"We fight. We die. There is no beauty anymore" -Tal Rasha
"It'll be over soon. Everything will be gone, and this place will be forgotten..." -POD intro.
Not going to give it all away already, but now that Brother Laz is gone, I have inherited the mod; instead of rebuilding everything Laz didn't have written down when 1.10 comes out, I'm just going to make a new mod. ^^ Also, it makes it much easier to fix such problems as the annoying adds-melee-damage-to-AoE-here, adds-melee-damage-to-target-there, adds-no-weapon-damage-at-all-over-there that plagues a lot of succubus and megademon skills. The fact that only two megademon skills actually need attack rating is even worse.
I believe Laz is going to upload whatever he has to the Keep, which might be the best thing to do given the fact that neither of us has the time to work on it much before 1.10, and otherwise it's all wasted. vv
So I'm going to make a Demon Trip 2 (sort of... I'll start from scratch), but this time with a plan, and skill trees determined beforehand, instead of the "we'll see what happens" attitude towards the first. The melee skills should all work properly as God intended. All melee attacks will add weapon damage and special effects to the intended target only, and the elemental AoE damage to nearby enemies (like lightning strike does in classic LoD). So weapon damage and attack rating actually does something now. Some of them have a frenzy-like "rev up" effect on top of their normal AoE damage.
The emphasis of the mod will be on strategy and longevity... the first Demon Trip is more or less what Laz called a "tech demo", and the items are too powerful but the second one will be more than just max-vitality-only-and-pick-supernova-and-go-kill-things. A 'real' mod, so to speak. Where items in Demon Trip 1 are way better than LoD items (+1000 vitality and +6 skills anyone?), they are much more 'normal' in Reign of Fire. (all new, of course) The highest skill level bonus attainable will be +5 (!), from +2 as built-in bonus on a 'holy' staff and 'holy' armor (this affects affixes as well as built-in bonuses and stuff like defense rating; the opposite are 'undead' class items), and +1 affixed on that staff, or else +1 built-in on an 'undead' staff and +2 affixed. No more level 90 skills. And now that I have found out how to make the melee skills work properly, damage and attack rating will now be actually useful. Also... minions cannot be targeted by enemies (like raven). Hey, who needs invincible meat shields? Learn happy feet, dammit.
There are three characters, but that means all of the character skills can actually be useful. Anyone uses Dire Charm or Summon Resist?
Something important: I will actually have the time to *TEST* everything... instead of having the beta testers do so. Hell difficulty should be balanced, there should be no stupid monster count bugs, etc.
Oh yes, the characters...
Hehe, I already have them and half of their skill trees written out, but I'm not going to give it all away already. ^^ Three or four skills will return, namely Rolling Thunder (melee attack that causes a stunning earthquake, working properly now as outlined in the paragraph above, and with a cool purple shockwave effect), Immolation (melee attack that sets the area on fire, now also with proper melee damage added to the target, uses attack rating and increases attack and moving speed if you hit!), and Frozen Crown (with new custom graphics). The rest is new, obviously. And cooler, see screenshots. There are no aura skills (some aura charged items though) and one passive... and the total number of useful skills is greater than in Demon Trip 1 (no trash or filler skills).Oh well, some skills:
http://www.boomspeed.com/caan/markofthedevil.jpg
http://www.boomspeed.com/caan/markofthedevil2.jpg
A preliminary test of the Mark of the Devil skill. Keep mouse button down, stare at the moving patterns for ten minutes and you'll achieve a higher conscience. ^_^
http://www.boomspeed.com/caan/lesserdemon.gif
This is a life size pic of the normal Demon Form (there is a greater demon as well ^^ ). At least, it's him before the anti-aliasing I did to remove the jagged edges. (for some reason, this caused the filesize of the animation to inflate from 81 to 510 Kb. Hm. Kept the old one to link to, because Boomspeed only takes 1 Mb and I'm too lazy to create 15 different accounts. ^^ This demon form can use Immolation, and also other stuff such as Glacial Strike which causes a freezing blast. All of them increase attack and moving speed, btw. Think 5 Immolations per second. ^^
http://www.boomspeed.com/caan/henchmen.gif
Henchmen... summons three different monsters at once, each with (in the final version) 4-5 different spells... adding up to 13 different spells from one casting. ^^ Each of 'em does low damage, but there are, ermmm... 'more than one' of them. Oh and BTW: this causes less lag for me than four level 16 pre-1.07 pre-timer firewalls.
http://www.boomspeed.com/caan/thunderbirdicon.gif
http://www.boomspeed.com/caan/cleric-holyhealing.gif
http://www.boomspeed.com/caan/sorcerer-northstar.gif
http://www.boomspeed.com/caan/sorcerer-ascension2b.gif
And a new storyline! ^^ No Disco Inferno, a much darker storyline where the big T takes over and destroys the Worldstone. Both the forces of Light and Darkness have ended up on the mortal plane, and are fighting each other. This means there are allied NPCs everywhere, but don't expect those guys to tank for you like on Bloody Foothills. Stand next to them, protect them and they might be able to cast Holy Healing or battle orders on you once before biting the dust. ^^
The release date... well, without 1.10 I can't do much else than the graphics and txt files, right? Hmmm... 4-5 weeks after 1.10, k?
