A few questions about abilities with 1.17

1. Which is it better for loading time and/or in game performance: An ability with 20 levels, or 5 seperate abilities that combine ingame to make the 20 different levels? (example: +armor with 20 levels, or abils with +1, +2, +4, +8, & +16)

2. What is more effiecient, and demands less (either at loading or in game) Giving different units standard abilites, or detecting a build/spawn and asigning it the appropriate level of ability for that unit. This is similar to the first question, but would be for different circumstances. (example: unit 1 - evade 5% skill, unit 2 - evade 10% skill, etc... or... unit 1 built - give evade level 1, unit 2 build - give evade level 2, etc.)

3. (not really 1.17 specific) Do item buffs stack with normal buffs? (example: If I have a unit with the normal evasion skill at 20%, and give him the item evasion buff with 30%, would it stack to 50%, or just use the higher one like non-item skills do?)

Hope that was all clear. If not, I can try to make it more so. Thanks.

I have heard a rumor that abilities with higher than 3 levels take a disproportionate time to load, but I have nothing to back that up. Since abilities with multiple levels are really just multiple abilities that have been packaged together, I'm most convinced that they probably take the same time to load. You could, however, run a test.

I'm not sure about your second question. You want each different unit to have a different level of an ability? Almost certainly best just to make a version for each different amount of evasion you want and give them to the appropriate units in the object editor.

Evasion isn't really a buff. Some things stack, and some things do not. I believe that Evasion stacks, but not as a sum. If you have a 7% and a 10% evasion, you don't get 17%. Some times, they might both fire.

Abilities with more than 3 levels (As far as i know) are not significantly less load-increasing than one with 4 levels. Unless you have Hundreds (And i mean HUNDREDS) of abilties, then changing this shouldent alter the game loading time more than a second or 2... max...

Im not really sure what you mean by the second question.
If you are sugesting using build triggers to activate and use abilities, then it is obviosly less damanding to use standard abilites.

Like Panto said, Evasion is not really a buff.
I think he was right in saying they both fire. EG:
A unit attacks the unit.
There is a 7% chance that they will miss. If they hit there is then a 10% chance that they will miss.

Some items stack and some dont. If you really wonder about one thing, look up the buff. Sometimes they have the Editor suffix (Stackable) if they can stack.

Good luck!
-Garith

/calculate...

52 heroes
1 normal skill each + 3 hero skills each + 1 ultimate hero skill each
hero skill = 4 levels
ultimate skill = 3 levels
thats 8 levels of skills per hero
is 260 custom skills...
is 416 levels of different skills in my map.

o.O ... Oh my. >:[

Got a hero-test map that usually takes about 10 seconds to load with no cusom contents in it. After creating a hero with a fun 83 custom abilities (most of them unit abilities, though 5 were hero abilities with 5,5,5,5,3 levels), added atleast an additional 10 seconds to the loading time.

To my knowledge, a lot of the time spent loading abilities is spent on caching art and parsing strings.

Assuming I am correct, if you had a boxful of abilities with the same icon and minimal tooltips, it would not impact performance very much.