Posted by The Angel Gabriel on August 26, 1999 at 09:09:54:
Spellbane is there to keep magic from affecting a rager. To keep them untainted. Very well. Then it makes sense that it deflects area spells as well as directed spells. So what then can I be thinking? Spellbane should not be dependant upon the type of spell, it should be dependant on what the affect of the magic is, whether it in fact directly affects the victim with magic or not. What do I mean? Take a slow spell for example. It is a spell that directly attempts to magically change/affect/harm/help someone else. Therefore, it should be deflectable by spellbane. Scourge by masters is the same, it directly attempts to magically affect the rager, so it should be spellbaneable, as far as the blindness/weaken/poison. The damage part I will save for a moment. On the other hand, take a spell like pebble to boulder. This spell has the magic affecting the stone, a pebble, and making it big. As far as the rager is concerned, there is a big boulder coming at him, not magic. This spell should not be deflectable by spellbane.The same logic works for a spell like iceneedles. The invoker uses magic to create solid objects -- remember, iceneedles does not do cold damage, they are physical attacks like someone throwing metal needles at you -- and those objects are then being hurled at the rager, like arrows or weapons of any other sort. These should not be affected by spellbane. Those provide the two ends of the spectrum, things that clearly should be spellbane-able, and things that should not be spellbane-able. What is in the middle are things like buffet, or fireball, or scourge, as I alluded to above. These things use magic to create forces like wind, or fire, and directly channel them either at the rager, or simply to the whole area. Fire, wind, electricity, in and of themselves, are not magical. It is magic to bring them into form where they are not already, by using a spell. However, because of the nature of them, the magic is so interwoven in them -- the magic keeps the wind together as it is forced against your foe in a buffet, the magic keeps the fire expanding to harm all those around you -- they are not like the iceneedles or peble spells, either. So, for those spells that fall in the middle, I propose that spellbane have a lesser percentage chance to deflect them. Obviously, these percentages are just off the top of my head, and I did not take the existing spellbane percentages as the standard since it would not be appropriate to list here the specific code for it. But the point is clear I believe. That is how I think spellbane would make the most sense based on what it is supposed to be, a way for ragers to keep themselves from being affected by magic, to keep them pure. And I think it would still be generally balanced in a gameplay sense.
This is a very basic way of thinking of it: Spells that fall into the first category of things that are direct magic upon the rager, should have an 80% chance of being spellbaned, or 75%, or whatever you believe is the most balance yet effective limitation.Spells that fall into the second category of things that are not magic at all upon the rager, like pebble, should have only a 5% or 10% chance. (Yes, logically it should have no chance, 0%, but I do think that there is some value to giving it a small chance, simply as a token to the power itself being of assistance to ragers in all fights with mages. Most skills and spells have a chance to fail even if you have it at 100%, so, by the same token it should have at least a minimal chance of succeding even if by a relative longshot). For the spells in the middle category, where it is not really magic directly affecting the rager, but magic being part of what hits them, like buffet or fireball, a middle level of success, perhaps 35% give or take, would be in order.