Dispel Magic - Help me understand it

mzorich

First of all, just to be clear I do have SCS installed, and that's it.

I'm having trouble understanding Dispel Magic... either that, or I do understand it correctly and just got incredibly lucky against Nimbul. I'll explain:

So my level 1 Inquisitor cast Dispel Magic at Nimbul while he had Stoneskin and Mirror Image up. To my disbelief, it was successful at dispelling both! (and I won the fight). The reason I was so surprised is that based on the spell description, I would've had a 1% change of successfully dispelling, because Nimbul is a level 7 mage/thief apparently... 7 caster level minus 2 caster level (Inquisitor is doubled) equals 5... 50% base chance of dispelling minus 50% (5x10%) equals 0%... and hence only a 1% chance to dispel (hopefully that all made sense).

So unless my logic is incorrect, I just got incredibly lucky... or am I missing something?

Thanks for any help/input!

bbear

I thought the difference in level is 5% instead of 10%. So the base chance should be 25%.

mzorich

bbear said:

I thought the difference in level is 5% instead of 10%. So the base chance should be 25%.

Thanks for the reply. By the spell description, it is a 5% per level bonus if the caster of Dispel Magic is at a greater level than the caster of the original spell (I'm at level 10, Nimbul is at level 7, I get a 15% bonus, and hence a 65% chance to dispel)... but it's a 10% per level penalty if the caster of Dispel Magic is at a lower level than the original caster (I'm at level 4, Nimbul is at level 7, I get a 30% penalty, and hence only a 20% chance to dispel).

Who knows... maybe I just shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth!

elminster

Regardless of the difference in levels there is always a 5% chance of the spell either working or failing.

Tresset

I don't understand dispel either. All I know is that the inquisitor one is the only one that actually works.

mzorich

@elminster - According to the spell description: "there is always at least a 1% chance of success of failure", but I do fully realize that the spell descriptions aren't always exactly 100% accurate

@Tresset - I've, believe it or not, never played an Inquisitor so I'll keep an eye on these success/failure rates going forward and see if the Inquisitors' behave roughly the way they should. If I find anything interesting I'll post an update. Dispelling on a 1% success rate one of the first times I ever use Dispel Magic just makes me skeptical... maybe time to buy a lottery ticket?

CrevsDaak

Tresset said:

I don't understand dispel either. All I know is that the inquisitor one is the only one that actually works.

Yeah, Inquisitors dispel like champions, but they also dispel your party
Anyway I think I used Keldorn's Dispel Magic to dispel undesired effects on my characters than using it against enemies.

the_spyder

If you have a save just prior to the encounter, try doing it again. If you can do it 3 times out of 5, then there's something more than what we are seeing. Otherwise, you just got very lucky.

elminster

mzorich said:

@elminster - According to the spell description: "there is always at least a 1% chance of success of failure", but I do fully realize that the spell descriptions aren't always exactly 100% accurate

@Tresset - I've, believe it or not, never played an Inquisitor so I'll keep an eye on these success/failure rates going forward and see if the Inquisitors' behave roughly the way they should. If I find anything interesting I'll post an update. Dispelling on a 1% success rate one of the first times I ever use Dispel Magic just makes me skeptical... maybe time to buy a lottery ticket?

That looks like its an error with a description. Where are you looking that you see that? The inquisitor's Dispel Magic description or another one?

The spell description for mages/clerics for me says its 5%.

mzorich

@the_spyder - I don't unfortunately, I'm playing limited reload so I'm not keeping many saves. I thought the same thing though right after I started this thread (facepalm).

@elminster - From the PDF Manual... which was probably where I went wrong.

Tresset

mzorich said:

elminster - From the PDF Manual... which was probably where I went wrong.

@Jalily Is there an error in the manual?

Jalily

The manual uses many outdated descriptions. This is one of them.

