Resisting Paralyze

[tanmits]

Old thread, but it needs a bump. I distinctly remember that my character with 55 resist would not only occassionally outright resist paralyze, but the higher his resist got, the duration was noticeably shorter. Here, unless you're carrying more pop pouches than your enemy has regs and/or mana, you can be effectively paralyzed indefinitely at GM resist while they chain explosion/hally hit/para/med.

[Malaikat]

I also recall resisting para, but not necessarily in era. Any research done on this?

[Roser]

May 10/99

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.game ... 7699dbd651

Do you know if it is possible to resist paralyze?

Yes. The duration of paralyze seems to be based on how well you resist it.

Sometimes you even get the resist message and are only frozen for half a second.

*******************

March 14/99

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.game ... b43847a20e

spent another half hour waiting for Malek to walk of the front steps so i
could get in there and tag him. of course, he was using those steps like
kids use 'im on base!'. what happened next is what i want to know wtf. he
paralyzed me and i had to stand there for 10 seconds while i watched him
fizzle this and fizzle that before i could move again. ten freakin seconds!
does anyone else think that this is just a tad bit long to be stuck under a
paralyze spell? is it in the game like that or was his spells under the
influence of a third party prog? and my next question is, what was that
trick that i saw posted up here about how to get un-paralyzed? i think it
had something to do with magic unlocking something.....hell, i dont know.
any of you know?

Thats how it works normally. Paralyze freezes you for 10 - 15 >seconds? or

until you take damage.

What's ridiculous about the paralyze spell is that it has a 100%
chance of successfully paralyzing you. If you resist, you are still
paralyzed for long enough to get off an explosion spell and maybe even
another paralyze. The only way to thwart it is to cheat by drinking a
poison potion, setting off a trapped chest, or a purple potion. Or
equip a bow.. you can still shoot arrows while paralyzed. It's a
spell made for cheap kills. One of many.

[Kaivan]

One thing to keep in mind about paralyze is that it's length varies depending on the caster's Magery skill. The reported numbers will be different as a result of that, and the information in some newsgroup posts supports the position that paralyze can last much longer at higher skills. Specifically, this post made later in one of Rose's links points directly to that:

Umm hate to tell you this but my gm mage can paralyse for up to 40 secs..
yes definitely.. 10 secs? count yerself lucky! Also, paralyse can be
resisted.. with 87 resist I sometimes resist them entirely (I believe this
was a recent fix up by OSI)though you cant count on that. Carry MULTIPLE
magic trapped chests.. each one wastes the mage 20 mana .. purps work too. A
novel method I saw against a PK paraed by me was he targeted and clicked on
a nearby bear.. it attacked him and broke his para..he got away damn
damn....

As for directly resisting paralyze, there are indications that it was possible to do, but extremely rare. The issue is that we have no idea exactly how rare it was, or whether it was dependent on having high resist or not. This spell falls into the same category as Mana Drain and Mana Vampire, which all virtually unresistable after the 2/24/99 patch. However, documentation shows that both Mana Drain and Mana Vampire spells were updated, making them highly resistable spells (regardless of resist), while Paralyze is not documented to have undergone the same update. This provides strong evidence to support the position that paralyze remained a nearly unresistable spell throughout T2A.

[tanmits]

It did occur to me that my recollection was based on having almost never actually been paralyzed by someone who had GM magery nor me ever getting GM resist on production shards.

Is it possible at all to resist paralyze completely here? I've been paralyzed many times and don't recall ever resisting it entirely... of course, that may be because paralyze was irresistible at GM magery no matter one's resist, as it seems here.

Also, is this a gray area where multiple pieces of evidence point to different situations? I'm not sure why the evidence brought up by Hemperor isn't being reckoned with. I realize that they don't go into detail about mechanics like the ones Rose found, but the evidence offered there directly conflicts with the others, so either something changed between March 14 (Rose's) and June 18 (Hemp's), or one party's account is being discarded in favor of the other's.

It's too bad all of this information is anecdotal, though. Doesn't look like Stratics in April '99 had any info, either.

[Kaivan]

Other information from later in T2A also suggests that paralyze was not resistable as well. At this point, we have little information that is conclusive on one side or the other. All we have are anecdotal stories that suggest that paralyze was resistable to some degree (how much is not known, nor are the exact conditions of the resist event), and information that consistently shows that in rare circumstances the player would receive the resist message (in which case we are sure they resisted the spell), and would be frozen for only a very short time. Without any conclusive evidence, we must go with the evidence for other spells effected at the same time as paralyze, namely the nearly unresistable effects of Mana Drain and Mana Vampire

[Ragancy]

I don't have any hard evidence but I think we have it accurate. Magery + resist determined how long you were paralyzed, but regardless of magery and resist you couldn't resist the para spell altogether.

[Blaise]

Just a bit of current info on what I'm seeing, hopefully it's relevant.
I got hit with Paralyze by an Air Elemental last night.
My Resist is (was) at 77.0 at the time.
The system message literally said
"You cannot move"
"You can move"
Within a one second time frame.

In other words, my level of resist and the ele's level of magery, resulted in a paralyze duration of under one second, but I was still paralyzed ever so briefly.