Ever since I’ve been playing Warcraft 3 I’ve always had a minor problem of item management during campaigns, missions or custom campaigns made by fans. Of course I’ve always prioritized items that I needed the most on my hero to support troops and to buff up the hero depending on the mission or challenge I had to face.
What I’ve always thought was a must have on a hero was an Orb. I doubt there is a player that doesn’t know about Orbs in Warcraft; how each has a unique effect when you attack and how they enable a pure melee hero attack air units. Of course I’m not saying that an Orb cannot be sold or thrown away when you have the chance to get a better “high level” item but I would still trade in consumable things such as mana/health pots just to be able to keep on holding to the Orb I have.
I took the time and thought about what Feranor Steeltoe (a Dwarf NPC from the ‘Blackrock & Roll’ mission in Reign of Chaos) said when you brought him Searinox’s heart. Feranor said that he will: “reforge your weapons to strike with searing heat” and rewards you with the Orb of Fire that takes up one item slot in your inventory and rewards you with +5 attack and splash damage. Which brings me to what I had in mind as an option that would be nice to have in Reforged. Orbs should have a special slot that can be fitted on Heroes; as a result the Hero Unit will benefit from the bonuses of the Orb and have an extra free item slot, thus making item management a bit more simple and convenient for a player. If the player wants to remove the Orb, he/she will simply open a weapon tab on the Hero and throw away the Orb, either sell it or discard it on the ground where it can be picked up or seen.
I think the orb of fire is garbage. Even with an extra slot for it.
Well it was an example. The main idea was for Orbs to have a slot of their own and allow you to use the Orb you want without interfering with other items and allow you that extra item slot.
I like the idea thumps up
I think in the future with Reforged they plan on allowing full customization of the UI (judging by the UI in the screenshots). This should mean in the future people will be able to do this for their maps. You can already kind of simulate this fairly easily, but the UI customization currently is not very good and thus it’s hard to relay this information to the player.
All an “Orb” is is like any other item. And all an Item is is it’s just an object that has a link to an ability. The ability then gets applied to whatever unit that the item is in the inventory of. So, to simulate items all you really need to do is have a custom hidden ability that’s used in right-clicking on objects. Trigger that catches this ability to remove that item from the game and add an ability to the unit. But again, because of no UI customization it’s hard to simulate dropping items and showing it and the information about it to the player.
I think that something of the sort of what Templarfreak says should be done (i.e. translate items into custom abilities), but only for quest items in the campaign (and not for orbs). And I can think of only a couple of situations where this could apply (at least in RoC; haven’t gone through Frozen Throne campaign recently).
One of these is the RoC Undead campaign, where you have to have Arthas pick up parts of a key. This should be represented in the game as an ‘ability’, albeit one that you cannot use. And you shouldn’t be required to have one inventory spot vacant to pick up any parts. It’s just annoying inventory management imo.
Second is the last mission of the Orc campaign, where Thrall carries a Soul Gem to trap Hellscream with. This should be a custom ability for that mission rather than an item that pointlessly takes up a space of your inventory (and which you can’t even decide to swap to your other hero anyway).
Otherwise, inventory management should remain essentially the same between campaign and multiplayer, where decisions about balancing consumables and passive bonuses should remain a strategic decision.
They said they’re possibly giving us the chance to even change the inventory size for Custom Games, so I’m fairly confident there’s going to be other improvements too what comes to items and inventory management.
I have to disagree. They should leave it the way it is. Orbs already provide melee heroes with a huge upgrade. If we give them an extra slot for a specific orb, they’d be too powerful.
I think they have it right at the moment. If you want your melee hero to have an orb, you have to lose an item slot.
When you say Custom UI will we get the ability to have inventory screens?
We have 6 slots for items right now, how many do you think we will be able to have in reforged?
The prospect of more RPG elements opens up whole new possibilities for custom games.
For custom, hopefully the editor will be flexible enough to do this. For melee, IMHO, no.
For melee, this simply removes a decision from the player, reducing their options (which reduces strategic depth). Why not let a player fill all their slots with non-orbs if they want to?
Aside: Orb stacking rules aren’t obvious - maybe inactive orbs should indicate they’re inactive (e.g. greyed out) - unless they change the rules so they can stack properly.
I’ve noticed that you can stack orbs and the option to “mute” items that could result in stackable orb effects or picking up what another hero (or enemy her drops on the ground) doesn’t work too well or at all.
I’ve seen this option in dota but it almost never worked, you could use the grey’ed out/muted items on anyone and they would still benefit from them despite the warning.
The only game I saw where you were allowed to choose one of the many orb effects you had on you due to items was HoN; the game allowed you to select an orb effect from an item you had equipped while keeping the bonuses of both.
I’ve toyed around with the WC3 latest maps and updates and they always had this thing where you could use all orb types and they would function as intended. So in 1 hit you can: purge, poison, chill and armor reduce your victim; if you have the necessary Orbs equipped. It was kind of funny to see and luckily you can’t combine the AoE effect of the Fire Orb with the armor decrease of the Corruption Orb, causing multiple victims to suffer an armor debuff.