It's pretty unclear precisely what this passive effect actually does. The comments on ZAM have a few different theories, but I haven't seen any evidence one way or another. The text for the effect reads: Grants you the brilliance of Ro, decrease the chance you will fizzle a spell for 2:00:00. Ignoring the wrong tense on 'decreasing', it seems pretty simple, right? Except ZAM lists this is the effect. Increase Effective Casting Level by 20 Which seems more... general? It has the same wording as the Feeblemind debuff on Thought Horror Overfiend, which reads: 1: Lure(6) 2: Decrease Hitpoints by 5 per tick 3: Decrease Effective Casting Level by 200 4: Increase Curse Counter by 9 7: Decrease Mana Pool by 800 So it definitely affects fizzles, like it claims to do in the spell effect. But there's another factor in this: resists. People have told me more than once that it also impacts the level difference calculation in Resist checks. I guess I just want confirmation on this from a dev: Does the Effective Casting Level stat only impact fizzle chance, or does it affect other things as well?
I've always been curious how this line works as well. It also looks like based on the spell data that Brilliance of Ro might have been a castable spell that never made it live and was plopped onto an item instead.
Enchanters get a lower power version of this spell in Luclin but the line ends at level 17. If you don't want to farm one of the items, a +6 level difference should be enough to do testing at lower levels. Here's a pretty short, mostly useless parse I did on Test. Level 1 Mage casting Burst of Flame vs Level 10 Test Dummy -------- No Intellectual Superiority 50 casts 8 fizzles 42 nonfizzled spells 13 resists - 31% 14 hits @ 1 dmg - 33% 11 hits @ 2 dmg - 26% 4 hits @ 3 dmg -10% -------- With Intellectual Superiority (+6 Effective Caster Level) 50 casts 7 fizzles 43 nonfizzled spells 12 resists - 28% 16 hits @ 1 dmg - 37% 12 hits @ 2 dmg - 28% 3 hits @ 3 dmg - 7% I actually expected the fizzle rate to be a lot lower with the buff up, but it might not play well at extremely low levels with baseline evocation skills. 50 Casts is also low enough that RNG can sway the numbers.
The effect is still current (not capped). It does reduce fizzle rates on spells. I believe it improves the effects of spells that scale with level too (not many these days). I believe it works for bard songs too, as SPA 112 and 272 (Jam Fest) might share the same code (they do on a certain ). I used to wear Crown of Energy all the time back on Rallos Zek server for the added advantage in pvp. I believe it improves resists check (I felt stuns landed noticeably better in pvp at the time) and it mitigated an enchanter debuff that always landed (lol those were fun battles). Besides enchanter buffs, Wizard and Mage have AA to increase this SPA (112), and Bards have Jam Fest (272). If you look at the description of Jam Fest you see all the possibilities that might also apply SPA 112: I doubt that SPA 112 effects stack and debuffs would win out, of which there are many over the years. There are no debuffs for SPA 272. Bonuses to SPA 112 might be a useful countermeasure to other types of fizzling debuffs like Itching Poison (SPA 159) cast by e.g. "a majestic cockatrice" in RoS TO. I haven't tested that since I use Mastery of the Past protected spells instead (level 106 and lower).
The main problem with testing on a high level character is that fizzle rate has a minimum value. After a certain point, no amount of skill, specialize, and effective caster level will improve the fizzle chance. I don't doubt that it improves fizzle chance, that's not what I was asking. That much is clearly evident with how Feeblemind makes you fizzle so often (though using your Specialized school still gives you a pretty good chance to succeed despite the -200 ECL). I was wondering if it affected anything else, like the way Jam Session empowers certain Bard songs or if it affected resist chances.
Yes. Effective Caster Level is used in several places in spell casting. It is used to determine whether or not the spell should fizzle. It is used to determine the amount used in any component of the spell that scales with level (such as buff duration, heal/dmg amount, etc.) It is used to determine the level difference for computing the resist chance when a detrimental spell is cast against a target.
I've been wearing a Brilliance of Ro item for a few weeks. I don't have parses, but I still fizzle spells often enough that I doubt the effect works at all.
Use a lower level wizard to do your testing. The Familiar line of spells gives a +2 bump at lower levels, and a +4 bump at higher. You will NOT see a spell damage increase on spells until you actually hit the level, so it does NOT mod your damage/level scale. You might also be able to test to see if a lower level wizard can land spells on a mob that previously was too high, but I've never tested that. I personally believe all it does is reduce your fizzle rate, to what ever the hard minimum is per spell.
SPA 112 affects your fizzle rate. It has nothing to do with your "casting level." That's a bad description on the spell parsers. If a spell is Alteration and you have 200 skill, and your buff has SPA112 value of 20, (Brilliance of Ro) then your Alteration skill is counted as 220 when doing the math. That's all. For an intelligence caster the formula is basically: Skill = Skill + SPA112 Weight = (((intelligence / 10) + 100 + Skill) - 250) - 15 + (spec skill / 10 + 1) Then it randoms between 10 and 98 using the weight. Let's say you have 500 intelligence, 300 evocation. 240 Spec evocation. 500 / 10 = 50 + 100 + 300 = 450 - 250 - 15 = 185 + 240 / 10 + 1 = 210 Random between 10 and 98 using a weight of 210. In other words: Everyone is way, way, way, way, way over the stats needed to cap your fizzle rate so it does nothing. Note: I simplified things in the above. That's not the exact formula, but a close approximation. It also varies slightly by class, level, spell level, etc. but not enough to matter after level 60ish, probably even 50.
