by Maddoc » Tue Feb 21, 2006 9:00 pm
Short Version: As Ngreth mentioned, the bug is fixed.
Longer Version: Depending on how many of you know and / or care about how our spell data works...
Our spell system grants us a lot of flexibility when it comes to being able to scale the power of a spell based on the level of the player. We can adjust the duration, the return on the spell effect, and the resist modifiers. This flexibility is great because it allows us to give players an added benefit from their spells as they level up.
Our item system also allows us a lot of flexibility when it comes to assigning spell effects to an item, primarily through an "effective caster level" of sorts, which basically just allows us to override the caster's current level and use the level specified on the item instead. In conjunction with the spell scaling I mentioned above, we're able to create a single spell that gives a large power increase, override the caster's level, effectively clamping the scaling-factor (for resist mods, duration, and effect calculations) of the spell to whatever it would be if the caster's level was 'X'.
The effective caster level fuctionality had a bug in it that preventing it from working correctly, which has since been fixed, but also had an unfortunate side-effect of making items and potions actually use the effective caster levels that were set in data.
We made sure to fix all of the items, all of the new potions, and all of the old potions we knew weren't being converted to new potions, to work properly with the new effective casting level system, however... Due to unforseen issues with the tool we ran to do the potion-conversion, some players may still have the old potions, and they may not work quite the way you remember.
For those of you who have been completely confuzzled by my babbling: A quicker, more temporary fix will be put in place the next time we update items to the live servers, which will return the old potions back to their former status. A more permanent fix will occur once we complete the potion-conversion on the live servers, which will result in the removal of all of the old potions.