How does Cancel Magic work?

[footlongcorndog]

I was in a group tonight where the tank was being blinded, I wanted to use Cancel Magic but wasn't sure if it would remove buffs and end up being a net waste. How does Cancel Magic determine which spells to remove? And can it cure Blind?

[ko37qtl]

In my experience, and I'll defer to anyone who has gazed at the inner workings of this, it takes buffs and magic-based debuffs off more or less right to left (it can jump a bit). It will not affect things that need to be cured, such as diseases, poison, and unfortunately, blindness. You need a cleric or a shaman for curing blindness.

[Daldaen]

Every dispell has a random dice roll on it's "strength". 1-4 or 1-8, depending on level of spell.

Every buff and Debuff has a random dice roll on its strength. 1-8

Basically the Dispell will go top down removing whatever number it rolled on its strength until it completely removed a buff. Then it will stop. This means if you have 15 buffs all with 8 strength, and you cast a cancel magic, which rolls a 1 on its strength roll. Cancel would go through every buff and remove 1 counter of strength leaving you with all 15 buffs but they would now all have 7 strength.

However if you had a buff with 1 strength in your top slot cancel magic would remove that and stop removing any counters of strength from the rest of your buffs.

I believe they made a change to make it so that most Clickies are a low strength roll which would allow them to more easily be dispelled. Other than that I'm pretty sure it's all random.