PlaneShift

If I had to guess, I would say all of the above spells (except for one) raise your defense multiplier (just as some affixes do), but if you don’t wear any armor, this multiplier is applied to a low defense value, so yes, you will not see a notable difference. And I agree that spells on their own should protect against weapons to encourage specialized characters rather than jacks of all trades.

See also  FS#6202 …maybe fixed to some degree in 0.6 coming soon™ ?

I reviewed the mathscripts involved and the spell scripts, everything is ok and working. The main issue are the base cloths which provide a very low base protection that when modified still result in a low value. Also the relative armor skill is quite important because the spells only works as a defence multipliers. However a lot of these issues are no longer a big problem as the new training system made it easier to train armor seamlessly even for a mage. Regarding the bug itself I raised previously a lot of defensive spells’ power level and even more will be raised with a recent review, so closing as fixed.

Any reliance on physical armor, and by requirement physical strength is just wrong IMHO. My mage can barely carry a tune, much less a sack of plate armor, and sure can’t begin to wear it. The point of defensive magic should be as an independent alternative to physical armor. Overall protection should be capped such that employing defensive magic on top of physical armor would provide little additive gain.

Just because you made training free and accelerated based on stats doesn’t fix this, because the mage focused heavily on Int, Cha, and Will from the start, and paid into those almost exclusively to push up spell power, and despite that, remains squishy due to ineffective defensive magic.

On a related note, since magic robes have almost no physical defensive value, they really should do better in buffing magic skills, particularly defensive spells.

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