[CF-Devel] area spells

[Mark Wedel]

Michael Toennies wrote:
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      When i stay near a single skull who is attacking me,
     
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      i often notice he is floading the areas which the same spell
     
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      a few times. So i had often 3-6 flame object under my feet with
     
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      a (it looks so) normal spell cast round.
     
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      In fact, it seems there is some redundant casting.
     
     
  That is 'normal'.

 The monster logic certainly is not very intelligent.  They will repeatedly cast
the same spell.

 In some circumstances, this is a good thing.  In the case you describe, each
flame object does some amount of damage, so having got hit by 6 of them will do
more damage than just getting hit by one.

 In other cases, this may make less since.  If the character is already
paralyzed, probably better to hit them with a lightning bolt or fireball and not
another paralyze.

 The spells do not currently merge.  There is some debate on how much good it
will really do to let them merge (let them in this case means that all the spell
parameters match up).  The main question is how many spells can actually merge
in that situation.  Because in the case of the multilple spells, they will be in
different phases of the duration (so for example, if you cast burning hands,
wait a tick and cast another such that it is effectively one space behind the
other, nothing in that will really be able to merge even though the effects are
overlapping, and this is because the duration of the lead is a little shorter
than the one behind.)

 Similarly, things like damage, direction its moving, and other things may very
well be different.