Rise of Winterchill (RoW) is a custom scenario for Warcraft III of the AoS genre (which includes DotA, among other popular maps). It is under casual development by Softmints. This site assumes a background in Warcraft III and its mods/mod culture: beware of the jargon! For the initiated, RoW features:
Twenty-six interesting, engaging, and original characters to fight with.
Almost no stuns or unit-targeted abilities; instead there is a massive emphasis on timing, aiming, skill, and teamwork.
Abilities remain useful at all stages of the game by scaling based on stats, and can be partly customised by certain items.
Gameplay heavily oriented around player versus player combat.
Progressive systems to make selecting heroes and items very easy for new players and veterans alike.
Oodles of bonus content!
See that Sidebar over there on the right? It's handy for navigating.
The Playable Characters aspire to provide a variety of fun playstyles which reward player skill. Unavoidable, easy-to-use abilities such as Storm Bolt are kept to a minimum, as are complete disables such as stuns. Abilities tend to have ludicrously abstruse (but hilarious and very satisfying-when-you-nail-it) aiming, such as the famous Caber Toss which requires alignment with a tree, Thunderbolt which needs a unit to be standing exactly between Tempest and where he wants to hit, and Arc Arrow, which curves more based on how much Agnes turns before firing it.
Status Effects are a standardised set of debuffs which are employed by multiple abilities, and some abilities (Lich's Dark Ritual) then affect status effects in general. They are Burn, Poison, Wound, and 'Chill'.
Powerup items such as dropped coins, or meat can be interacted with by some abilities, such as Psychic's Barrier which attracts anything that's lying around.
Knockback is a major feature, as being knocked into trees or other destructables deals hefty bonus damage, so enemy players will be forever trying to align their shots to maximise damage.
Some abilities are classified as 'attacks', and benefit from attack modifiers such as life/mana leech, or cleave. This allows for much greater item customisation.
Ability fields (mainly damage) can vary based on stats, and several items can additionally customise abilities to improve their damage, duration, radius of effect, or add extra effects such as inflicting poison.
Resources come in from a few routes:
The troops on the lanes split a modest 9-12 gold between nearby enemy players upon death, as well as a steady amount of experience.
The troops also have a 25% chance to drop a coin when they die. Coins are worth 30 gold, and are picked up at melee range, but they disappear within a few seconds, so it's a race to grab them.
Killing enemy players gives a nice bonus of 200 + 3% of the total value of all the items they're holding. This bounty will be split evenly between all participants of the killing. Also, experience is provided: more if the dead enemy was of a higher level then the killer, and less if the enemy was of a lower level.
Towers give team gold every time they take damage! This makes pushing very lucrative and encourages offensive, risky gameplay.
Items are of course a significant feature, as they provide the opportunity for one team to eventually win. There is a generous array of items on offer, with complete information about them included in the map, housed in a special interface. Details such as costs, recipe components, and stacking information (particularly for % based effects) are listed, to the point where this wiki (or any external site) is pretty much pointless. New players have exactly the same information available as experienced players, and will never have to rely on external sites or rote learning. If you make a mistake, or just want to check how much your dps improves with different builds, items will be refunded for their full price if they haven't left the fountain area yet.
One of the best things about item shopping is the revolutionary -i command. Just type -i <itemname> and the game will buy it for you. So -i boots of speed will buy exactly those. If you can't afford it, the game tells you how much you need. If you're not near the shop, it will be kept 'on the counter' for you, and no-one can steal it. You can even type shortcuts such as -i str for a strength item, or -i speed for a movement speed item. The shortcuts are highlighted in orange wherever the item's name appears, making this extra easy.
Recipes (when several weak items can be combined into a stronger one) are bought as 'bowls', which can be clicked to complete the item. If you don't have all the components handy, the game checks if you have enough gold, and if you do, it'll spend the gold and complete the item anyway. This works even if you only have some components, so combined with -i, you'll never have to spend 5 minutes trawling through 10 shops to get the items you were looking for. There is only one items menu, so you won't have to run halfway across the map to finish an item any more.
This is as intuitive as it gets, and as a bonus, the items are versatile enough that generally, every hero can get every item without it being a complete waste due to stacking issues. New players, you have nothing to fear.
The terrain recently got a makeover! It's primarily built around function: if units are thrown into trees, they take damage, hence the abundance of trees.
Background:
RoW is the successor to Softmints' old project, DotA Outland, which was started in 2003 and ended in 2006 (when work on RoW began). Some content has been carried forward, but most importantly the style in which it was made. Outland was never a success in terms of bugs, balance, or efficient coding, but many people loved it all the same, and it served as a great learning experience.
If you wish to request access to this wiki, please contact me on the forums.
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Rise of Winterchill is free for anyone to play. It is not free to be redistributed commercially (that includes any website with advertising or any form of making profit), to be altered, or to have any of its content copied or used in any manner without explicit permission from Softmints. All rights reserved! If you want to contact me, there are some forums linked to above.
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