Timed Summon

[Wuldreg]

I am trying to create a duration based summon but can't get it to work. My first thought was to use hydra but I have found that its duration is tied to its AI. This would be fine if I wanted a stationary turret summon but not so useful for anything else. My second idea was to give the pets a self-damaging aura with "immediate" set to nothing and "perdelay set to 250. The problem here is that I can't seem to get the pets to actually take damage. I have also tried giving them aurastats like negative hpregen and negative hitpoints, but this resulted in either bugs or nothing at all. Lastly I changed DamageRegen to a negative value in monstats, but this resulted in a crash.

I have not tried anything with revive but I am fairly certain that would not yield any results. It doesn't even have summon listed in skills.txt so I can only assume this skill has very specific functions.

My final idea was to make use of maxhp in aurastats and setting the minimum value in ItemStatCosts to 0. I haven't tried this because I assume blizzard had a very good reason to set this to 1 and that changing it would result in glitches.

[Conqueror]

First:

Create a new invocation. Use svrdofunc=49 (Shadowmaster)

add some stats in the "aurastate" column, then edit "auralencalc" column "the time".

Can use a "dummy" state for all summs. Example: "Invocations"

States.txt:

state=invocations
ID: NEXT
nosend=1
*eol=0

Skills.txt

Check this post to create new summs with IA ShadowMaster (IS THE BEST!)

Finally, use "Invocations" in "aurastate" column and your time (seconds*25) in "auralencalc" column.

[Wuldreg]

So this works great except for one major exception. Whenever a state gets removed from me my summons (except 1) all get destroyed. I changed different summons and received the same results, so I think it is more likely related to the skill or the state.

[Necrolis]

So this works great except for one major exception. Whenever a state gets removed from me my summons (except 1) all get destroyed. I changed different summons and received the same results, so I think it is more likely related to the skill or the state.

Certain state trigger a full refresh, like leveling up, this tend to remove all skills added by items etc for a frame which will lead to those granted by items dying (this can also occur if you petmax is a formula that depends on stats granted by items).

[Wuldreg]

Well the petmax is simply 100. I checked to see if anything else was based off of items and nothing was. The only thing I could think of is that I believe shadowmaster gives your summon items or some such thing. I don't really know much about it. I found that dopplezon is also able to make timed summons (not sure how I missed this in the first place) and is what I am currently using. Here the summon gains stats from the summoner I believe, specifically hp. I have these fields set to zero but I think they would nevertheless be updated as you described. This behavior of destroying summons works the same for shadowmaster as well as dopplezon. If this item interaction is to blame I find it odd that all but one summon is destroyed, unless this is hardcoded to do otherwise, given that these skill functions only ever had a petmax of one in mind.

If this is simply an interaction with no workaround then I think I am back to square one and have to find a way to kill my summons using auras. I am not sure this is possible as all the methods I have tried have resulted in consistent failure.

Edit: So I solved the issue by changing the PetType. I was using raven because that is the skill I am trying to redesign, but I switched it to spiritwolf just to see if that worked, and lo and behold it did. I am not sure what about the raven PetType is specifically causing the issue as my new PetType entry is pretty much the same. I guess it might just be a hardcoded issue or something.

As a side note, this skill works as I would like to now, but there is still one issue. My ravens can now be attacked. I think ravens not getting attacked is due to the skill functions of the raven skill. Given that I am now using dopplezon/shadowmaster they are now grabbing aggro. This is a more a minor issue for me, but if anyone has a workaround in mind I would much appreciate it.