Okay, some updates on EQ.
The casting difficulty for EQ was set to 1, meaning as low as possible, so chance of success should pretty much have always worked. I think this fits with the old game rules as well, as many of us remember EQ always succeeded - you just had a chance that it would fail and backfire. So the low number of wiz casting it isn't really an issue, nor its ability to break through defenders, that was by design, it just seemed to be missing the backfire chance part. We can increase the difficulty pretty easily if it's needed, we could put it on par with Fireball for example so you'd actually have to beat the defenders defenses to cast.
But, it's the damages really, that are disturbing.
I did find a bug in the EQ spell, an old code I think Keeper added as a trap for multis (it was supposed to auto trigger some EQs I think, if a player met some conditions in one of the multi detectors), well it was powering all EQs cast with 100,000 wiz. I think this was added about midway through last round, when there was multi drama.
So that's why you could cast it with low numbers of wiz, and that's why it was very powerful. In addition to the other things we changed the other day that were also overpowered - which I still believe are fixed properly as my tests with Fireball today showed me good results.
I found the multiplicative model used for offensive casting is highly prone to some weirdness too, very easy to get runaway numbers that make some things impossible or guaranteed - no matter what. Currently, now that that 100k wiz buff is removed, it's pretty impossible to successfully cast against someone that has a decent amount of magic defense, because the multiplicative model gives more defensive buffs than the caster gets, it's structurally biased toward the defender, always has been, just the ksratio booster and the eq wiz booster were overcoming them. Now that offensive casting is normalized, the defensive bias is very obvious (my test kingdoms with same schools/land, 1k wiz could defend against fireball/eq even when using 50k wiz to cast against them).
Trying not to alter the multiplicative model too much, because IDK why it was chosen, but don't want to undo it for whatever reason, I added some suppression caps and softened density terms so offensive casting isn't nerfed at the moment... What I think we need, is to replace the multiplicative model with a contest based model, that would be more attuned to a power versus power calc, giving defenders more of an option to successfully defend and casters the option to overcome those defenses with their own magic power investments.
Welp, I'm done for the day, look more at it tomorrow if there's time lol
