Incorrect arbane

[Guest Erik]

Before using this fixpack (used baldurdash in the past) I was used to carrying arbane around to protect myself from hold and stun and more. While the fixpack is right that it was protecting from more effects than described, it took away too much.

 

According to the description, it should protect against hold person and stun. Now it does not protect against stun anymore. So it does even less than the description.

 

Maybe it was an oversight, because the spell I'm getting stunned with all the time is "Power word: stun". It should protect against that..

[Guest Erik]

Actually, now I'm confused. The original item description doesn't have it but did protect against it.

 

So with this fixpack the description is added, but the ability removed? That does not make sense, either you remove the ability and keep the description, or you add the description and keep the ability.

 

The baldurdash fix removed the extraneous immunities (web, grease etc.) but kept stun immunity, because according to them, it looked like the stun immunity was intentional (from reading their fix readme).

[Nythrun]

Original description is

STATISTICS:

Equipped Abilities: Wearer is immune to hold person
Special Abilities: Once per day can haste the character for 12 seconds

 

And the additional effects are probably from copying over effects from Free Action or some such rather than by intent.

 

GTU string @1039450 is at fault for the description mismatch (it's still based on the Baldurdash additions)

[Guest Erik]

Yeah I noticed that the original description didn't include it.

Baldurdash did add it but nerfed the other immunities, as I put in my other post. Any idea if the original intent was to add the stun immunity or not? That's what the baldurdash fix believes but it's not too clear on what they base it on.

 

You could advocate either way, that the description is off, or that the abilities are off..

[Nythrun]

Yeah I noticed that the original description didn't include it.

Baldurdash did add it but nerfed the other immunities, as I put in my other post. Any idea if the original intent was to add the stun immunity or not? That's what the baldurdash fix believes but it's not too clear on what they base it on.

 

You could advocate either way, that the description is off, or that the abilities are off..

 

Usually if something has additional effects that aren't mentioned in the description it's best to assume that effects don't write themselves and they must be there on purpose, so the description is what should change.

 

Arbane's effects might just be a cut and paste from the Free Action spell in which case they're not intentional. It doesn't include haste and slow immunites though, so even if it's a cut and paste, some thought when into it - so that might be what Kevin Dorner was basing his changes on (though how you end up with only stun and hold person out of that block, I don't know). It's difficult to second guess incompletely documented work from five years ago.

 

Anyway, I'm out

[CamDawg]

I'll save devSin a post: he's going to say "GTU sucks, drop plz".

 

Arbane originally protects from hold, stun, grease, web, entangle, and prevents portrait icons for stun, web, and hold. BD drops the immunities and portrait preventions to grease and entangle. BD has a bug in that it no longer prevents web but still retains an erroneous protection against the icon, so you'll get webbed with no portrait icon. Fixpack drops the immunities for stun, grease, web, and entangle, and drops the portrait prevention for web and stun. We also prevent the 'held' string from displaying. (I just noticed a bug here: we should be removing the web stuff, but the code is wrong, so it's currently providing web immunity.)

 

So really, the only difference between BD and Fixpack here is the stun immunity. That it explicitly says 'protects from hold person' and stun is missing from the original description is, to me, the key--the only other item with an explicit stun protection (Greenstone Amulet) includes it in the description, and also differentiates it from hold immunity. As the item is already filled with useless cruft (probably a bad copy-and-paste from some free action item as Nythrun says), I trust the description here over the file itself.