. Note that hero melee doesn't get the damage boost, though at least hero ranged doesn't get the damage penalty. Heavy Armor is used by the ground-based melee. Pretty boring in having no real interactions, though they do take double damage from magic. So the casters that typically do pretty crap damage overall are at least encouraged to shoot the front lines. Fortified Armor is simply used for buildings, though notably excludes burrows as part of a balance-change to make orcs be more invadable early game. Pretty simple, use your catapults and raiders for this one if you want to kill the buildings faster, though at least ground-based melee have the least punishing damage multiplier of the other damage types. Any spells that hit buildings also do full damage for whatever that's worth. Unarmored's largely your casters and a few random units. It didn't exist initially on Reign of Chao's launch, and was added for balance/counterplay reasons. Taking more damage from ranged and siege means that they wanted casters to be more vulnerable, which makes sense because casters of any stripe tend to be pretty huge force multipliers in an army. Edit: Can't believe I forgot hero armor. Hero Armor is the tank type to end all tank types. They take half damage from all attack types except melee and other heroes, and they're the only ones who take less damage from spells, as well. Even with this though, they're still priority targets due to the fact that their spells and auras tend to be pretty huge armor force multipliers themselves. One of the more effective tactics is to right-click your melee squad (which can include any of your own heroes) past the hero in question, then attack the hero once 3 or so melee get past the hero. This effectively creates a cage for your melee units to hack the hero apart while they can't escape. And it's why the paladin is such an annoying hero to deal with for the enemy army. The Divine Shield basically makes them pick between waiting and letting the rest of your army keep hacking at them for damage, potentially opening a hole in the cage for the paladin to get out. Or they simply change targets and let the paladin escape on its own, having wasted some damage-time doing nothing. Keldulas fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Jul 10, 2023 |
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Jul 10, 2023 19:32
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Isn't the blademaster thing because Samwise Didier just really loving loves samurai and panda's.
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Jul 10, 2023 19:41
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The armor and damage types are probably very important for high-level multiplayer play, but I found that it literally mattered diddly squat in the actual campaign missions and I never paid them any attention. Considering that there's generally only one unit for a given niche (for a given faction, at least) anyway, you never really have an alternate option with different armor/damage types that can do the same job.
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Jul 10, 2023 19:49
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Fights are easier to win if you get your footmen to hit the enemy trolls while also not having the enemy grunts hitting your rifledwarves. But you can probably beat the game on hard even if you don't.
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Jul 10, 2023 20:39
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SirDrone posted:Isn't the blademaster thing because Samwise Didier just really loving loves samurai and panda's. Yes
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Jul 10, 2023 21:21
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Keldulas posted:Fortified Armor is simply used for buildings, though notably excludes burrows as part of a balance-change to make orcs be more invadable early game. Pretty simple, use your catapults and raiders for this one if you want to kill the buildings faster, though at least ground-based melee have the least punishing damage multiplier of the other damage types. Any spells that hit buildings also do full damage for whatever that's worth. There is one notable unit that has access to fortified type armor, and it is just as beefy as that implies.
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Jul 10, 2023 21:41
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PurpleXVI posted:The armor and damage types are probably very important for high-level multiplayer play, but I found that it literally mattered diddly squat in the actual campaign missions and I never paid them any attention. Considering that there's generally only one unit for a given niche (for a given faction, at least) anyway, you never really have an alternate option with different armor/damage types that can do the same job. the reason magic damage and unarmored armor got added in ROC was because back when casters did ranged damage and had... i want to say light armor? they unquestionably outperformed any other ranged units, and "there is no circumstance where you use riflemen or headhunters after the early game" did not sit right with blizzard
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Jul 10, 2023 21:59
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On the other hand, armies of shamans gowing rawurawruwrar and then mowing down a bunch of soldiers was hilarious.
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Jul 10, 2023 22:01
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It's also worth noting that you could define custom types of attack and armor in the map editor. Seriously, the amount of stuff you could pull was amazing. You could do things like build a tower defense where certain types of towers had vastly different damage outputs against different unit types. You could make units that were invulnerable to certain things or were elementally themed or, well, the sky was the limit. There were limits to what you could do, but it was so far out of the realm of what was possible with Starcraft that it was amazing. And the best part was that when you hovered over the tooltips, the game would tell you how the attack or armor fared against the other types of attack or armor.
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Jul 10, 2023 22:15
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Yeah, the editor is amazing. I don't think ant rts editor before or since comes even remotely near the combination of strength and user friendliness of it. Heck, if you want to go nuts with it, they even made a basic scripting language. You can just write some code in for unorthodox stuff.
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Jul 10, 2023 22:39
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