Spell effect stacking, bug or not?
 

When playing a druid I ran into a possible bug..
It seems that the effects of the "barkskin" spell stack when it is cast multiple times. When casting it a couple of times, which is only a small investment in mana, you can make your character allmost imune to physical damage (95% immune) . You then only receive one damage per enemy attack). I tried this in both the Crack of Doom and Hack and Slash and got the same effect. I -think- it also works for other spells that increase values by a certain percentage, I didn't really test this but I ran into Berserker Orks that had cast 60% damage on themselves multiple times and they ussually kill a 100+ hitpoint character in one strike.. It also works for the spell that increases your light radius, casting this multiple times will also have an additive effect.

What is your opinion on this? is it a bug or a feature? If it's a feature then it's my opinion that it's completely unbalanced. There's absolutely no reason to spend more than one skillpoint on any of the affected skills/spells because you can get maximum effect by casting them multiple times, and it makes it far to easy to get very high bonuses. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif

[ May 13, 2003, 17:53: Message edited by: henk brouwer ]

Re: Spell effect stacking, bug or not?
 

I am not entirely sure myself, but I consider it a bug. Or at least a gameplay issue that needs to be adressed.

Rollo

Re: Spell effect stacking, bug or not?
 

I agree it's a bug and happens with quite a few of the spells. My current character is a Druid and I feel that the duration for most spells is way too short. The other thing is there is no way to know when your spell wears off, maybe a status line needs to be added that could be used to display events in the game, or better yet a way for the spell to 'autocast' if it runs out.

IMHO most of the 'buff' spells are not that good because the duration is way too short. I have been thinking of changing the .TXT file to make them longer on my copy of DO.

Re: Spell effect stacking, bug or not?
 

I think it's kind of neat with the light spell, but with combat spells it can further unbalance the system, as the examples mentioned show. There should be a way to specify which spells stack and which don't, and the ones that become overly powerful or make high-level skills pointless should not stack.

As for duration, I agree it is pretty short for many spells, particularly for buffs, to the point of making them more fiddly than they are usually worth, especially if you aren't playing with the speed turned way down.

PvK