The Warcraft III Ability Guide

[Kueken]

Atwa (Tornado Wanderer): Units that have this ability can follow other units much closer than ordinary units. You'll just have to set the area of effect of the spell to a greatest possible value. A unit that has this ability will just have to be ordered to right-click another unit and it will follow the unit if it doesn't have an attack.

Is there any way to make this useable for a hero without side effects (like wandering randomly when not having any other order)?
I experimented with the values a bit, but with some weird results. Sometimes the hero wandered a bit and then suddenly died. (with just the values for AoE and cast range set to 99999); I could not even revive him (he was not removed from game, his disabled icon showed up, but revive via trigger did not work)

User Interface: Often tooltips and buffs don't show up correctly when a spell is updated to a higher level. In that case any ability can be added and removed to update the user interface. I usually base this ability off of Adis (Dispel Magic).

JASS:

function UnitRefreshUI takes unit u returns nothing
  call UnitAddAbility(u, <refresher ability>)
  call UnitRemoveAbility(u, <refresher ability>)
endfunction

I never had this problem with any ability besides Charge Gold and Lumber ('AAns'). But this method does not seem to work here. The gold/lumber cost is correctly updated, but the tooltip, cooldown, mana cost etc is ignored. Is this a known problem?

[Callahan]

I may use 'Awan' (Critter wander).

[Kueken]

Maybe I formulated it a bit misleading:
I dont want the hero to move around, I just want them to be able to follow other heroes closely as stated in the guide, but without the side-effect of randomly moving around.

[Ignitedstar]

Tom_Kazansky found an interesting thing about Engineering Upgrade. I don't know if this is already known, though. I'm sorry for posting it again, if it is.

Originally Posted by Tom_Kazansky

... Engineering Upgrade ability is... weird, (this is not the word I want to say but... I will just use it ). When you upgrade an ability to another, it keeps... the nature of the old ability. ("nature", I mean it is active or passive)
For example: you upgrade a passive Storm Hammer to an active Storm Bolt, after upgrade, you can't cast Storm Bolt, it become a passive now.
that is what I found with my own test

[cosmicat]

Interesting. I wonder if it keeps other "natures," too. Like, if I upgrade Thunder Clap to Storm Bolt, does the ability still think it's an immediate order?
Maybe you can only "correctly" upgrade an ability to something with the same parameters...

About the "update user interface" thing, spells do fail to update their tooltips if they're leveled up via trigger while the user is reading the tooltip. The remedy for this is either to add/remove a dummy ability or hide/show the ability being leveled up. Hide/show will actually update the tooltip while the user is still reading it, which is cool if the ability is just a counter or something, but maybe not if the description changes drastically.

[Ice Snake]

Thank you! Very useful.

[Ignitedstar]

I found something kind of peculiar with Channel's field "Art - Animation Names". I thought that Channel's default fields for this field (them being "spell" and "channel") where just there for fun. Haha, but it turns that it serves a function to how Channel performs. It's very simple, but I haven't seen it posted anywhere. It's probably already common knowledge, but you never know.

Apparently when you remove "channel" from Channel's "Art - Animation Names", it no requires the spell to be channeled by the unit. To elaborate, when "channel" is removed, the spell will fire off whether or not the unit is channeling the spell. No strings attached. While this may not be important for spells that fire off immediately, it is important when making the decision of whether a spell that happens overtime should stop when the caster stops.

An example where removing "channel" is relatively useless is if you wanted to make a spell like Storm Bolt. Your hero would only be stopped if there's an interruption before the spell itself activates (just like normal).

An example where removing "channel" is significant is if you wanted to make a spell like Monsoon. Remember that this is making a spell LIKE Monsoon. Monsoon itself is hard-coded so that you must channel the spell (trust me, I tried). Spells like Monsoon require that a unit channels the spell to gain the full effect, while there are other spells like Flame Strike (which is hard-coded to require channeling, as well... I tried) that, despite the spell being channeled for a few seconds, does not take effect until a certain amount of time.

Let's use a spell like Flame Strike as an example. Normally, Flame Strike takes a few seconds to activate before firing off. This gives any unit the ability to stop the Blood Mage before firing it off by interrupting him (via stun or silence) or by scaring the playing into thinking that the Blood Mage is in peril and should back off. It's still mana used, because even though the spell was used, the effect is delayed for a few seconds. If a person were to remove the "channel" requirement as listed in the "Art - Animation Names", the Blood Mage would never have to worry about channeling the spell. It would fire off whether he stands there the entire time or only manages to use the spell for .1 seconds. Stunned? The spell will fire off. Silenced? The spell still fires off.

Remember that this only works for Channel. The actual versions of Monsoon and Flame Strike are hard-coded to require that the unit channel the spell.

It makes me wonder... Is there anything else that would change the behavior of how a spell works if we add more things to "Art - Animation Names"?

[ALiEN95]

Atwa (Tornado Wanderer):
setting area of effect to 999999 will make it usable for units with attack :)

didnt read this all tutoria lbuts its great so far