Tome of swirling feathers / Brilliance of Ro

[Mortbise]

'lo.

I found out tonight in ToV, the hard way, that my tome now has an improved dodge IV instead of Brilliance of Ro. I say the hard way, aka "Dragon resisted Malosinia" multiple times, "Dragon resisted nuke" multiple times (even thunder of ice and its -150 ice check, and after I finally managed to land Malosinia).

So, a couple question came to my mind :
- Was brilliance of Ro deemed too powerfull for the item ?
- Is BoR too powerfull, period ? I searched around, only 2 other attainable items have it (not counting Vex thal drops, I don't think the zone can be accessed and items in there are... well quite crappy, stats-wise)
- If it's not the case, could BoR actually become a bit more available ? There's often talks of casters balance, I can assure you that's something that help them BIG time (tonight's reminder was kinda brutal). Lot more than improved dodge at least.

[ChaosSlayer]

brilliance of Ro was in fact worthless, given it was coded properly into source to begin with.

brilliance of Ro, follows the line of spells such as Intellectual Superiority which increase your casting level. Back on LIVE people believed that this allows you to cast spells as if you were that many levels higher - in case of BoR at 70 you would cast spells as if you were level 90, and it would be an awesome buff if it was working like that.
Unfortunately its in fact ONLY gives you that 20 levels bonus when it checks your FIZZLES, nothing else.

So it does not anyway helped with resists, and other players actually posted and ask to change it for something else.

[Mortbise]

Sorry but I don't believe it helped me, I came to this conclusion after actually using it. I'm talking about a before and after I had it with me here. And now back to before.

If it's not the case, then :
- Why am I suddenly getting half a dozen resists when I try to debuff, when before it almost always landed first hit (except bosses in Kael which are truly pains to debuff) ?
- And after I finally land malosinia, why am I seeing a considerable number of resists on tears of the sun, which also used to almost always land ? I've even seen thunder of ice get fully resisted at least twice (I don't think I ever saw it fully resisted before).

My gear didn't change, except for the tome not having BoR anymore, and a strange silk circlet that I traded yesterday for a crown of resilience. An increase in ToV overall resistances would have been announced, too.

If BoR wasn't so hard to attain, I'd do a With/Without round of test. I know you guys like data and parses, so I've just cast Malosinia on Vlar (I believe he's the dummy with 200 in all resists) 65 times :

It landed 4 times. 5th before last landed but I didn't mark it with a /say "". Of course when it landed I annul magic'ed it. Never did that before, so I don't know if it's normal or not, but heck, sounds like a lot to me. Vlar made a break of 36 resists in a row.

[Tyler]

I assume the mage's name is Eskarina?

I put Tome of Secrets in her bag, top left. Please run same parse against this mob while this book is equipped.

Vlar has 200 to all resists. ToV resists weren't changed one bit.

[Mortbise]

Quite right, you are.

35 more casts without BoR, to bring the count to 100 total casts :

3 more hits, 32 more resists. Yes, I landed it twice in a row, followed by almost 30 resists

Now let me introfuce you to my other chat window, that collects spell hits and the like :

I'm displaying this one, because it's quite more talkative. 10 casts, 1 resist (Here). I can do 90 more if you like to confirm the trend, but it's going to take some time with all the annuling inbetween. And, well, with only 10 BoR-powered cast I've gotten better results than the former BoR-less 100.

Your thoughts ?

[Tyler]

Even if it takes time, please do - you get to keep the Tome, too

[Mortbise]

Up to 50 now, he resists roughly 1 cast per series of 10, resisted twice in series #4.

Note that he never resisted a BoR-powered annul, which happened a lot without BoR, too. So that's an added 44 unresisted casts.

[Mortbise]

Per series of 10, he resisted 1-1-1-2-1-0-0-2-1-2 times.

Break-down :
Without BoR, 100 Malosinia, 7 hits 93 resisted. 10 annul magic, 6 hits 4 resists.
With BoR, 100 Malosinia , 89 hits, 11 resists. 89 annul magic, 89 hits.

[Tyler]

Thats quite impressive!

Thanks for testing.

[ChaosSlayer]

except its NOT suppose to do that
but oh well, more power for us, the original effect was rather useless...
now just pray that emu devs do not discover this NEW effect and do code it out