Many buffs, with many spells, help!

Hey,

From my work in the past 2 weeks, I discovered three things... Limitations of sorts, and I was wondering what you guys have done to get around, if you encountered them.

1. Two (or more) spells with the same base ability can not BOTH (or all) place different buffs on the same target. If the buffs are DIFFERENT, NONE will show on the target - they actually end up cancelling each other out, somehow.

2. Channel base ability doesn't seem to place any buffs on a target. This bothers me. Along with the fact that it doesn't allow projectiles either.

3. However, I did notice (not really a constraint) that if you have two spells of DIFFERENT base abilities, and they both have the same buff, then they will overlap.

My issue is that, because I have many different buffs for many different uses, I need to be able to cast as many as (say, for example) 30 buffs at any time on one unit. This requires that I have atleast 30 spells with DIFFERENT base abilities, and they all must be of the type that can "target a unit", and be able to place a "buff". The Channel base ability, as I mentioned before, can "target a unit", however, it can't place a buff. Otherwise, channel would have been perfect.

As for regular spells that fit those criteria, I can think of: Innerfire, curse, slow, heal, entangle, ... not many more

I have issues with spells like hex - hex can place a buff, however it also adds the "hex" animation, and target will get turned into a creep of whatever sort. So it's not a viable option.

So any suggestions?

If you want to go nuts and add 30 buffs on one unit, it has to be placed down with triggers. If you try and place them down through the heroes abilities they will just overlap. Try makeing a trigger, that when you research the ability that adds the buffs, then it will add all of the buffs through triggers. Make the ability only add one. Thats my guess, hope it works for you.

I'm already speaking from the context of triggers. When I say I want to add a buff, I'm talking about using a dummy caster to cast a spell which will place the buff on the unit. As far as I know, that's the ONLY way to do it.

Oh wait, when I say buff, I don't mean just positive buffs. I'm talking about casting a nova spell on an emeny unit, and that unit having a FREEZING BREATH buff applied. The 30 buff's on one unit was coming from a (rare) situation where a poor sap gets hit by, say, curse, nova, impale, bolt, shadow strike, faerie fire, terror, cold arrow, slow, polymorph, hex, and so on. I'm talking about a number of enemy heroes all casting their respective nukes/negative spells on one poor hapless hero.

I can't hae buffs being replaced, or removed because another buff was placed on top of it because I used the same base-ability spell to apply it.

Hence, if I have 30 custom spells, and 20 of them apply a buff, then I need 20 spells of different base ability such that I can apply the buff via triggers because in my game, a hero can learn up to any 5 spells. (Envision, say some RPG game where you can select the spells you want to upgrade)

Any suggestions now? Thanks anyhow!

Well, I don't have any suggestions, unfortunately. I was just about to make a post about this as I have the same exact dilemma.

Currently for our trigger spells, we're using special effects, which works fine, except that the player may not realize the exact effects that their units are under. Buffs would be much better, with the text and the icon, but these one-buff-per-base-spell limitations are quite annoying.

It's kind of interesting that UnitRemoveAbility can be used to remove buffs from a unit, but UnitAddAbility cannot be used to add buffs to a unit. If only Blizzard would allow buffs to be added directly through triggers...