Tips When Working With Custom Spells

Customizing Casting Animations Based on Ability
This one is really quite useful. Have you ever wanted a Treant to do something other than his Eat Tree animation when casting? Ever wanted to make the Shadow Hunter do that cool backflip/handwalk animation during a spell? It all depends on the Art - Animation Names field that every spell has. It's at the very top, and based on what you put in it, it will change the casting animation of the user accordingly.

For example, I want my Treant to use his Root animation when he casts Blizzard (Neutral Hostile). I go the ability (and make a custom one if neccessary), go to the "Art - Animation Names" field, delete the Strings already there and add one new string: "morph".

Now, whenever the Treant casts Blizzard, he'll use his rooting animation.

Proper Tooltip Values for New Custom Abilities
Looking at the standard abilities, you'll notice their tooltips usually contain things like <AOsw,Dur1>. These triangle-bracketed values are variables. For example, <AOsw,Dur1> is the duration of AOsw at level 1. AOsw happens to be Serpent W. When you create a new custom ability based off of Serpent Ward, it's name is no longer AOsw, and so, if you change it's duration time at level 1, you'd have to enter correct value in the tooltip as well, otherwise the tooltip values will be that of normal AOsw. This can be hell if you have to go back and change a lot of values.

Luckily, New Custom Abilities have their own unique names! To see these spell names, like AOsw, press CTRL+D in the Object Editor. Now, you can change the tooltip variables to the appropriate values. For example, <AOsw,Dur1> might become <A001:AOsw,Dur1>.

You can save yourself a bit of time, too, by copying and pasting the entire tooltip into Notepad and then doing a Find and Replace for AOsw, replacing it with A001:AOsw, or whatever you're using.

Note
I'll add more tips as I think of them.

Great tips, I never thought of changing animation names... that'd produce some cool effects :)

I thought you just had to change AOsw to A001 and that the piece after the colon was just letting you know the spell you based it off of...

But to change the animations, don't you have to know the name of the animation you want to use? All I know are stand and attack; how do I find the others?

Gung-ho, if u turn on the previewer (i have it off cuz i heard it reduces WE lag), you get a preview of the unit selected. The little arrows on top of the previewer is used to look thorough the units different animations, then just check what its called.

Alright, thanks. This helps a lot. :D

(From my experience)You have to change all capital letters to small ones if you look up the names in the previewer, or it won't work.

I'm not sure if it's like this with all animations, but I think so.

i thought every1 already knew this :))
anywayz, if u want beastmaster to cast any spells u might consider using
attack slam for channeling spells, or attack second for spells like storm bolt etc....
i made a cute spell using storm bolt, second attack anime, rexxar projectile art and it looks something like this "he swings his axe, another axe hits the unit and stuns it" with custom effects....

also that custom animation stuff and new buff/effect editor significantly reduce the need for trigger enhanced spells cuz u can already make those effects....i'll post this map, and u look at hero named "phantasmal warrior" and his "deadlock" spell....the forked lightning effect is kinda dull, but the sprites flowing around him and his target are kewl :)
before this it was an trig. enhanced spell which looked almost the same as this one...