So I was fooling around with builds in turn-based mode and I realized something: the durations of spells on the character creation/level-up screen aren't what they claim to be. While you only see the duration listed in rounds, they're actually calculated from a base duration in seconds, modified by whatever, then converted to rounds only at the end (which are 6 seconds, not 5 like I've been seeing some people say).

 

Take Interdiction, it displays as 1 round duration in the preview and even with 20 intelligence or +50% duration, it's still one round when actually cast or inspected from your ability tray. Here it has a green number with a mouse-over that shows its base duration at 7 seconds modified by intelligence and level, you would need +72% duration to make it last 2 rounds. But now take Shining Beacon, which also shows 1 round in the preview. But in the tray with the same modifiers, we end up at 2 rounds because its base duration is actually 9 seconds so the modifiers push it over the limit, in fact +35% would do. Same starting point, different ending points.

 

This leads to several problems. Picking spells at level up or planning our build we don't know how long/effective a spell will be with our given modifiers. Since there's such a huge difference going from 1 round to 2, I want to know which spells I can push over that line with a reasonable amount of intelligence and which I can't. I think it has led many people astray in thinking that you need +100% duration, 30 intel or equivalent, to make the 1 to 2 round jump. I know I've seen several comments here saying as much, while in fact +20% is often enough but you wouldn't know that until you have the spell. So the truth is slightly better but frustratingly uncertain, I resorted to loading a save from RTwP so I could inspect spells to decide how to level up my TB characters. Just making a new character it's impossible to tell how good some spells will be.

 

The solution seems to be to give abilities in the creation/level-up screen a similar mouse-over that displays the true duration in seconds so we can know how they will get modified. You could also just convert everything to rounds first, then modify, so that Interdiction and Shining Beacon would both need +100% duration to go from 1 to 2 rounds. This would at least make things consistent but would be a huge nerf to a lot of spells so I would argue against it. Or you know, don't have discrete rounds, but that's a different discussion.

 

On a sidenote: I'm not sure why Circle of Protection is a hard 1 round or 10 seconds, not increased by anything in TB or RTwP. As far as I know it's the only spell with a duration that doesn't benefit from more intelligence, and it was throwing off my testing until I realized that. Especially in TB, 1 round just seems too short, at least round it up to 2. In fact, why not just round everything to the nearest whole number like normal, 10 seconds on anything should be 2 rounds, let along 11.99, always rounding down seems harsh. Actually it looks like in at least one case they already did this; salvation of time normally adds 10 seconds but they made it add 2 rounds in TB.

Edited February 14, 20196 yr by arkteryx

Circle of Protection does last longer due to intelligence bonus in (RT mode) combat, for example in my case 13 seconds because Xoti has +30%. However, tooltip says flat 10 seconds and is therefore broken and misleading, which is further exacerbated by the fact it cast on ground, not characters, i.e. there is no timer among active buffs.