Undo the alleged MCP "fix" for Absorb spell reflection

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Jemolk
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Re: Undo the alleged MCP "fix" for Absorb spell reflection

Post by Jemolk »

Chris wrote: 22 Dec 2017, 20:22
kuyondo wrote: 22 Dec 2017, 19:42 Theres a PR that was merged, that makes eaten ingredients strength and duration effects to be based on skills. With a high enough skill, eating a mere ingredient can outvalue any premade potions. Doesnt make sense in my opinion, eating a bread/mudcrab meat with a high skill can restore my fatigue much better than an exquisite potion? no way. Your skill doesnt determine how strong the ingredient affects you, it determines how well you create the effect, by magic or alchemy.
But since its how vanilla works, it was accepted. Why not this?
Because that was intended behavior. The scale could probably do with some balance tweaking, but it was obviously meant for your skill to have some effect on wortcraft since they specifically coded that behavior. In contrast, it's debatable whether or not reflect magic was intended to only resist an absorb effect considering the point of reflect spells is to give back damage given to the target. Given that absorb is one of the more complicated effects with how it does multiple things at once between specific characters, and normally deals with simpler damage- or drain-only effects, it's not obvious whether reflect simply nullifying absorb was specifically coded behavior or an unintended side-effect resulting from how they individually coded reflect and absorb.

That is to say, given that Resist Magic has the same effect as Reflect Magic on absorb effects in vanilla, and the point of Reflect is to give the damage back to the caster vs Resist simply blocking it, there's a strong case to make for it being a bug resulting from a system that fails to account for the complexity of the absorb effect.
One thing that does NOT have the same effect on absorb spells is Absorb Magic effects. Reflect results in no change in health, but absorbing an Absorb Health spell means the target regains magicka equal to the cost but the caster does not heal. That I feel is a far stronger comparison and a better case for my position that this is a balance change, not a bug.

Again, however, if the projectile ricocheted back at the caster, it would make more sense to me to treat it as a full reversal, since there could be a new tether for the healing. Seriously, absorb is one effect. The effect is, you take an attribute from the target and give it to the caster. Reflect as it is right now just changes the target. To change who gains the health, it would need to change the caster, because the caster is not a target. Reflect could make sense working the way you want it to with absorb if you could cause an ally to absorb the health, but as is, there's only one target, and reflect just changes the target. You're not taking control of the spell, you're just changing the targets. If the projectile was sent back, I would honestly have an easier time thinking of it as effectively taking control of the spell, since it then behaves like all spells do after being cast, rather than completely differently. Do you play Magic? Because I'm thinking of a couple cards that would illustrate the difference pretty well I think. Here: Commandeer versus Misdirection.
AnyOldName3 wrote: 22 Dec 2017, 00:50 I knew when I made that last suggestion that it would need an accompanying diagram, so here it is:

[...]

So, after all these diagrams, I hope you see why some people might believe that the vanilla behaviour was an accident and MCP's makes more sense to them, despite agreeing about the basic idea of modelling it as a mirror. As for deciding if health flows along the spell path or teleports to the original caster, someone might decide they like the flowing idea better because of clues like how in Skyrim (and potentially Morrowind, too, but I've never cast an absorb spell myself) the visual effect shows particles travelling along the spell path to the caster. A visual effect isn't something that can be trusted outright, but it could hint at what the designer thought was happening, and the debate is never anything more than whether or not the mechanic in the game is what its designer was trying to put in the game, regardless of what actually ended up there in its place.

Edit reason: More obvious line breaks were needed.
I'd say these are pretty solid illustrations. The one for absorb in OpenMW and with the MCP change, though, makes no damned sense to me for a spell with only one effect. I honestly still don't really see it, sorry. It's one effect, so if you're reflecting it, you're reflecting the whole effect. I can imagine reflecting fire damage but not restore health if they're part of the same spell and both on target, but they're two distinct effects, and so separable. Hell, spells in Morrowind with more than one effect on target even have more than one projectile, so that supports the separability of different effects but not the separability of one unitary effect, the same as how the game works in vanilla. I can say, though, Morrowind has no such visual clues for absorb spells as you mention for Skyrim, and it seems generally a bad idea to assume intent based on later games, given how free Bethesda has been with retconning.
AshSlave
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Re: Undo the alleged MCP "fix" for Absorb spell reflection

Post by AshSlave »

Jemolk wrote: 23 Dec 2017, 04:51 Do you play Magic? Because I'm thinking of a couple cards that would illustrate the difference pretty well I think. Here: Commandeer versus Misdirection.
Although I haven't played Magic and didn't know about these cards, this is pretty much what I thought the whole duration of me reading this thread. MCP's approach looks like hijacking of the spell control - something much more complicated and involving than just reflecting.

