A tutorial on how to replace hero skills, without leaving enginner upgrade traces :)

Yes, you heard it right ppl :)

I know an order, in which engineering upgrades need to be added and removed to and from the hero in order to replace a hero skill with another hero skill, leaving no traces of engineering upgrades in the system.

This thread is essentially a follow-up on "Tinkering with Tinker" thread, but since the original thread is not very interesting to people who are not Tinker junkies and went horribly off-topic anyway, i decided to create a new thread.

Ok. Let me restate my findings.
I know how, using 2 custom Engineering Upgrade skills, replace one hero ability on a hero with another IN-GAME.

With this knowledge, it becomes possible to write a trigger, which genuinely replaces one hero ability with the other, including ability icon, ability tooltips, ability research icon and tooltip, ability functionality and anything else within current Engineering Upgrade capability.

The attached map illustrates the rather simple idea behind hero skill replacement very nicely. It also gives a lot of room for testing, should any of you be interested :)

The attached map takes your common Blood Mage. The only way this Blood Mage differs from any original Blood Mage is that he has lvl11 (modified by gameplay constants) and can lvl up Phoenix to level 2 (Which is identical to lvl 1 for all practical purposes). These modifications were done for better testing and are irrelevant to hero ability switching procedure.

The attached map responds to the following chat string commands:
"00" command adds engineering upgrade that replaces Flame Strike with Storm Bolt.
"01" command adds engineering upgrade that replaces Storm Bolt with Flame Strike.
"10" command adds engineering upgrade that replaces Banish with Thunder Clap.
"11" command adds engineering upgrade that replaces Thunder Clap with Banish.
"20" command adds engineering upgrade that replaces Siphon Mana with Bash.
"21" command adds engineering upgrade that replaces Bash with Siphon Mana.
"30" command adds engineering upgrade that replaces Phoenix with Avatar.
"31" command adds engineering upgrade that replaces Avatar with Phoenix.
If you put a "-" character in front of any command, the resulting command will remove the ability, instead of adding it.

Now, the actual procedure for replacing one hero ability with the other, leaving no engineering upgrade traces is fairly simple.

If you want to replace hero ability A with hero ability B and have no engineering upgrade abilities on your hero you need:
1) add an engineering upgrade which replaces ability A with ability B (You now have ability A replaced with ability B and 1 engineering upgrade icon).
2) add an engineering upgrade which replaces ability B with ability A (You now ability A back again and 2 engineering upgrade icons).
3) remove the engineering upgrade which replaced ability A with ability B (Miraculously, you still have Ability A, but only 1 engineering upgrade icon now)
4) remove the engineering upgrade which replaced ability B with ability A (Voila! Ability B has now replaced Ability A and you have 0 engineering upgrade icons).

Now would be a fitting time to say something like "Am I a Genius or What?". But i don't want to get under my reader's skin too much , do i ^_^?

If you fire up the map and feel the urge to replace Flame Strike with Storm Bolt for that cool Banish/Bolt hero, you need to input the following commands in the following order and observe the whole process first-hand:

00
01
-00
-01

This methods has its limitations. One limitation i know of is that if you try to replace an already learned ability with a different ability using the previously outlined procedure, you will get one hell of a conflict between ability cursors, graphics and mechanics.

For better demonstration, try putting 1 skill point in flamestrike, and changing it to Storm Bolt afterwards. Or even better - change flamestrike to bolt, upgrade bolt to lvl1 and then change bolt to flamestrike again. Then cast it on self :). The bloodmage will just stand there in perpetual chanelling motion, taking damage from Flamestrike that doesn't even bother to show. sw33t stuff :)

Surprisingly enough, when a hero ability does not have any skill points in it, it can be changed to whatever you want, it will still function properly. Just make sure you don't change abilities that already have at least 1 skill point in them. Though i am sure you resourceful guys out here already have quite a few ideas for a workaround lol :)

So there you have it. Have fun building hero skill trees with this :)

P.S: T3h M4P

Workaround, eh? You mean like tracking the points the hero has in all his skills, removing all his skillpoints, swapping the ability, and then re-attributing the points?

Yeah, something like this lol :)

Yes, in combination with tome of retraining and some variables, this could be done. And you can switch any ability with any without having too many engineering upgrades, you only need to go in circles through all ability changes untill you get to the one you want....

but wouldn't it then be still easier to just make a unit ability for every level of a hero ability out there, since you can move abilities on and off easilly, without any possible bugs still lurking out there?...

The problem is - hero abilities also appear on research tab. And research tab also has an icon and a tooltip. Which cannot be changed without replacing a hero ability.

If you want your hero to learn a skill normally (Via standart learn skill interface), without having to implement custom dialogs and create a hell lot of additional abilities-per-level, with all the research tooltips working correctly, this is the only way i know.

Why just not use triggers?

Unit- Add ability
Unit- Remove ability

Voi, those triggers add any ability, as a unit ability. Which means hero abilities are only added at their first level, and they don't appear as learnable skills.