Phantom Units with variable stats

[tipereth]

So I'm trying to make something similar to the Ravager in AotZ where he spawns copies of himself sometimes and it's a really nice windfury effect. My question is, how can I make the stats of the spawned unit  (ie attack damage) the same as the spawning hero?

[Mucky]

I've been wondering about creating a windfury-like effect myself. The only thing I can think of is Conjure Image with 100% damage dealt and Locust. But then the copies would be a translucent blue and they'd probably attack random targets, neither of which are the case for the Ravager.

[tipereth]

You could make the spawned unit have upgrades to make it's damage on par with the hero's as it leveled but that would get weird with items so that doesn't work.

[Ricky_Honejasi]

As for the stats (str, agi, int), isn't just possible to modify a hero image (presuming it's a "hero") to just modify them via triggers like if it was a normal hero. Same for hero level. Might require a 0% exp gain on the illusion.

As to avoid the extra hero icons, I presume they are given to a neutral player with related kills "redirected" by triggers to the real player. I am also presuming they are made "flying" as well with 0.00 flying height and with 50% transparent (either by triggers or by the "Ghost (Visible)" ability.)

If there is the matter of +stat books, I believe you will have to keep track of them of each extra stat gained by the real hero and auto-add them to the created illusions when they are made.

Thus with the 3 above + undroppable items of the same type, the "illusions" should have the same attack damage (and attack speed) regardless of the case.

As far I believe, an image (if you can modify it) is basically treated like a normal unit in terms of triggers (unless you use some kind of "illusion" boolean condition to differentiate between the real one and the illusions) and so on except it got an auto-die after X time + disabled abilities and a -100% damage.

[tipereth]

Wouldn't that cause crazy lag with the hero resources being constantly loaded and reloaded?

[Ricky_Honejasi]

Wouldn't that cause crazy lag with the hero resources being constantly loaded and reloaded?

Unlikely in my opinion since if the skin, skills, etc. are already loaded once, they are still in memory thus the game just refer to the already loaded ones. WC3 tend to only "clean up" when you leave a game.

I guess the best proof is when I had at one time in my W&M map each hero with 30-40 levels per hero skill (5 skills) which the first one of each type took a good 5 seconds in mid-game to load at the moment of the hero creation (without preloading of any sort) because it loaded ALL the "levels" of every skills but each next hero of the same type was instant.