Granite Golem's guide contains much useful info, though its in Russian. Maybe it will be readable if you auto-translated it by web-translator services.

You can find it here: warlords.h1.ru/war3/gg/index.php

Item-related spells effects are tied to item levels.
Shatter brake all items in a 8 square radius (except only those in the caster's pocket, so make sure your stacked heroes passed their items to wizard before you'll cast Shatter).

A hero of level 1-2 would shatter lesser items, 3-4 - lesser and minor items, 5-6 - former plus major items, 7-8 - +artifacts, 9-10 - +great artifacts.

Summoning items works pretty similar, though i'm not sure about levels. Also i suspect it can steal items from other players..

Dispel cancels all spells maintaining by heroes which level is lesser than that of a caster. not sure about number of dispelled spells. i thought its not limited.

Thanks for the link. I don't speak russian, but I guess trying an online translator might do the trick.

I just sold my bane's crown and tried summon item with my lvl 10 alchemist. No items were summoned!

edit: I don't think you can summon items from enemy heroes, but you can summon items that are on the ground. So if you want another hero's items you have to shatter them first.

summoned items are capped by "major items" i suppose. whereas the banes crown is an "artifact".
maybe lesser items are summoned at lvl 1-5, then minor at 6-8 and major at 9-10.

Molotov wrote:


this sounds about right

from Granite Golem's guide I can answer my own question about quests: easy = lesser/minor, average = major/artifact, hard= artifact/greater artifact. if I have interpreted it correctly. I guess I would have to make that list over artifacts to confirm this...

i can generate an item list for you tomorrow by my program (ultimate darklords editor). it has not such a function yiet but spreadsheet generation is in my TODO list.

A couple of minor points here

1) Shatter. The number of items shattered is limited to the spell caster level (so at L6 you can shatter 6 items in 1 cast). Usually this does not come into play but I have before been in games where a lot of items were owned or many heroes were close by and I had to do multiple shatters to get them all.

2) Shatter/Summon/Reward. What you can shatter/summon or get as a quest reward is *totally* based on item cost. The level field is no longer used. I know this because I recently updated the Divine Right scenario and re-costed many items to properly reflect their value. Once I did this, items that used to come as easy rewards no longer do so. Incidentally, Base's Crown at 2000 is too high to summon/shatter as I believe the max shatter/summon tops out at 1999 (ie L10 is 1800-1999). This can be easily tested by lowering the cost to 1999 and trying.

3) As noted, you can never summon an item from another hero. But you can summon from the ground (or a ruin).

KGB

KGB wrote:


Do you know if the ruin will get something random instead, or if it will get a spesific reward? Would be great if you could predict the outcome.

I got my alchemist to lvl 9. I could summon ring of air, which I shouldn't be able to do before lvl 10. I decided to recruit another hero. I didn't manage to get summon item before lvl 3. I could summon the golden chest(1000g), but not the daggeril blade (1000g) or the darksword (950g). When I look in the editor the cest is labeled minor and the other two are major items. I have no quick way of browsing the items to find if there are any items that are lesser/minor with a larger cost or a major with less cost to test more. Guess I'll look into this later.

My understanding is that by the time you are summoning from ruins/ground there are no more items left. So the ruin won't get a different item (items in ruins are fixed at game start time), you just get no reward for searching it (other than 3 XP).

Interesting thing about the summon item. That one is rarely used (since teleport games are hardly ever done so it requires a custom scenario hero with summon item and no teleport) and it could well be that skill *is* tied to the level item type of minor/major/artifact etc. For your tests, I suggest you modify the default.rul file to give say 500XP for searching a ruin so you can get to L10 on turn 2

KGB

With pictures and all! Thanks a lot Molotov <3


I did some testing conserning ruins. I picked up quest for an item in a ruin with one hero and summoned items with another until I got that item. I then searched the ruin and got gold. I was able to do this twice during the game.

At the end of the game I had searched 42/50 ruins, which meant that there were 8 hidden ruins. I did easy quests to get access to those ruins. I knew there were only 2 items left that I didn't have. Bane's crown and the cross of power. I did get several offers for the cross by a merchant while doing easy quests, I did not get any offer of bane's crown. I did find bane's crown in one of the ruins, I did not find the cross of power in any of them.

I did sell bane's crown before I found the last ruin hoping that it might spawn there, but it didn't. I guess the ruin is predetermined since I had passed a few sages close to the last ruin offering mana crystals, which is what were in that last ruin.

After loading I was able to do some hard quests getting the cross of power as reward. I did only do a few quests, but it seems to me like you can't get quests that give you any item that is hidden in a ruin.