Changing Cooldown Time

I'm planning to have some spells in my map that will interrupt spellcasting and will increase the cooldown of the spell being cast by a certain amount(only for that time, it's not permanent). I could trigger this to just not do anything when they cast it unless the cooldown's up, but it wouldn't look very nice and might confuse new players as to whats going on ^^. So, I was wondering if there's any way to add time to an abilities cooldown.

Edit: Also, since they will have already started casting the ability when it's interrupted(so the cooldown has started), using Engineering Upgrade would be difficult. Even without that it would be a pain in the ass to make an engineering upgrade for each combination of abilities possible.

Make an alternate spell, identical in all respects except for the cooldown. Then give the unit that spell temporarily.

Without engineering, not really, though you can use a very short (0.01) stun to reset the casting time on most abilities.

Well, the problem is there will be more than one of these "longer cooldown" abilities, each with 15 levels, and they need to work with each of my other abilities. So I guess it wouldn't be a ton of work to just copy it and change the cooldown, but it would still be a lot of If-statements and time spent copying and pasting, considering that the number of spells for this map is almost in the hundreds and quickly growing. Also, using countdown timers in this map is proving kind of difficult, because I have up to 64 teams(AI controlled of course) of 4 heroes each. If I thought it through I might be able to get some up, but for now I have a pretty good system working with buffs and periodic checks.

I guess the stun might work, although it would make the player think the cooldown is going to be over soon, and then it will get reset, and actually now that I think about it the stun would be a lot of work too, because I'd have to find out the cooldown of each seperate ability, and depending on what it was stun them during different times of that cooldown. Also, the stun would interrupt casting times, which I'm using heavily in this map. So nevermind, I don't think the stun would work =D.

Well, if there isn't some relatively easy way to do it I might just have to ditch those abilities, or do it the ugly way.

There's no easy way to manipulate ability cooldowns. It is possible to some extent by making multiple versions (or levels) of an ability, but even that will work only if the hero has the ability on the right level before he casts it.

Crazy idea, just give the unit a kind of infinite cooldown, then after Starts the effect of an ability wait (custom cooldown time) seconds or much better create a timer and do gamecache stuff with JASS.

Once the timer passes just remove the ability from the unit and add it again.

Of course this requires you to remove every single usage of Remove Ability Cooldowns from your triggers.

It may also need a safelock so if the unit dies during the time and there is no way to revive it, it shouldn't do the remove/add thing.

Hmm, well that would work. Still wouldn't display how much time is left accurately, but at least they would be able to see that it's still on a cooldown and everything. I'll mess around with it and see how I like it ^^. Thanks.