The inner workings of Tinker

You may already know all of this, but regardless of that I am making this post for those of you who don't know how he works already.

Cluster Rockets: The main thing i have noticed about this is that the missile speed has no say on how fast the actual missile goes. It will reach the target in the same amount of time regardless of how close or far away from the target area you are. Each missile does it's own damage, which is why the damage is only 7.5 or so. Stun does not stack, and the duration is naturally short.

Pocket Factory: This has multiple parts to it, and the actual hero ability is just the pretty front.
There is one ability that spawns a clockwerk goblin every so often. Nothing more to it really.
There are 3 exploding goblin damages which each deal a different amount of damage. Just kaboom but weaker.

Engineering Upgrade: This ability is little understood by most people. But here's how it works. There are 4 of every ability besides engineering upgrade and the kaboom ability, which upon levelling up Engineering upgrade, moves up to the next "level" of upgrade. After this becomes openly moddable, we will be able to actually have abilities that have radical changes, such as a fireball that becomes a line of fire that then becomes a firestorm. This ability will take a LOT of work on your part though in creating the additional units and abilities since it just kicks them up to the next ability that it is moving them up to. Note: This ability will NOT be good for using if you plan to have a lot of levels to it. a 10 level spell will effectively need 30 or more additional abilities, which will quickly mount up.

Robo-Goblin: This is a basic Transformation spell. Not particularly different from any other one, most all of his abilities are ones that you can edit without changing the robo-goblin.

Demolish: This will be a popular AoS spell for sure. It has a "chance to demolish" thing which means you can turn it into a "5% chance to deal 2x damage to building" or something. It is pretty much critical strike, but against buildings.

From what I gathered.. demolish has a simple little section that's really nice. It isn't just against buildings.. but you can choose the armor type. This means that you can make interesting ideas, such as Hero killers... or ranged killers... this is also a way to incorporate "countering" units in UMS maps too. Such as a Melee that gets bonuses from hitting Small armor.. or magic users who get the bonus against Heavy armor.

Excerpted from an IRC discussion about the obvious features of the Goblin Tinker's abilities:

nice, still, they didn't fix the issue w/ clockwork goblins
blizzard shoulda made the goblins spawn WITH kaboom autocasted already
<not that i use the tinker :P>

You wouldn't need kaboom autocasted, they deal the damage upon death, meaning that they deal damage without kabooming and would be able to attack before they die too.

The suggestion I made to the Devs about that kaboom ability was simple, I'm surprised they didn't do it. If they are willing to make a different blink icon for lvl 3 Spirit Bear (beastmaster), why didn't they make a new kaboom icon for clockwork gobs... heh, it would make a lot of people not have confusion at all. And I see no reason to autocast kaboom on them, so why have autocast available?

Heh, silly blizzard, you do great things.. you do some other things I don't understand... still good company :) keke

personally i think Robo-Goblin is horribly imbalanced. first off its permanent, he turns mechanical which means almost no spells against him and he can be REPAIRED, 5 acolytes can fix him from 1 health to full in 7-10 seconds, ditto with orcs/humans/NE (worse cuz they have mass workers). secondly, since he has Demolish he can freakin annihilate defensive buildings, like maybe take out human towers with one or two smacks or ancient protectors in four. Third, he retains his hero armor.personally i think it should be switched to Fortfied for his robo-form, so artillery, cannon towers, ancient protectors, batriders + gyrocopters can beat the crap out of him. ^_^ ^_^ ^_^

tinker is fun as hell to kill outside of his robo-mode tho...he's so tiny!

Fellas, let's not talk about whether the Goblin Tinker is a good idea or whatnot. This isn't a discussion of melee, it's a discussion of the Tinker's abilities, and how they can be used/abused/modified/exploited to further mapping.

ah, ok. well in that case, my reply is you can do a hell of a lot with it. Cluster Rockets is a very flexible damage spell, Pocket Factory allows for building-summoning (which was probably doable anyway), and/or for neat unit-spawning without triggers (for maps like Footie Wars). Engineering upgrade is highly flexible, and would make an excellent replacement for Attribute bonus. Demolish can be turned into %chance to deal extra damage to any armor type of choice, you can do a lot with that. Robo-goblin not so much, it's just a basic morph spell.

also, lots* of 1337 new models! ^_^ missles!!

Does anyone happen to know if Pocket Factory is the same root as any other summon spell? Or if it has any special properties?

I would say that its a new unique spell. Most of the other summon spells don't have a missile effect (most have effect effects like inferno)

i think Vengeance and Spirit of Vengeance have missle art, but Pocket Factory lets you target a point. i'm also pretty sure you can use other units than Factory, it's NOT a structure, just mechanical, immobile, and targeted as structure. I did make a pretty uber ultimate out of Pocket Factory, i mentioned it in some post about ability editing.

This thread has been unstickied, since the patch has been out for a while and people seem to be happily experimenting on interesting things to do with the Tinker's abilities quite well on their own. Feel free to continue posting here if you find more interesting information or some other neat tricks.

i heard a rumor somewhere that Demolish could be set to work as % chance for any armor type. This proved to be false, just so ya'll know.

Engineering upgrade is good but it's a bitch to do for high-leveling Heroes, like say 20-level or even 100-level (a moronic idea at best, regardless of Engineering trouble) and doing this in multiplayer causes a hellluvalot of lag due to ability count. so for engineering upgrade: don't try this at home (in multiplayer), kids :\

I had other problems with engineering upgrade myself. When I tested it on a hero of mine (it was perfect for him, before the 1.15 I had to trigger the damage bonuses frm the pasive ability on all his spells), it worked up to level 2 but then when I wanted to learn level 3 it wasn't there, all that was was a tooltipless green square of death. After learnig it, the level 3 bonuses didn't show up. (I was testing it with one upgradable ability only). Ah, well, back to having the whole thing triggered.

Also, the robo goblin is a dissapointment; the only way it can work is the "infinite" way, meaning morph into something and back whenever you please. I also couldn't find any fields to edit the bonus strenght and armor, it was fixed on +5 and +1. So all the advertising how this morph is not buggy when used as a multi-level spell is kind of useless, as the spell cannot be used to replace "old" morph spells such as metamorphosis and avatar.