Protections/Dispellers

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That makes Confusion a double pain because you will presumably dispel all the positive protections on your characters at the same time?!

 

@ Faraaz:
You are in fact mistaken about dispeling "friendlies." It is extremely easy to test, and I did so just so I could make this post with a certainty greater than your "100%". Dispel Magic cast by a lvl 12 mage failed to dispel stoneskin or haste cast by a lvl 31 mage, but succeeded against both when the levels were 12 and 13. Mirror image is always dispeled, but this is due to a bug. Curiously, in a different test, dispel magic failed against stoneskin and haste but succeeded against mirror image. Also curiously, dispel magic always succeeds in dispeling Mislead, but does not dispel any protections on the mislead character.

Other ways to test this yield the same results. Dispelling the stun status from Symbol: Stun can be difficult if not impossible, especially in Tactics mod where the mages are very high level and you can face them at level 10 or less.

@ Truper:
I agree that the manual is written poorly in this regard (as in many others). Dispel Magic compares the level of the two spell casters: the caster of the dispel magic and the caster of the spell being dispeled. The actual level of the spell (confusion being a 4th level spell) is irrelevant. As for the "level" of items, I do not have an answer at my fingertips, but it should be something easily found out.

@ Michael Mouse:
Confusion is indeed a double pain, because if you succeed in dispeling it, you will succeed in dispeling all other protections on the character. Irritating.

Edit: Well shoot. I did not see Aldeth's post when I made mine. Sorry to have repeated anything.

 

Stoneksin, Mirror image, blur, protection from the elements, protection from magical energy, imp.invisibility, spell immunity: divination, spell immunity: abjuration, fireshield (red/blue), protection from magic weapons.

This is a very powerfull buff you can easily put up in a relative short time, it's almost fool-proof since there's no way to dispel your protections because they can't target you when your half-invisible (except with dispel/remove magic, but spell immunety: abjuration protects against that), spell immunity: divination protecs against all invisibility dispels EXCEPT Glitterdust (which is a conjuration spell IIRC), but how many enemys have you seen use this spell? And you can save against it too.

Now as for dispellers I find breach the ultimate, I don't have the list off all it removes but if you get a breach in you can always hurt your enemy, now the only thing that stop breach is a spell shield (which stops the breach but also removes itself, so just breach again) and more importantly improved.invis, in which case you can either dispel invis then breach or try remove/dispel magic. I most often use this as mages can be pounded to death and still have all the spell protections in the world up, as long as you remove their combat prots it's all over. This is why liches are hard being immune to level 5 spells and down which disables breach leaving you with dispel/remove magic, Keldorn should sucseed most of the time though and weapons that dispel on hit (SoTM, Carsomyr) seems to dispel no mather what as long as you roll a "Hit"

Back to dispel, how is the % calculated?

 

Dispel %:

"The base chance of successfully dispelling is 50%. For every level that the caster of the dispel magic is above the original caster, his chance of success increases by 5%. For every level that the caster of dispel magic is below the original caster, his chance of success decreases by 10%.
However, despite the difference in levels, there is always at least a 1% chance of success or failure."

 

Err... ok, I'm still trying to figure out how Dispel Magic works. (The nice thing about having Keldorn is that you just cast it and never have to worry about those % calculations)

If I understand what Eric and Aldeth have said, the % calculation occurs against the level of the caster. Therefore, in the case of items (and scrolls I suppose), it's against the fixed caster level implemeted in the item properties (easy to check in IEEP).

As for things like ghoul paralysis, would I be correct in assuming that it gets dispelled every time because the caster level of the effect is extremely low (say, level 1) ?

Since the Infinity Engine has no way of differentiating between "real" spells and effects that work similarly (to the engine, they're all spells), I'm assuming this is how things work.

 

@ Ziad: What you have said about the ghoul paralysis makes sense, but I can't say for sure. Something else easy to check in IEEP?

