As any player would know, I've been ranting about how mages are overpowered. There are lots of things that I think should be done to minimize this. Recently a topic has come up about melee fumbling, and that has expanded to spell fumbling.

I've wanted this for a while, but at the time I thought of it we had low player numbers and almost no active devs.

Basically, if you have you have your SF <=0, you can never fail a spell. It is much too easy to get that golden value.

I propose that we heavily modify the effects of CP/SF. I think SF should be a percentage. IIRC CP is. I think the two should be directly related, instead of SF having some mysterious correlation with CP.

So I think a player with no gear on should have a SF rate of 30-40%. So 30-40% of spells fumble. Currently the intelligence stat also factors into this, bringing SF -0.1. I think that 1 intelligence should correlate with 0.5% or 1% SF.

This will likely require quite a large change in equipment stats. Fortunately ATM there are few, if any, items with a custom CP value set, so we can just change that via arch/artifact definitions.

Under the new system, if you find a dress with SF -5.0%, you'll be 5% more likely to successfully cast a spell.

Now "fumbling" will probably get a new purpose from this thread.

Comments?

I agree in general terms that this would be a better approach.  I think it needs some more work though.  For instance, Armor that actually does anything useful for the wearer should not necessarily help spell failure percentages, in my opinion.  Last time I played we had 2 types of armor (it has probably been a year or two so i may be dead wrong on this):

1. resistance armor
2. evade/mage armor

I think we need something more like:

1. resistance armor/ +HP armor/ +str (for tanks)
2. evade armor/ +DPS/ +dex (for archers, stealth types, etc.)
3. Mage armor/ +Mana/ +pow/cha/wis (For mages, priests, etc.)

Thats my thought on that...