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Resisting Magic, by Rainman |
Many people wonder exactly how to deal with resisting the powers of magery in UO. Many are confused as to exactly how things work, and what combination of skills they may or may not need to effectively combat the more powerful casting creatures, or mage player-characters. The intent with this document is to give the average player a firm grasp on exactly how resistance is calculated. The further you read along this document, the more the inner-workings of the game are "spoiled" for you. Mini-Faq: Question - Does Evaluate Intelligence help me resist spells?
DIRECT DAMAGE SPELLS: (Including: magic arrow, harm, fireball, lightning, energy bolt, explosion, chain lightning, meteor swarm, flamestrike, and Earthquake) Here is an outline of how spell damage is calculated: Actual_Damage_done = (Base_Spell_Damage - 50% [if Resisted]) + Eval_Intelligence_Damage_Modifier Your chance to resist is calculated by comparing your resistance skill to the magery of your attacker, as well as the level of difficulty of the spell he/she is casting. This assures that it is always more difficult to resist a flamestrike than it is to resist a magic arrow, as the circle of the spell is included in the chance-to-resist calculation. It also gives clear advantages towards having higher levels of magery, as even fireball can become extremely deadly when it's being thrown from multiple master or grandmaster mages. Figuring your chance to resist a spell is done as follows:
This ensures that you always have a minimum chance to resist a spell. That minimum chance is your resistance skill divided by five. So a character with 30 resistance skill, always has at least a 6% chance to resist ANY spell thrown by ANYONE. This is necessary to ensure that its still possible to advance the skill, even at low levels. Admittedly at zero skill, your chance to resist would be zero. However, you can easily train up to 20-30 points of the skill from mage NPC's (this is highly recommended to anyone who has a character with zero resistance). Conversely, This tells mages that they don't always have to use the highest possible spell in their arsenal. If they know their opponent well enough to have a grasp of his/her resistance skill, lower spells can be used with nearly equal effectiveness. (though admittedly, at a higher cost in reagents). Your evaluate intelligence skill, as an attacker, does not enter in to this part of the equation. Quite simply, Evaluate Intelligence has no affect on your opponents chance to resist a spell. IF A SPELL IS RESISTED, DAMAGE IS THEN REDUCED BY HALF The remaining damage is multiplied against a small equation: If your resistance is higher than your opponents evaluate intelligence, then the equation is: From this modifier, further damage is either taken away or added to the Base_Damage after resistance was figured in. If the spell was resisted, then Base_Damage is already at 50% of what it would be, otherwise it's still at 100%.
Bear In Mind that these percentages are added or taken-away from the base_damage AFTER the spell is or is not resisted. Meaning that if your base damage has already been reduced by half(by resisting it), it can be reduced yet another 50% (if you have zero evaluate intelligence). This means that spell damage can be reduced by 50% twice, making the range for damage start from 25%, and spread all the way up to 120%.
Here are four EXAMPLE scenarios.: Chance to resist = 100 - ( ( 80 - 20 ) / 5 + 6*5) = 58% chance to resist the spell The result here is a 58% chance to resist the spell, doing 45% damage if resisted, and 90% damage if not resisted.
Chance to resist = 100 - ( ( 90 - 20 ) / 5 + 7*5) = 51% chance to resist the spell The result here is a 51% chance to resist the spell, doing 35% damage if resisted, and 85% damage if not resisted.
Chance to resist = 70 - ( ( 95 - 20 ) / 5 + 6*5) = 25% chance to resist the spell The result here is a 25% chance to resist the explosion spell, doing about 50.5% damage if resisted, and around 101% damage if not resisted.
Example Four: Chance to resist = resist / 5 = 6% chance to resist the spell The result here is a 6% chance to resist the chain lightning, doing about 57% damage if resisted, and around 114% damage if not resisted.
NON-DIRECT-DAMAGE ATTACK SPELLS
A Simple example of this would be casting CURSE on a monster or player. If your magery is 85, then you take -8 points away from that character in all three stat categories. Conversely, if you were to cast bless, you would add +8 stats to all three stat categories. Various Notes: The spells Mana Drain and Mana Vampire work slightly differently. The calculation for the chance-to-resist these two spells is known to be similar, if not identical to the calculation for direct damage spells. However, instead of reducing their effects by half, when these spells are resisted, they are completely resisted, having NO AFFECT on their target. When they are not resisted, they take a percentage of Mana OUT of their target's attributes. In the case of Mana Vampire, that mana is given to the attackers attributes. How this percentage of mana is calculated, noone seems to know. Observations seem to show that these spells can take as much as 65-75% to as little as 30% of the mana currently available to the defender. The Mind Blast spell is another complete mystery. Originally this spell compared the INT of the attacker versus the INT of the defender, and the loser suffered severe damage. Now, it's rather unknown exactly how this spell works with resistance and evaluate intelligence, or even how much damage can be accomplished by using it. The spells Earthquake, Chain Lightning, and Meteor Swarm all have an added wrinkle. The nature of these spells is that they are area affect spells. As such, anyone standing in the area of affect receives a portion of the damage. This means that using these spells against large groups is rather ineffective, as the damage sustained by any one target is very low. However, against 1-3 opponents, the results can be devastating if timed and targeted correctly. |