Lightning hose in 1.09

[Vash]

I've been curious about this for some time.

Does anyone know exactly why +skills in 1.09 gave mercs odd behavior? To me, it seems like a lightning hose attack has nothing to do with a rogue's other skills and I'm perplexed as to why/how this would happen in the code.

[NuurAbSaal]

silly me...

[Vash]

Yes I read that post already. You asked about +skills on mercs in the new 1.10 beta where, apparently, the odd behavior has disappeared.

I'm asking about 1.09 mercs and why the odd behavior DOES appear.

[NuurAbSaal]

I apologise :(

Maybe I should read a post as a whole...:blink:


I'll give you my two cents on the issue:
I think it was meant as a sort of easter egg for the players to discover. If somebody found out that a rogue with +1 skills shoots only fire arrows (my question: why don't +0 skills mercs use their elem. arrow all the time?? silly Blizz), naturally people would experiment further. And lightning seems ok after fire and cold (same order as in the char screen). A merc with +skills items "improves her skills" with elemental magicks.

well, that's how I see it

NuurAbSaal

[Ruvanal]

It was an error how the modifier for the +skills was be applied to the data structures. Normally the +skills would adjust the skill levels of the various skills that a player or merc uses by incrementing one of the data fields in the skills data structure. Example adjusting the say the 4th DWORD(one of the offsets) in the structure by +3. The problem came up with the Rogues due to how their normal missile was defined for them; it was a pointer to a missile data structure, not a skill data structure. In the missile data structure, the missiles ID to use from the missiles.txt file is stored at the same position as the skill level is stored in the skills data structure. This causes the various +skills items to change the missile that is launched when the rogue fires what would be here normal missile. Each point of +skills just increments the missile ID to use from the missiles.txt file. It just happens that within the small amount of +skills (6 points) that can be normally equipped on a rogue, that one of these (+3) happens to correspond with a missile that actually does some significant damage. The normal missile the rogue is supposed to use is Rogue1 (ID=120). Here is a short list of the missiles starting at that point.
ID Name
120 rogue1
121 rogue2
122 rogue3
123 bat lightning bolt
124 bat lightning trail
125 skmage1
126 skmage2
127 skmage3
128 skmage4

The missile 123 "bat lightning bolt" in turn will use the sorceress skill lightning to compute its damage and ends up using the mercs level for setting the skill level to use for the damage calculation. Farther down the list are even more powerful and unbalancing missiles. Defiantly a bug.

[Vash]

Very cool. Thanks for the explanation.