In case there's anyone who counts votes for what should be the default, I express my strong preference for the vanilla approach. I usually don't care that much, but I remember clearly how infuriated I was when I saw this "fix", enabled by default by the MCP. And I also remember how I exploited it right away, before turning it off, so the balance arguments don't sound convincing to me. There's a lot of things I would change in Morrowind, but the absorb mechanics I always found to be right and logical.
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AnyOldName3
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Re: Undo the alleged MCP "fix" for Absorb spell reflection

Post by AnyOldName3 »

Out of curiosity, how are you supposed to deal with enemies with 100% (or nearly 100%) reflect as a pure mage? Even with the vanilla reflect mechanic, you can't actually do any damage and you're just ensuring that you don't get damaged either.
AshSlave
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Re: Undo the alleged MCP "fix" for Absorb spell reflection

Post by AshSlave »

AnyOldName3 wrote: 24 Dec 2017, 16:07 Out of curiosity, how are you supposed to deal with enemies with 100% (or nearly 100%) reflect as a pure mage? Even with the vanilla reflect mechanic, you can't actually do any damage and you're just ensuring that you don't get damaged either.
Summons? Reflecting back their spells, if they can cast? It's not harder than dealing with 100% resistant.
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Jemolk
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Re: Undo the alleged MCP "fix" for Absorb spell reflection

Post by Jemolk »

AnyOldName3 wrote: 24 Dec 2017, 16:07 Out of curiosity, how are you supposed to deal with enemies with 100% (or nearly 100%) reflect as a pure mage? Even with the vanilla reflect mechanic, you can't actually do any damage and you're just ensuring that you don't get damaged either.
Luckily, the only opponent with over 50% reflect in Morrowind is King Helseth (thanks to his ring). How you kill him, I honestly don't know. That ring was designed to make him almost impossible to kill, and it's damn good at it. I guess summon enough Ogrims, Dremora and Golden Saints and you could batter your way through him and his guards. Karstaag and Hircine's Guile form have around 50%, though, and how I generally had to deal with it was getting lucky and save-scumming, or else using Absorb Health. Granted, this was as an Altmer mage, so I was weak to my own spells when they were reflected, but I really shouldn't be forced to play a Breton instead of my preference just because of reflect. Reflect is honestly a broken effect, even more than Absorb Health.
AshSlave wrote: 24 Dec 2017, 17:08 Summons? Reflecting back their spells, if they can cast? It's not harder than dealing with 100% resistant.
It actually is harder, unless they're 100% resistant to Magicka, Fire, Frost, Shock and Poison. In Morrowind, Resist Magicka doesn't help against anything that has its own resistance effect. So you just use something they're not immune to. That's why it pays to have an arsenal of effects rather than relying on a single one, like Absorb, which TBH is much less effective against, for example, Bretons than you generally need it to be, and entirely useless against Gedna Relvel due to constant 600% (for some reason not just 100%) Resist Magicka.
AshSlave
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Re: Undo the alleged MCP "fix" for Absorb spell reflection

Post by AshSlave »

Jemolk wrote: 27 Dec 2017, 16:36 It actually is harder, unless they're 100% resistant to Magicka, Fire, Frost, Shock and Poison
Reflect costs as much as all these resist spells combined, which I implied by 100% resistant (well, maybe a bit lower if you also add paralysis). But what I wanted to say is that, as you said, you can't always rely on a single effect and need some arsenal anyway. And in situations when your offensive spells are useless, does that matter how exactly would you fail if you tried?
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Jemolk
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Re: Undo the alleged MCP "fix" for Absorb spell reflection

Post by Jemolk »

AshSlave wrote: 27 Dec 2017, 23:32
Jemolk wrote: 27 Dec 2017, 16:36 It actually is harder, unless they're 100% resistant to Magicka, Fire, Frost, Shock and Poison
Reflect costs as much as all these resist spells combined, which I implied by 100% resistant (well, maybe a bit lower if you also add paralysis). But what I wanted to say is that, as you said, you can't always rely on a single effect and need some arsenal anyway. And in situations when your offensive spells are useless, does that matter how exactly would you fail if you tried?
Point taken. Yeah, 100% reflect is probably easier than 100% resist Magicka, Fire, Frost, Shock, Poison and Paralysis, if and only if your opponent is also a spellcaster. If they're not, it's equivalent. If they're even not immune to Paralysis, though, 100% resist everything else is easier, since you can still paralyze them and stab them to death. Fortunately, 100% reflect only comes up once in the game without mods, so it's not that horrible.
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Capostrophic
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Re: Undo the alleged MCP "fix" for Absorb spell reflection

Post by Capostrophic »

PSA: I've broken fixed this and my branch is pulled into the master branch of the repository. In the release 0.44.0 Morrowind behavior is going to be the default but there's also going to be an option to have the previous behavior.
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Jemolk
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Re: Undo the alleged MCP "fix" for Absorb spell reflection

Post by Jemolk »

Capostrophic wrote: 03 Apr 2018, 15:27 PSA: I've broken fixed this and my branch is pulled into the master branch of the repository. In the release 0.44.0 Morrowind behavior is going to be the default but there's also going to be an option to have the previous behavior.
:shock: :D :D :D :D :D

I can't wait! Now if we can just get script functions implemented to do the equivalent of MWSE functions, my wishlist for OpenMW will be complete.
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wareya
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Re: Undo the alleged MCP "fix" for Absorb spell reflection

Post by wareya »

Thanks!
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