Warcraft 3 uses very few abilities to change unit's type. You should be aware at least of two of them — Chemical Rage and Metamorphosis. Both of them shares pretty much the same properties, but for some reason inner mechanic between them is different. Here I'll try to shortly describe famous Meta bug, which happens with Lycan alot.


Ability Shapeshift based on Metamorphosis. It worked quite good back those days before Lycan got cast time on this ability. And now, having cast time, this ability reveals issue with all Metamorphosis based skills.

For your info: everytime Chemical rage or Metamorphosis duration is out, unit being ordered to re-cast the spell again. Basically it doesn't end by itself but because hidden order to re-use it, which reverts all effects.

If the ability has cast time, it will be used again on back-morphing. But since it's fake re-order, this cast time won't cause the unit to halt and cast normally. Instead, unit will be fully functional for the duration. Since all moprh-based spells keep "uninterruptable" option, which forbids to use «stop» anyhow, the unit will follow every given order but not listen to another until first if completed. Imagine if you order to morph initially: unit stops and performs moprhing until it's done. He won't listen to new given orders, regardless what is it, stun or stop. That's why you can dodge order-based disables (stun namely) with morphs.

If unit dies while backmorphing, bad things happens. Unlike original morph-in, morph-out have less internal conditions. All fine if you dies while morphing into the Wolf form. And if you managed to die while morphing back into normal Lycan, game will not receive «spell finished» event and won't remove «uninterruptable» option from unit.

That means Wolf will remain barely controllable. Every given order cannot be stopped or prevented anyhow until it's finished or hero dies. For instance, if you order to follow allied unit, like Fountain, you'll never be able to act again since this order cannot be finished. And if you ordered to attack your ally nothing could stop you from doing that, only successfully killing of death.

Since game think you still morphed, you cannot activate ultimate again.

This bug also widely known for Batrider, although it's pretty hard to reproduce it in normal games right now.


Batrider has 0 cast time for this morph, so it requires some efforts to bug this out. Lycan has 2 seconds cast time, which makes it easier to proc.

DotA has command -recreate, which requires the hero to stand at fountain area, being Lycan or few other allowed hero, and requires 2 minutes of standing still. After that hero being recreated — all hardcoded buffs will be lost, but you'll be in control again.

Bug may be abused with Batrider and Bloodstone. Shift-queue Bloodstone usage and Firefly. Done.

In Allstars bug with Lycan has been fixed by moving it into Chemical Rage class. This spell has no issues with cast times. Batrider isn't fixed, thought it's barely matters.

Edit

Actually ALL morph-based abilities are vulnerable to this issue, it's just harder to get in some cases. There's no cure for that. All you really can do is re-create unit. Detecting the bug is possible — just trigger order to do something, then order another stuff, if unit still has old order — he's bugged.

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