TheHelper Mapping Projects
Hosted Projects and Completed Maps.

Lore of the Protectors 1.54

I thought of giving this the usual description like: "LotP is an AoS map with a twist. Choose from 48 unique heroes--" and so on. After years the map never quite got accepted among the mapmaking community so i might as well come clean. This is an AoS map and yes, in some level, it's a DotA clone, though i'm trying not to make it so. I would appreciate it if you give comments other than the usual "you copied DotA." Then again i deserve that so i'm not gonna try and stop you.


Tower Upgrade System (Tower Evolution)
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Tower upgrades use lumber as currency and is denoted by the "?" symbol. So they're written as "?umber" throuhgout the game. Other than collecting gold for items you can also collect ?umber for tower upgrades. Like gold, free ?umber is also given; 1 ?umber every 3 minutes. While killing enemy units gives additional gold, every 10 denies gives you a ?umber. (Denying for those who don't know is when you kill an allied creep that is low on health to "deny" your enemy gold and experience.) All ?umber acquired is given to team leaders blue player on Sentinel side and pink player on Scrouge side) as they are the only ones capable of upgrading the towers.

Every tower has a small structure connected to it. Ancient Protectors have Upgrading Runes and Spirit Towers have Upgrade Generators. To upgrade your tower, click on those small structures and pick the upgrade of your choice. You can only choose one among the 4 main upgrades (Fire, Poison, Ice and Death). Choosing any of the 4 main upgrades will give access to additional upgrades.

Below is the list of the tower upgrades and their descriptions

FIRE TOWER (2 ?umber)
Gives the tower the ability to cause splash damage. Upgrading to the Fire Tower gives you access to the Napalm Upgrade

Napalm (5 ?umber)
Gives the tower's projectiles the ability to light up the ground with Liquid Fire. Does 12 damage per second and lasts 4 seconds.

POISON TOWER (3 ?umber)
Gives the tower the ability to poison its target's for 12 seconds dealing 100 damage in total. Also slows enemy movement speed. Upgrading to the Poison Tower gives you access to the Piercing Missiles Upgrade.

Piercing Missiles (5 ?umber)
Gives the tower 10% chance to do full damage.

ICE TOWER (5 [?umber)
Gives the tower the ability to slow its target's attack and movement speed. Upgrading to the Ice Tower gives you access to the Freezing Attack Upgrade.

Freezing Attack (5 ?umber)
Gives the tower 10% chance to freeze its target in place. The target can still attack and cast spells though.

DEATH TOWER (8 ?umber)
Gives the tower the ability to lower its target's armor. Upgrading to the Death Tower gives you access to the Skeletal Warriors Upgrade.

Skeletal Warriors (5 ?umber)
Gives the tower the ability to raise its own minions from enemies it has slain. Minions also follow creep flow so they don't hang out their spawn site. Update: Ancient Protectors actually spawn Undead Treants rather than Skeletons but i forgot to change the name of the upgrade.


OTHER UPGRADES - These upgrades are stackable. You can upgrade your tower with all of these as long as you have lumber to spend. Some upgrades are only available to specific tower levels. Tower levels vary from how far they are from your base. The farthest towers are Level 1 and the closest to the Ancients are Level 4.

Repair - 5 ?umber (Level 1 & 2 towers only) - Restores 250 of your tower's health.

Spiked Barricade - 7 ?umber - Returns 10% damage to attacking enemy melee units

Armor Upgrade - 4 ?umber - Gives +5 armor to your tower

Feedback - 3 ?umber - Destroys 30 of its target's mana with each attack.

Mana Detector - 10 ?umber - A mana detector is placed above the tower and detects any enemy hero casting spells in a 1000 AoE and deals 2 damage for every mana spent.

Brilliance Aura - 5 ?umber (Level 2 towers only) - Gives the tower an aura that grants nearby allied units +100% mana regeneration. Aura has 300 AoE.

Detonate - 10 ?umber (Level 3 towers only) - Blows up your tower dealing 1000 damage to enemies within 700 AoE.

Weaken Aura - 8 ?umber (Level 4 towers only) - When an enemy unit attacks a tower with this aura, its attack damage is decreased by 20% for 4 seconds.


Weather System (Violent Skies)
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The weather system by default is not activated as people might find them distracting or some older computers not being able to run them properly. To activate the weather system, player blue has to type "-vs" in the chatbox at the beginning of the game.

Every 5 minutes a random weather appears. The weather lasts 1 minutes and each different weather affects all the units in the map in its own way.

