Shattered Kingdoms

Can someone answer a couple questions about magic resistance for me?

Helpfile: "Magic resistance is a personal field of magic absorption that has a
chance to completely disrupt most magical spells and effects. It is an
alternative to saving throws as a way to avoid harmful magic, including
spells that cannot be saved against. The more resistance you acquire, the
more it will trigger. And enemy mages cannot compensate against it."

1. What spells cannot be saved against?

2. It says enemy mages cannot compensate against it, but isn't that what art is for? Or does art only work against stats like fort., willpower, etc...?

3. I've been told that it takes much more MR, than the other stats, to resist/avoid spells. Does anyone know how much MR it takes to be effective, roughly, and also how much MR the magic resistant races have innately, such as elf/delf/halfling/gnome?

4. Also, I've heard the more Wis/Mana you have, the more likely you are to resist hostile magic. True, false?

I'm sure similar questions have been asked before, but I didn't see exactly what I was looking for. Any help would be much appreciated, thanks!

In before someone gripes about IC information.

1) Harm, faerie fire, and probably a couple of other spells have no save. On the other hand, petrification and magma spray bypass MR.

2) MR provides a percent chance to completely resist the spell; art lowers a person's fort / will / reflex saves, but doesn't alter the MR percentage.

3) No race is innately MR-bound, the "magic resistant" races take less damage from spells, so they're effectively MP-bound. Also, gnomes are not resistant, but sprites are.
A barbarian who trains 10 MR trains is 100% MR... as for MR on gear, I suspect it is supposed to be 1% per enchantment.

4) Your modified (with gear) WIS score affects your willpower save, your DEX affects your reflex save, and your CON affects your fortitude save. Raw HP/MP/MV does not matter.

When you say 10 MR for a barbarian=100% MR, does that mean that any additional MR on his armor will not have any affect? Also, am I correct in assuming that 100% MR also doesn't equate to resisting spells 100% of the time, but is instead merely a stat cap?

Having 100 MR enchants makes almost all spells bounce off of you, sort of like having 50 willpower will cause almost all willpower spells to bounce off of you. But, even if you have 100 MR there's a chance that you can get hit with a spell, just like if you have 50 willpower you can still fail will saves. It's just a very small chance on both accounts.


Specifically for MR, the difference in whether you resist a spell or not doesn't change as much percentage-wise after 100 MR or so: The difference between 100 MR and 200 MR may be something like a 2% chance of a spell hitting you to a 1% chance of a spell hitting you. BUT, every spell that you "resist" on account of MR actually heals you, and does so depending on three main factors:

The spell itself: More costly spells in terms of cast-time, concentration and manacost heal for more (For example, a resisted harm "heals" more than a resisted "armor" spell).
The level of the spell (Whether a grandmaster cast it versus a maste", for example)
The amount of total MR that you have, which is a proportional scale according to what Dulrik has said IIRC.

So, if you have 100 MR from MR trains, then a Finger of Death spell from a GM may end up "healing" you say, 10% of your max HP. But, if you have 100 MR from trains and also 50 MR from armor, that same spell cast from the same person will heal you 15% instead.

Also, I definitely didn't mention this before but if you're new to the game don't train MR at all. It's extremely frustrating and actually requires you to put an exponentionally greater amount of prep into your character than just training physical stats.

And if you ever train anywhere near 10 MR trains your barbarian instantly becomes useless.

oops

Actually, I'm pretty sure that you did mention that already, E.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I heard that more than once myself.

I meant in this thread

Look up.