Cantab

Yeah I never get when it does/ doesn't work, I normally just cast it when some one won't take damage or my guys start hacking each other up

elminster

Yea so in-game descriptions are generally better to use over the manuals. Heck, there's an entire thread ( forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/6819/manual-discrepancies/p1 ) dedicated to pointing out the errors in the old manuals and as you've just seen there were still a few that were missed. So while they should be pretty darn accurate at this point they aren't going to be perfect.

fighter_mage_thief

As far as I know (and it was mentioned above):

There's a base 50% chance to dispel all spell effects (except protections that guard against spells--i.e. Globe of Invulnerability, Spell Deflection, Spell Turning, etc. It will remove Stoneskin, Mantles, Absolute Immunity, elemental resistance spells, things such as death ward, haste, etc. but also slow, paralysis spells, etc.)

-10% chance per level lower than the enemy caster.

+5% chance per level higher than the enemy caster.

Basically, the two classes with the best dispel chance are the Inquisitor and Cleric. The Inquisitor because the kit casts dispel magic at 3x the class level. The Cleric because this class has the fastest level progression. The only exception might be the Bard, although the Cleric will also end up with a lot more spell slots for dispel compared to the Bard.

Level 20 dispel vs level 10 caster spell = 100% dispel
Level 10 dispel vs level 10 caster spell = 50% dispel
Level 15 dispel vs level 10 caster spell = 75% dispel
Level 5 dispel vs level 10 caster spell = 0% dispel

elminster

fighter_mage_thief said:

As far as I know (and it was mentioned above):

There's a base 50% chance to dispel all spell effects (except protections that guard against spells--i.e. Globe of Invulnerability, Spell Deflection, Spell Turning, etc. It will remove Stoneskin, Mantles, Absolute Immunity, elemental resistance spells, things such as death ward, haste, etc. but also slow, paralysis spells, etc.)

-10% chance per level lower than the enemy caster.

+5% chance per level higher than the enemy caster.

Basically, the two classes with the best dispel chance are the Inquisitor and Cleric. The Inquisitor because the kit casts dispel magic at 3x the class level. The Cleric because this class has the fastest level progression. The only exception might be the Bard, although the Cleric will also end up with a lot more spell slots for dispel compared to the Bard.

Level 20 dispel vs level 10 caster spell = 100% dispel
Level 10 dispel vs level 10 caster spell = 50% dispel
Level 15 dispel vs level 10 caster spell = 75% dispel
Level 5 dispel vs level 10 caster spell = 0% dispel

Again there is always a 5% chance of failure or success. So no one has 100% success rate at dispelling and everyone has at least a 5% chance of it working.

TwoWayFinesse

is there any way of knowing what level enemy casters are (without looking at the game files that is) as even two or three levels of difference makes such a huge difference?

Tresset

TwoWayFinesse said:

is there any way of knowing what level enemy casters are (without looking at the game files that is) as even two or three levels of difference makes such a huge difference?

Probably not... I mean you can estimate by counting things like the duration of their spells or how many mirror images and stoneskins they can make, but it is far less of a hassle to look it up in NI.

Skaffen

Are you guys sure it's 10% for lower levels? InPnP it certainly is 5% in both directions. D20 11 dispels your own level, 20 everything, 1 always fails as the underlying mechanics. Don't know why they would have changed that...

Abel

So, I actually made some research and even some tests because this spell and his little brother Remove Magic have been bugging me for a while.

First, contrary to common knowledge both the Inquisitor ability and magic users spells are set at power 0. That means creature like Liches that are immune to certain spell levels will always be affected (though not necessarily successfully dispelled).

Second, chances to dispels should behave as described below (source):

#58 (0x58) Cure: Dispellable Effects (Dispel Magic) [58]
Parameter #1: Level
Parameter #2: Type
Description:
Dispels magic from the targeted creature(s) (excepting magical weapons eg. Spirtual Hammer). Depending on the value of the 'Type' field, the 'Level' field can be used to set the level of the effect.
Known values for 'Type' are:
0 Always dispel
1 Use Caster Level
2 Use 'Level' field
With 'Type' of 1 or 2, the base chance of successfully dispelling is 50%. This chance is modified by the relative levels of the dispeller to the caster. Each level below gives a -10% chance, each level above gives a +5% chance. There is always a 1% chance of success or failure.

However, in vanilla BG2, it wasn't working as intended so a hack fix was made (see there).
It has been included in BGEE (see discussion). Unfortunately it seems to me it still doesn't work properly as my comment on this discussion suggests.