Hello,
i read in some threads now that it will not be possible to give items (passive) abilities that will alter class skills to behave in different ways or simply boost them. So called “Transmuters”. For example the transmuter that removes the cooldown of the shaman’s primal strike ability. I just want to go on record here saying that this is essential if you want to create items/sets that add completely new builds to the game. Something i was burning to do in my mod.
If its within your power to do so Crate entertainment, please consider it.
One idea that popped into my head today, as an example, was making a storm totem/dust devil set that makes dust devils permanent but with 2 summon limit and storm totem cooldown -XX%
If its impossible to alter class skills via items in such a way, then i can just forget about it.
Youre missing the point. Sadly i have to reference diablo3 here. in D3 there are lots of sets that are build defining in that they change core abilities (heavily). I want to do similar things
There is sort of a workaround that could work but it strongly limits you in what you can do as it bases on hidden skills of the cost of skill slots from masteries which might result in being able to do it but loosing space for usual mastery skills.
I didn’t test it yet though so no promises.
Edit: Transmuters don’t get boosted, even if you give them + 1 to a specific transmuter via an item. But as far as I’ve seen transmuters and modifiers are pretty much the same except for a few functionalities, so you could make “pseudo” transmuters.
I’ve read the mod guide and I’m already a programmer. LUA isn’t one of my languages of choice, since I belong in the Python camp. (Also the “anything but Java” camp.)
Let’s say you want to make a skill that has three progressions. Each progression would need to be defined separately anyway. You end up with three different DBR records. The main technical challenge becomes making the other passives link to all three, named A B C. Edit the other items to give bonuses to A B and C. This seems like decent design in some ways, because it prevents frivolous edits to skills. Ideally the three forms of the skill would have different graphics anyway.
Crate has created something similar already, they appear to use a name based hack to make the skills somewhat interchangeable.
Asset Manager:
records\skills\playerclass01
cadence1.dbr
cadence1b.dbr
cadence2.dbr
cadence3.dbr
cadence3_buff.dbr
cadence3x.dbr
When I looked at the D2 modding community it was mostly based on hex editing. They had to modify the existing skills extensively to make modifications. Later on someone hacked in some extensions I think. Crate has done an amazing service here by offering the core of the game resources to be modified with native or near native levels of access.
The core engine seems to have a much better design than Titan Quest or most other ARPG out there. I can’t think of any that have better design off the top of my head, maybe Path of Exile but that’s a different breed. I disliked the armor formulas for Titan Quest very much, I’m going to look at modifying Grim Dawn’s to use a mix of armor and resists for elemental damage. We have an amazing level of access! I’m going to be discovering what they prepackaged for us for a while, I’m still taking notes on basic tool usage while experimenting.
I haven’t really dug into the skill side a ton, but shouldn’t it be possible to add a hidden ‘transmuter’ to a given class (like someone alluded to above) such that you can’t see it on the mastery screen but items could give a +1 to that skill and apply the transmute effect?
You would probably need to end up putting the full description of what the Transmuter / hidden skill did in the item description to explain what it changes, but it seems like a viable workaround (in theory).
Unless Elfe meant by transmuters not getting boosted means that they outright don’t allow + skills to affect them.
LUA has nothing to do with skills. As you said, it’s all dbr editing, and as they are tables, that’s… all it is. Table editing. I haven’t actually tried to make a passive reduce a cooldown (or eliminate it completely) for the ability it is attached to.
And as far as the ‘hack’, I’m not entirely sure it matters what you call them. As long as in the _classtree_class#.dbr they are listed in order, because that’s how it reads them. You could call it cadence, zappers, wigglesworth and bugsby, as long as they are in the right order in the other files.