Spells: Abnormal fizzle rate at 40.

[Mardur]

Even Canni 1 would fizzle a fuck ton. It was built into the spell as far as I know, no other explanation. I've never heard of the level of the spell affecting fizzle rates thing before, but who the fuck knows.

[Brinkman]

Fizzles are pretty simple in everquest. I am still confused why so many people dont understand this system. Here is a post the man himself GZ :

FIZZLE RATES

This is a post by Geoffrey Zatkin, the primary programmer for the spells and magic section of Everquest, Explaining the chance to fizzle for wizards ( this is unifirm to all pure casters, just replace wisdom for int when applicable.


There is always a 5% chance of succeeding (regardless of how low your appropriate skill is) and a 5% chance of failure (regardless of how high your appropriate skill is). What modifies the chance to fizzle check is the appropriate skill (Abjuration, Evocation, etc.), your Wizard's Intelligence and the level of the spell. Spells have a toughness rating ( Toughness is known in the SPDAT files as " fizzle rate" ), so that some are less difficult to cast than others. According to GZ, none are more difficult than the average to cast.

When you gain a new rank of spells, any spell that you cast of that rank has a 20% chance of fizzling. This is adjusted by your skill and INT, and the toughness rating of the spell. If your INT is greater than 75, the chance of fizzle is reduced by 1% for every point of your statistic above 75. Each spell assumes that you have a skill equal to (5 * level you got the spell). A Wizard getting Bind Affinity (a Wizard gets Bind affinity at level 12, so 5 * 12 =60) would have that spell assuming that he had a 60 Alteration skill for purposes of casting. With a 60 skill in Alteration (the appropriate skill) and a 75 intelligence, our wizard would have an 80% chance of successfully casting Bind Affinity. For every skill point in abjuration that our Wizard has above 60, the percent chance of fizzling goes down by 1%, to a minimum of a 5% chance of fizzling.

Thus, three levels (15 skill points) after our Wizard gets Bind Affinity, he will be able to max out Alteration for that spell, and have a mere 5% chance of fizzling the spell. Higher Intelligence will also help with this.

Basically what this is saying is: Three levels after you get a spell, if you max out your skill in that spells casting type, you have a 5% fizzle chance in general, unless the "toughness" rating is lowered, which makes some spells easier to cast, no spells are harder.

Specialize will lower your fizzle chance a bit as well 1% lower fail rate per 50 skill in eah specialty. So basically if you are max spec in evocation(200) and max in evocation and casting an evocation spell 3 lvls or lower, you should have only a 1% chance to fizzle.

I firmly beleive that something is incorrect in the fizzle code on P99.

Knowing all of this... here is a post by Uthgaard from 7-22-11 ... Has this been applied yet?

Originally Posted by Uthgaard [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

There was an additional, unnecessary level of difficulty that was subjectively added to the checks, and it was based around hard-coded skill caps that were inaccurate for timeline. This created a higher fizzle rate in the mid-level range, that disappeared as the per-level skill caps approached the hard-coded value. This is fixed, pending update.

[jilena]

That makes sense minus the int part. Every caster worth a fuck has ~200 int which would mean that they would always have a %5 chance of fizzling any spell no matter what their skill. Maybe he typoed it and it was every 5 points would be 1% making 200 int a bonus of 25%?? When was that posted?

Still pretty similar to what I said though surprised it is a direct number value rather than a percentage based on the gap. Interesting either way.

[Brinkman]

This was posted in late 1999 prior to kunark, the devs started talking to website owners such as Baelish and Graffe. I beleive this was posted in response to a question by graffe, who ran the major wizard site back in the classic days.

The int/wis part of it was always tricky. It did in fact play a part, but it was small. It's possible it was a typo and he meant to say .1% instead of 1%. Fizzles are capped at 95% success rate based solely on the lvl of the spell vs your skill. Int/wis wouldnt push you past that cap, but it did lower your fizzle rate if you were not max skill.