Here is the old spells.eff change I made that you asked about. This is the shielding spell and changing that 00 to 02 causes the origin to be the caster instead of 0,0. You can change it to several other values as well which change the way the effect looks but 02 was the best I found.
If you only make that change and nothing else the effect is a circular green particle and some strange falling orange particles at the caster. During my testing I was able to make these particles behave as expected as well, using the "jet" effect or whatever.
What I couldn't figure out was:
1. How do you get effects to follow the caster/target if they move?
2. How do you get the effects to come from the hands instead of the center of body?
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As for my methodology of how I figured this out, I just noticed that all the effects in the file say GENXYY_SPRITE where X is a letter A-Z and YY is a number (10, 20, 30). I did a replace all on GENA with GENB, see if that was the shielding effect, then replace all on GENB with GENC, see if that was the spell effect, repeat until the shielding effect particles change in some way to know you've found one of the sprites involved.
Then I reset the file to normal and changed the particle I found, GENC I think it was, one effect that used it as a time. That allowed me to identify the spell block for the shielding effect.
Next I noticed that the frost nuke effect actually had the origin at the caster instead of 0,0. I repeated the above process to find that effect. Then I copied that whole spell block over the shielding block. Then I went back and changed 1 line at a time back to the original shielding lines until I identified which line was responsible for changing the origin.
Unfortunately there seems to be no spell effect in the game which will stay with the caster/target if they move or that originates from the hands as expected. This is why I gave up. Without a working example to use as a template its extremely hard to just change random characters and then check and see what happens. If you look through various spell blocks you'll see that they all seem to have "random" areas changed to "random" values. I can't identify any kind of pattern to work with.
As Aeolwind said, I think the involvement of the character model hands and staying with the model may be outside of this file. I just fixed the origin location.
As for the gravity effects of particles, this can be adjusted in spellsnew.edd. I accomplished this during my original testing but didn't take any notes on how I did it. It was an unintended consequence when I was trying to get the particle direction to change. I was able to create particles that flowed out and then began falling down in an arc like pattern. I also identified a change that increased velocity and various other things. This is why I said I was confident these changes could be made. I've made all the necessary adjustments at one time or another, just forgot to write them down.