poison spell?

[BlackLeaf]

it seems that does lvl 2 poison on a crow as well as on an ancient wyrm (im at 100 magery),same for poison field.
i think there is something wrong here,should be able to inflict lvl3.i thought it was lvl 3 with no resist,and lvl 2 if succesful resisted,or something like that.as it is now is lvl 2 no matter what.also stratics speak about varying level of poison,and many post of the era talk about killing dragons with 2 applications.
please correct me if i am missing something.

[Mikel123]

You're missing links to the posts on Stratics.

[BlackLeaf]

stratics page

if it has problems loading the correct page go to strategy-->essays and guides-->magic & alchemy-->lvl3 spells

Poison: Poisons target and drops HP. Varying potential.

[BlackLeaf]

links to discussions:
link

I've been killing blood eles and dragons with the poison
spell for the last week

link

It looks like 50% of the spells, casted by monsters are the poison spells!
And they ar not just minor poisons, but the realy bad ones!

link

I killed a dragon by casting 2 poison spells. You can kill a corpser
with a single poison spell too

they are dated winter '99,i cant find something inbetween.but if nothing has changed i think this is what should be.

[Mikel123]

I wonder if we're capping poison damage on NPCs?

Would make sense if poison was useful on high-HP monsters, too, since it's percentage-based.

Odd that all three of these posts come from Feb'99 though.

[BlackLeaf]

Odd that all three of these posts come from Feb'99 though.

indeed,but i have searched the patches archives from gen 99 to dec 99 and i havent found anything about a change in how poison spell works.

[iamreallysquall]

how do we know they didnt get posioned via a energy vortex or a blade spirit . i know the ev has a higher level poison i honestly dont remember poison the spell it self being that strong. i am also curious i remember poisoned weapons being nerfed i am not mistaken the ticks them selfs cant remember the specifics but maybe its related?

[BlackLeaf]

how do we know they didnt get posioned via a energy vortex or a blade spirit

they explicitly refers to poison spell.

[Sandro]

It was not uncommon for a mage to occasionally cast a greater poison spell, but I am fairly certain it was scaled based on resist, and even at 0 resist it was a small chance to do so. I know that it was not until UO:R that you could deadly poison with the spell, and even then it was scaled based on distance from caster to target.

[iamreallysquall]

how do we know they didnt get posioned via a energy vortex or a blade spirit

they explicitly refers to poison spell.

point is i can say "hide skill" and mean "stealth skill" or "snooping" terms get mixed up i am not saying hes wrong nothing more nothing less.

[BlackLeaf]

sure,i understand the point,but in the links i have posted i really cant see any ambiguity.

also look at this link:the poisoning essay is dated 2 may 2000,that is last days before uor,but still t2a.in the article one can read:

Greater Poison is likely to be the best bet for an aspiring assassin to use on weapons and food. This poison damages approx. one part in sixteen of the victims remaining health per 10 second span, causing a minimum of seven points of damage in all cases. Within the course of 1 minute can add up to some serious damage. The mage spell of Poison or Poison Field is exactly as potent as this particular variety of potion. The poisoned victim will get the "You begin to feel pain throughout your body!" messages.

it seems clear to me that if not resisted the spell inflicts level 3.

lastly,concerning the date (too late or too soon),no patch mentions a change in the poison spell,therefore it should works like this.

[Mikel123]

May 2000 is NOT T2A.

[Faust]

Was looking over the OSI code for the spell and it seems rather odd to me.

Code: Select all

        if(Random(1-100) < Casters Magery Skill)
        {
          PoisonStrength = Level 2;
        }
        else
        {
          PoisonStrength = Level 4;
        }

Based on the code(if it's being read correctly) there are only two poison levels used. Regular(level 2) and greater(level 4) poison. However, it just seems really weird and rather stupid that the chance of hitting greater poison(level 4) becomes significantly lower the higher your magery skill gets instead of vice versa. This of course does not include any possible changes to the spell in between the known code and the cutoff date if there were any.

[Sandro]

level 4 is deadly poison btw

[Faust]

Oops, what ^he^ said...

The only way the code might not seem weird is if the variable...

Q66X = getSkillLevel(user, 0x19);

That references the variable used in the randomized logic statement produces something other than the absolute value of the magery skill of the caster.

The final code would actually look something like this for ease of readability...

Code: Select all

        CastersMagerySkill = getSkillLevel(caster, magery);

        if(Random(1-100) < CastersMagerySkill)
        {
          PoisonStrength = Level 2;
        }
        else
        {
          PoisonStrength = Level 4;
        }

The function that calls the getSkillLevel for the logic statement could possibly not be producing an absolute value of the magery skill even though it appears that way. There is a known variable called getSkillLevelReal but this could easily just be describing the 'show real' and 'non-show real' values of skills too. This would probably have to be further analyzed by Batlin or Derrick on a more technical level for a complete verification. There definitely appears to be a certain fact here based on what it looks like with in the code. Regular and Deadly(not Greater) poison is used for the spell.