I was just looking through some PBFs at lunch and noticed Mirozah's best set of equipment and having fought him a few times with Nighden I was always noted how often malleability was working for him.

The equipment was basically a full suit of darkened platemail, leggings etc and it struck me as odd that a creature who makes its body so malleable can still do so, despite the obvious contraints of hard plate armours.

I would like to see a change to the spell that makes it incompatible with metal armors such as darkened platemail etc as it just doesn't fit. Mages should be less dressed like warriors anyway, with more supple armour.

Thoughts?

That's a pretty interesting idea. I might implement something along these lines.

Edit: to be clear, I'm thinking along the lines of a penalty to success rate.

You give up corporeal hardening (25%), calcification (25%), and possibly petrify flesh (25%?) in exchange for special dodge/evade.

Now just having corp hardening and calcify up is a flat 43.75% dam redux (at the cost of flight).

So in order for malliability to be equally usefull it would need to fire around 1/3rd of the time on melee hits or at least just on skills (which even with arial or drow I don't think comes close to that high).

I don't think it is coincidence you really only see scions using this spell heavily for skill avoidance over general survivability. Without despoil you just don't have the HP base for the gamble to pay out often enough.

Yeah, that was my issue. I couldn't even take easy mobs with it unless I was rocking aura and shield to compensate for losing corporeal hardening and calcify. It's one of those powers that seems only usable if you're :

A) Trying to block something like assassinate...which you never need to do as a transmuter.

B) Fighting a spellcaster where you actually don't care about their melee at all.

C) Have full ABS and therefore, don't really care about your dam redux.

Maybe that's the purpose of it/design of it but I never seemed to be able to get it to work as well as I've seen it work in logs so I thought maybe there was some hidden weight penalty or something I was missing.

I'm kinda curious what affects malleability in general. I could never get it to work worth a damn.