Summer - Decreases all units mana overtime.
Rain - Decreases armor, rusting them up. Mechanical and structural units however recieve bonus HP regen as the rain waters down their flames.
Blizzard - Slows attack and movement speed.
Wind - Increases attack and movement speed.
Eclipse - Gives additional mana regeneration.
Fog - Deals damage to all units overtime.
Rain of Chaos - Infernals fall down from the sky at random places continually for 1 minute.


Multiboard
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Here is a screenshot of the multiboard. Each vertical line represents a tower with the right most line representing the Ancients. The letters N, M, S, and B stands for North, Mid, South and Base respectively. The vertical line's color tells you your towers health. As the tower absorbs damage the line turns from green to red, just like Warcraft's HP bar. Eventually it will turn dark gray when the tower is destroyed. The fraction in the multiboard ([0/11] and [1/10]) represents destroyed towers over remaining ones. This tells you how many of your towers are left or how many your team has destroyed in a glance.


HEROES & ITEMS
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Other information are available at my multiply page. Go here: http://hellmonja.multiply.com/journal/item/16 for the heroes' page and here: http://hellmonja.multiply.com/journal/item/17 for the item's page. The item's page however does not contain any information regarding items i copied from DotA.


Change Log
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Originally i was only going to release the open map. Never intended to release one to be played with. So i never got down listing all the changes i made. These are from memory only and i probably left out a lot of stuff.

-----v1.54------

Mechanics
- Fixed a bug where the Ancients remain invulnerable after you are able to destroy all 11 enemy towers.
- Added animation to spawning strutures whenever creeps spawn.
- Made the teleporting area around the warpgates bigger.
- Fixed Staff of Mages recipe bug
- Changed Tower's Freezing Attack mechanics: Now freezes upon impact.
- Items that can disassembled will no longer do so if the hero has not enough inventory room
- Added and replaced some skill quotes
- Fixed some typos
- New loading screen and map preview picture.

Heroes
- Wicked: All skills renamed.
- Iron Peacekeeper-Seismic Crunch: Converted half of the codes to JASS coding to improve stability.
- Holy Diver-Blizzard: Fixed a shared variable issue.
- Cursed Toy-Super Smash House: Improved trigger a little, removed a global var & fixed an SFX
- Mercenary-Explosives Pack: Explosives Pack (and all its variants) are no longer channeling. You can now cast and forget. Also the damage is a lot more accurate.
- Visakro-Basati: Cast range reduced to 300 and drag distancereduced to 700
- Visakro-Basati: Target unit being brought back to Visakro are now dragged instead of instantly teleporting there.
- Returned-CotG: Replaced Skeletal Warriors with Zombies
- Ancient Protectors with Death upgrade now spawns Undead Treants instead of Skeletal Warriors
- Cursed Toy-Kill Me: Fixed bug where allied units do not attack target of spell
- Battle Alchemist-Strange Brew: Improved code mechanics
- Electric Mage-The Storm: Added slow effect.
- Possessed: Tweaked Timmy's run speed animation
- Possessed-Combustion: New spell animation for Babylos
- Possessed-Combustion: Fixed the knockback angles
- Basati pull distance lowered: 1200-600
- Basati Cast range lowered: 800-500
- Ringo's Wrath of Storm's jump attribute improves with each level: 1/3/5 targets
- Cara's Silvery Night Sky mana bug fixed
- Pax's Seeds of War typo fixed
- Thunderhoof's Command Aura changed to Slow
- Auron Farstrider's Herbal Clutch renamed to Vine Hold.
- Grant's War Trap reworked.
- Holy Diver's stats rebalanced: strength and agility values swapped
- Shadow Khan's Shadow Run cooldown increased: from 16 to 25 sec.
- Shadow Khan's Black Artifice redone
- Shadow Khan's Soul Theft Devling removed.
- Shadow Khan's Phantom Images rebalanced: does 20% damage and takes 50% damage all levels.
- Electric Mage: Replaced Expunge with Blades of Heaven


Thanks to Blizzard Entertainment, Shernan, Saru, SD_Ryoko, Acehart, Vexorian, PitzerMike, Im_on_56k, Daelin, Chuckle Brother, Eul, Guinsoo, IceFrog, Softmints, emjlr, mems, DrainPipe, fortuneNext, Shakib, Sapphiro, Vulpix13 and his brother, SL4Yr, xxChaosxx and all who helped make this map and all who at least gave it a try...