What is the "spell level" for wands and potions? How do they interact with magic defenses?
Ygramul
Member Posts: 1,059
Having recently lost a game at the Bhaal Temple when a single Remove Magic dispelled ALL my pre-buffs from potions and scrolls, I realize that I don't know something essential to battling mages:
What is the "spell level" for wands and potions?
What is the corresponding "caster level"?
As a contrast, all scrolls in the game are regarded as caster lvl 10. (Is this true also for BG2 high level scrolls?) I imagine that for things like Dispel Magic chance calculations, this caster level is used: e.g. a lvl12 mage would have a 70% chance of dispelling your Spirit Armor cast from a scroll.
How about wands and potions?
Are all potions "level 1" [caster or spell levels]? (i.e. ANY caster can successfully dispel them all in one go)
Are all wands cast at "level 1" or at their minimum relevant level (e.g. caster lvl3 and spell lvl 2 for an Aganazzar's Scorcher?)
Can a Minor Globe of Invulnerability stop ALL wands? Or only spell equivalents of proper level? (i.e. stop Lightning Wand, but fail to stop Wands of Heavens?)
How about the Wand of Paralysis?
How many levels of Spell protections (for Spell Deflection etc.) will a wand eat per use?
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Comments
These are the spell levels for items, which determine whether they get past MGOI and how many levels they take from spell deflection/turning/trap spells:
Wand of Cursing: 0
Wand of Wonder: 0 for haste, petrification, stoneskin, and strength; normal spell levels for Stinking Cloud, Lightning Bolt, Fireball, and Web
Wand of Missiles: 1
Wand of Sleep: 1
Wand of Fire: 2 (Agannazar's Scorcher) and 3 (Fireball)
Wand of Lightning: 3
Wand of Monster Summoning: 3, but it doesn't matter
Wand of Fear: 4
Wand of Paralyzation: 4
Wand of Polymorphing: 4 (I think this is only available with mods)
Wand of the Heavens: 5
Wand of Frost: 5
Wand of Cloudkill: 5
Wand of Spell Striking: 5 (Breach) and 6 (Pierce Magic)
Rod of Reversal: 7
Oil of Fiery Burning: 0
Potions of Explosions: 0
Necklace of Missiles: 9
this is the gripe I have with abizigal, regardless of my level his remove magic works 100% of the time
my guess is that spell effects that are cast on you stop at level 20 per se, but dispel checks that require level can go pass 20
that's my only guess as to why abizigal at level 30 is succeeding 100% of the time when dispelling viconia's buffs when she is in the lower 30s ( his chance to succeed should be 10-20% at best)
Thank you.
Basically, this means that Fear, Paralyzation, and Heavens wands are reliable counters to MGoI in BGEE!
I am embarrassed to not have tried them. (I certainly would have wiped the floor in the Bhaal Temple fight with those three casters.)
Some surprises: I would have expected Fear to be lvl 2 (Horror?).
Also, I find it astonishing that one of the Final Battle casters dispelled ALL my buffs with a single Remove Magic. Perhaps I was just very unlucky? (If potions etc. are lvl 10, for 8 of them to be dispelled reliably, the caster needs to be lvl 15+.) Does anyone know the SCS/Final Battle char levels in that fight?
This also implies that at the time of BG2, potions etc. are useless in a caster battle: they will be consistently dispelled. Ergo: only reliable defense is items (and the rare PfM scroll).
But I might have been remembering the Wand of Fear's undocumented +2 save bonus.
Semiticgod was correct in the post above, listing the spell levels for wands, but those values are for BG2 wands.
In BG1:
Wand of Fear: 1 - for some reason
Wand of Fire: 3 - for both spells
Wand of Frost: 8 - different spell/effect so it makes sense (Column of Ice vs. Cone of Cold in BG2)
The only one that matters (and really only in SCS) is Wand of Fear - you won't be able to get through Minor Globe of Invulnerability with it.
Also worth noting that in both games:
Potion of Fire Breath: 0
Ring of Energy - "The Victor": 0
Ring of the Ram: 0
A Wand of Fire doesn't actually cast a Fireball spell. It fires a near-duplicate of the Fireball spell, so the caster level (irrelevant) and the spell level (3) are always the same.
