Editing the effect icons

anyone know how to edit the small icons that appear when a unit is effected by something?
example: when a unit is onder brilliance aura, a small icon appears at the bottom of the unit info and a tooltip that says "this unit is under the effect of brililance aura; it regenerates mana more swiftly."
anyone know how to edit the icon and/or tooltip?

Yes.

All the buff information for spells is found in the corresponding <race>AbilityFunc.txt and <race>AbilityStrings.txt files. So, if you wanted to change the buff information for the Unholy Aura, you'd take UndeadAbilityFunct.txt and UndeadAbilityString.txt out of the war3x.mpq and edit them using Notepad or something similar.

Look for the ability, and then immediately below it (with the same four-letter code, except starting with a "b") will the be the information for the buff.

Once you've changed them to your heart's content, import them into your MAP using the Import Editor. Change the path for the files to be Units\ and all will be excellent with you.

This is how we have to do buff editing, until (if) they release a buff editor in a future patch.

thx for that but... what if i dont want to modify the actual brilliance aura. i was hoping to be able to edit that on a custom ability that i use brilliance aura as a base. (i might use brilliance aura as itself for another unit). if i edit the original brilliance aura, will that effect all the custom abilities i base off it? i hope you get what im saying

Yes, I understand what you're saying and no, unfortunately custom abilities will use the same buff information as the original. Sorry.

where do i find the .txt files?

Get the latest version of WinMPQ and use it to open the war3x.mpq file in your Warcraft III\ directory. Don't add anything to war3x.mpq or any of the other .mpq's. Try not to alter them in any way. Just scroll down to Units\ and find the files. Extract them to your desktop.