Tinkering with Tinker :)

With Tinker's Engineering Upgrade, to be precise.

I made a small map with a hero, which has 3 abilities.

He has banish.
He has banish -> flamestrike ability that turns banish into flamestrike (Engineering upgrade, naturally)
He also has banish -> Siphon Mana ability that turns banish into Siphon Mana(Engineering upgrade, again lol)

He also has a bunch of tomes lying around - these are tomes of retraining, and banish -> flamestrike, banish -> siphon mana tomes.

And so i did some tinkering :)

Result #1: It is very possible to morph any ability into any ability. However, care must be taken in the fact that new hero abilities will not stay in the same slot as old hero abilities, but will rather take their own designated slot.

Result #2: Engineering Upgrade can be used in conjunction with items and appears to correctly upgrade/downgrade abilities when item is added/removed to/from heroes' inventory.

From this i can gather that Engineering Upgrade will work similarly as a passive unit ability.

I attached my small map, so all of you can take a look at it.

Also, i won't have time to work with Map Editor for a few days, because of exams, but if some of you could test a couple of things for me and post results here, it would be uber cool ^^

These things are:
1) How do item-based, hero and non-hero versions of Engineering upgrade skills interact with each other?

2) What happens when engineering upgrades are looped? Say, we add banish->flamestrike, flamestrike -> manadrain and manadrain -> banish. How does this work out?

3) what happens, if we then remove some elements from this loop?

And anything else you guys can think of :)

P.S: I would be very glad if you could answer my another question, too :)
How to make Engineering Upgrade not to show in active hero abilities roster after it has been learned? I tried to simply remove its icon, but it didn't work as you can see from the map :(

Unfortunately, almost every ability with an icon cannot be hidden. I think Channel might be the exception.

I guess noone is interested in the only way to dynamically change hero abilities WC3 has to offer :(

Oh well t.t

Does anyone know if there is a way to control which icons get shown if a unit has 4 hero abilities and 4 normal abilities, all with icons, and all assigned to bottom row?

Hmmm, i just found. You can add hero abilities to a unit with Unit - add ability action...

Lol, well kk i am quite a newbie with ability triggers - i never used them before...

Hmmm. Still, i was absolutely under impression that you couldn't add Hero abilities to units before 1.15. Can someone confirm it please?

Tested it.
Apparently, when hero ability is added to a unit, it is added to his ability tab, but not to his learn skill tab.

So engineering upgrade is still the only way to add learn-able skills to a unit.

qwertyui, I don't mean to sound harsh, but I think it's fair to say that most people on this forum are very interested in the editing potential of the Goblin Tinker's new abilities, and it's quite likely that nearly everyone is playing around with editing them in different ways.

The long and short of it is, I'm very interested to hear if you discover some interesting information. But I'm not surprised if people don't drop everything to investigate the avenues that you're looking into.

And yes, the Engineering upgrade is very abusable. I'm quite excited about it. Like I said in the thread about the Goblin Tinker's abilities, at the top of the forum.

Point taken.

Testing continues :)

And first result is interesting enough.
On attached map, you have 12 custom skill, named:
00, 01, 02, 10, 11, 12, 20, 21, 22, 30, 31 and 32.

Names are, obviously, based on the coordinates of their button.

All of these skills are passive and have to be researched, too (Based on Mountain Giant's Resistant Skin).

You can add these skills and remove these skills from the lone hero.
In order to add a skill with a name XX to a hero, input "XX" as a chat string. So to add skill 00 - input 00, skill 32 - input 32 etc.
In order to remove a skill with name XX from a hero, input "-XX" as a caht string. So to remove 00 - input -00, to remove 32 - input -32 etc.

After testing various combinations of these skills, i can say that they will always take the empty slot, should one be available, and will never force any of the hero's active skills (even unresearched ones) out of their button positions. If no slots are available, they will just disappear not to be seen again.

If any of you are curious in researching this simple map further, the map is attached. I am moving forward to testing how adding and active skill will work on hero with only passive skills.

EDIT: Tested, results absolutely the same. It seems the activeness / passiveness of the skill does not have any impact on how it allocated itself in unit buttons.
Moving on to the final testing - engineering upgrades. The only skill that actually causes changes in skill roster.

EDIT 2: Tested Engineering Upgrade.
Results: Adding 1 Engineering upgrade creates no undesirable side effects.
When you add the second Upgrade, the first one pops out and replaces one of hero abilities. This is a fatal drawback for those of us, who are interface perfectionists...
It seems nothing can be done about it. Or maybe i'm just too lazy to think in 1am in the night.
Yeah, Engineering Upgrade map attached too.

Hey watch the triple post. Anyway, this looks interesting. Whoever thought you could go so far in the warcraft universe.....