The Necklace of Missiles doesn't do much more damage than a Wand of Fire, and will do less damage than a level 10 mage's Fireball spell. The necklace's spell level of 9 doesn't affect the damage it deals; it only lets it bypass three things that a simple Fireball or Wand of Fire could not:
1. (Minor) Globe of Invulnerability
2. Rakshasa spell level immunities (1-7)
3. Lich spell level immunities (1-5)
(It might also bypass the Cloak of Mirroring and SI: Evocation, unlike a Fireball spell, but that would be because of its primary and secondary type; not its spell level)
Power level is set by the effects of a spell (or item) itself and does not change at all based on the caster/user. Flame Arrow can be cast by anyone from a 5th level mage to Elminster and its power level will always be three. Caster levels will alter the effects, e.g. Elminster will get four arrows from the spell whereas the 5th level mage only gets one. When you see a spell or item or creature is immune to spells of level X, power levels are what it's actually checking. Power level 0 will go through anything, though can be blocked for other reasons (school protections, magic resistance, etc.). Everything listed above is a power level.
Dispel/Remove Magic doesn't care about power level, only caster level. Spells take the level of the caster, whereas items default to caster level 6 (BG) or 10 (BG2), IIRC. Only via explicit casting of a spell by an item--such as what scrolls do--can the caster level deviate from the item default.
Dispel also has an 'always dispel' option and various enemies can cheat with it, but Angelo's Remove Magic is legit.
Could you elaborate on this point? I thought all scrolls were caster level 10. Whereas your point above would suggest that the caster level can deviate from 10.
Invoking an underlying spell via an item (such as a scroll) is the only mechanism to have effects that scale from a caster's level. However, nothing works this way by default--as noted above, scrolls use fixed caster levels. FWIW Tweaks has a component that changes scrolls to use the caster's level.
Yep, it's supposed to cast at the level of the person writing the spell to the scroll. So somewhere in Faerun, there's a very busy 10th-level mage.
That tweaks component btw does not work too well. It is fine for mages (caster level is your mage level) but it’s terrible for thieves with UAI. Because they have no mage levels, the engine must think they are level 0 or level 1; so a Magic Missile cast from scroll gives you 1 missile, Mirror Image gets you just 2 images, Fireball does 1d6 damage, scalable duration spells (such as 1 round/level) last for minimum duration etc. It would be great if that could somehow be adjusted so caster level = thief level or something like that.
Just wanted to add that the wand of polymorphing is available in BG1 and BG1:ee
The twins are afraid of the bogeyman. Help them or just kill the owner of the wand.
It's an engine limitation, and noted in the readme:
It’s actually a sweatshop run by the Twisted Rune where abducted 10th-level Mages are forced to scribe scrolls no stop for a chunk of bread and a glass of murky water.
Heh. Perhaps the TR involvement would also explain how those 10th-level mages can scribe all those level 6-9 spells they can't even cast.
The same does not apply to Carsomyr, whose Dispel Magic spell is specifically coded to strike as level 30.
Since it hasn't come up but is still relevant: the on-hit dispelling effects of Carsomyr, the Staff of the Magi, and Arrows of Dispelling always dispel all dispellable effects, regardless of level (though Carsomyr will grant a save vs. spell to negate if you have the right SCS component installed).
I never notice any of the gradations. The game does not tell you that it failed and for what reason nor in the least what the level difference would have been.
Casting gear at character level should be regardless of class, it should just take the max level of all present classes. Otherwise a non caster class will never cast at levels beyond 1 other than if they have a secondary class in the mage or cleric spell.
Still better than playing the game without the mod, though. At least it's not a 100% chance of losing a potion buff to every late-game mage in BG2. I've seen some potion buffs survive dispel attempts by reasonably high-level critters. It's much more fair to characters without access to Spell Immunity: Abjuration.
Beat me to it. Potions don't have "levels" so they'll be dispelled by pretty much anything.
edit: It's more nuanced than that--potions have no way to have their caster level set by modifying the item itself, so IIRC they default to a hardcoded caster level of 10.
Why would potions work differently from per-day items? I don't see why the haste from Arbane's Sword would operate differently from the haste effect of an Oil of Speed.
Only a handful of opcodes allow for an explicit caster level--cast spell (146 or 148) are the obvious ones, and dispel magic (58) is another. The handful of items that route effects through these opcodes can have their caster level adjusted, otherwise it falls back to the default. Scrolls cast using 146/148, as do a handful of items.
Items do not approach these things consistently. The Improved Cloak of Protection and Amulet of Cheetah Speed cast their spells explicitly via op 146/148, but an Oil of Speed or haste via Arbane apply their effects directly. There's no reason why you couldn't externalize these effects to a spell and route the item through a 146/148 so that they could scale, but it gets complicated. Given that (in the base game) all of these end up at level 10 it's also completely unnecessary--the difference only shows when you have mods come through and start messing with it.