@ Advanced Simplicity: That's an awful lot of spells, and the durations are ticking away while you cast them. You some sort of shell-shocked veteran? By the way, the save on Glitterdust is for the blinding feature only. It automatically dispels invisibility. Another thing about Glitterdust: the dust fades in four rounds, but I don't think the blinding feature does. I think it lasts the full 10 turns of the first level spell Blindness (someone check me on this). And you should always, always have someone in your group who can cast this sweet spell. It gets around lots of problems both early and late in the game.

 

@ Eric Xanthus

with vecna + AoP + imp.alac + auto-pause on spell you can cast the spells in a very short time, if you're too low lvl for imp.alac cast only the important ones and begin with long duration spells.

Are you certain about glitterdust always dispelling invis? Because I recall fighting Undead Sola and he put up a SI:Abjur SIiv imp.invis and I was never able to dispel his invis with Glitterdust.

Even so, glitterdust is an amazing spell and often overlooked, very usefull in a sequencer.

One question, does SI: Abjuration protect against weapons that Dispels on hit? And does Dispel on hit on i.e Carsomyr, SoTM go through PfMW as long as you roll a hit? Okay thats 2 questions..

 

@Eric: Meh...my bad.

But I could've sworn that was the way it works. I read that somewhere, and I always ended up dispelling my cleric's boosts when I used Dispel Magic. Ah well.

 

@ Ziad - maybe an example will help here:

Say you have two mages - one is level 10 and the other level 12. The level 10 mage casts invisibility on himself. When the second mage casts dispel magic, his chance of success is 60%. This is calculated by taking the base 50% then adding 2 * 5 to this total (because the 12th level mage is two levels higher) for a total of 60% chance of success.

In the reverse situation where the 12th level mage casts invisibility, and the 10th level mage attempts the dispel, he only has a 30% chance of success. Base of 50% but a penalty of 2 * 10 (I don't know why the penalty is twice that of the bonus) for a total of 30%.

Here's one thing I don't know - say a mage has multiple protections on him, and someone casts dispel magic on him - are the checks done individually or do you get an all-or-nothing result? To use the example above, if the 10th level mage had 5 different protections on him, and the 12th levle mage casts dispel magic, would we expect 3 out of the 5 protections to be dispelled? Or conversely is there a 60% chance that all will be dispelled and a 40% chance that none will be dispelled?

 

I almost positive it's all-or-nothing.

also when you make a succsesfull dispel it says: Dispel Effects

Should be easy to test though.

 

If Dispel Magic succeeds, all spells on the target will be gone. There are two wrinkles:

Some buffs (like mirror image) are bugged and automatically fall to dispel magic. So you can have a case where only mirror image goes down (the bug) but all other affects remain (the % on the dispel came up short).

The other wrinkle is how the game makes the checks against the target spells, and on this I am uncertain. It is possible that the game will check against each spell cast on the target, and if any check comes up positive, all spells are removed. This would stupidly penalize casting multiple buffs, but I seem to get dispelled with great regularity, so it's possible.

Another possibility is that the game only makes one check--against the lowest level, the highest level, or a random selects one of the "active" spell casters to check against. This possibility would annoy me to the ends of the earth as bad programming.
Edit: It could even check against the most recently cast or first cast spell, which would also be incredibly irritating.

The other possibility is that the game makes a separate dispel check for each "family" of spells--e.g., one check against all the spells cast on me by Edwin, one check against all the spells cast on me by myself, and one check against all the spells cast on me by Irenicus. This would again present a penalty, although a milder one than the previous example, for having more than one person cast buffs on you. This seems to be the most logical option, and if it is true then players should put a little more thought into who, if anyone, will be casting buffs on the party. Having your lvl 30 bard buff himself with stoneskin is sort of wasted if a lvl 12 mage buffs him with improved haste--a dispel magic that succeeds against the level 12 haste will automatically take down the otherwise hard to dispel stoneskin.