It can be decided what it will protect, good or evil.

Or Make it equally effective against both but slightly less than the original form of the Sup.

I meant that to read Neutral Healers. Specifically, I don't like the randomness of alignment protection Neutral healers get.

I agree, it sucks.

The way I understand it, it's used as a balancing mechanism somehow, to make protvalign harder for neutrals. Neutrals already have a social protvalign to a certain extent, by nature of being neutral (fence-sitters!), so in theory other protections vs. alignment (like the dam redux provided by the spell) should be nerfed somehow to compensate. The solution we came up with was the randomness - which is only a nerf in that if you get the one you don't want, you must dispel it or wait for it to wear off.

Your suggestion is essentially: rather than use inconvenient weird mechanics as a nerf - simply having the commune provide a slightly lower damage reduction and/or a higher mana cost for neutrals would be a more elegant and less weird fix. Granted, it's a straight numbers nerf, which is what I imagine we (the coders involved) were trying to avoid (for some reason aesthetic or functional) by going with the randomness instead.

And I suppose I'm for it. Since it comes down essentially to one's preferred way of balancing something - it'd be interesting to hear from the guy(s) who made that design decision.

Goodie healers commune protection from evil.

Evil healers commune protection from good.

Neutral healers get one or the other at random.

What's wrong with that?