Magic Resistance Not Always Functioning

[sirnicklaus]

After casting Magic Resistance (priest spell) on a character three times (conferring 40% MR per cast), a character tops out at 100% magic resistance.  And yet the character still gets hit (every time) by Sol's Searing Orb.  Sometimes I will get a "magic resistance" message accompanying the damage of Sol's Searing Orb and sometimes I'll get a "blinded" message.  Once I think I got both.  And all times, the fire damage from the spell occurs.  The fire damage from Flame Strike does seem to be negated as it should be.  Flesh to Stone also just killed me.  Symbol of Pain and Symbol of Hopelessness do seem to be negated as expected.

[Dan_P]

The issue is with those spells. They have effects that bypass magic resist. From a quick check, Otiluke's Freezing Sphere also ignores resist. Possibly others. I didn't look at everything.

In IWDEE, at least, those spells can all be blocked by magic resist. Doesn't seem to be  a reason for them to be different from other attacking spells.

[CamDawg]

9 hours ago, Dan_P said:

The issue is with those spells. They have effects that bypass magic resist. From a quick check, Otiluke's Freezing Sphere also ignores resist. Possibly others. I didn't look at everything.

Yeah, this. Whether something bypasses MR is set on individual effects within a spell--so you can have some effects be blocked by MR on a spell while others work. Generally you'll see all effects either bypass or respect magic resistance, but there are some spells with mixed effects, e.g. when you want a cosmetic visual to play even if the spell itself gets blocked.

There's not really rhyme or reason why some spells bypass MR while others don't, and there's not really any in-game resources to indicate which spells should be which. As such, Fixpack essentially punts and instead focuses on making sure that all effects on a spell treat MR the same way (with a handful of exceptions for e.g. mixed spells with visuals as noted above) since there's no way to solidly determine otherwise.

For Sol's Searing Orb, in oIWD all of its effects are handled by a single monolithic opcode--IOW everything it does is handled internally by the engine in ways I can't access. I can probably emulate it with other effects, but I'll need to play around with it.