After having played a few mages I am wondering if it is at all feasible to make it a bit harder to completely dispel the spells a person has put into place.

I say this because it seems somewhat unrealistic (and unfair) that a mage who spent their entire life in study can have the spells they have mastered completely torn down by another mage (or shaman) with a single spell that has little lag to it and is certainly alot less of a timesink than putting those spells up in the first place.

So here are a list of seperate proposals to think on....

Proposal One:

How about making it so dispel magic halves the timers on all spells and has a strong chance of completely dispelling ONE spell at a time? This would require the caster to use it multiple times to get the effect it has now (but at least you half the timers on their other spells.

Proposal Two:

How about making dispel magic work like it does now, but you have to pour more mana into it in order to increase your success rate. In other words casting it at normal has a chance to dispel one spell and a very minor chance to dispel multiple spells, pour another 50 mana into it and it has a normal chance to dispel two spells and a minor chance to dispel more than that and so on. Basically there is a mana cost to each additional spell you want to have an average 'certainty' to dispelling.

Proposal Three:

My final proposal is actually the addition of a spell to all mages who hit level 51 (perhaps as an edge or something) called 'Magic Lock' or something way better than that. It would be a spell that allows a master mage (lvl 51) to choose ONE single spell they have mastered (100%) and make it completely undispellable. I think this is fair after a lifetime of study that you should be able to have at least one spell you can seriously count on not to be dropped en masse. Obviously this has to be a spell you know and not one you get from a source (like ABS).

I don't see it as needing a change. Your odd gang of shaman who gets lucky plus some guys to bash aside, kills in which dispelling is a key factor are very rare. While you're spending rounds rolling the dice on dispel, the other guy's executing his strategy to kill you, and even if dispel goes your way he probably just runs away.

If this was the case, especially for proposal three, every mage would choose either fly or their respective bash-protection spell.

An ABS'd, fully spelled up mage who is rolling is already a complete, utter pain in the ass to lag/kill. Making it so it's either very hard or next to impossible to dispel him would make these powerhouses even more powerful.

I really don't think there is anything wrong with dispel magic. Sure, in a gank it is powerful...but so is summon, or lag options, or any other number of skills/spells. Dispel magic on it's own just isn't that scary, and if your foe is focusing on that instead of something else...that's time spent not (actively) killing you (provided there's not an extenuating circumstance, such as dispelling water breathing underwater or a gank).

For instance, as a shaman...even though dispel is SUPER nice, 1v1 vs a mage I'm almost *always* communing something else.

You made my argument slightly stronger.

If you look at your argument, you and maybe others don't even use dispel magic in a 1v1 - so this type of change wouldn't even effect your mage/shaman except when they are trying to gank someone down - which imho is a good change for the better. And thinking about it you are probably right because the fights as a mage where im dispelled are usually group fights and in THAT case im usually dead if the person is with a basher and all my protections I spent between two-three minutes in RL putting up get taken down in less than five seconds while im being bashed/cranialed/etc. to death.

This would make it better for mages being ganked not to be instantly put at a severe disadvantage and according to you would have little effect on 1v1.


EDITED TO ADD:

Perhaps another proposal could be making it much harder to dispel a mage who is already fighting someone.

You say it as if I think ganking down these powerhouse mages is a bad thing.

For instance, a full spelled up invoker. Or transmuter. Or conjie. Or shifter...wins a lot of their 1v1 fights. Very few things in the game can handle any of these characters rolling at peak capacity. I'm not even getting into necro undead or roided up APs. I'd argue that ganking them is a semblance of game balance.

Dispel magic + a good, competent lagger is VERY key in killing these buff, fully spelled up magical characters. And even then it's hard and prone to fail because if a dispeller is fighting you, and a lagger is fighting you, they're probably not perma lagging you. If they bring in a third guy, then you've got anti-gank code working in your favor.

Granted, you can circumvent this to an extent by having the dispeller sit outside of combat while the two laggers do their thing, but this is a harder thing to orchestrate than you'd think. (I tried a lot as Ooglarr, only one of the multiple dispellers I worked with really *got it*)

Overall a buffed up mage is HARD to kill, and making their spells harder to dispel makes them even HARDER to kill. That's not a fun game I want to be playing. That's an unnecessary difficulty to add to something that is already quite hard to do.