Rain of stones, and gifts from the sky

[Tuidjy]

Before I waste a few hours testing this for myself, I would like to know whether
anyone knows how Rain of Stones and Gifts from the Sky work. Namely:

1. Does arrow fend help with either of these?
2. Do the stones/meteors cound as magic weapons?
3. Do Luck, Twist Fate, Mistform affect the damage?
4. What are the chances a random unit is affected (not necessarily damaged) by
Rain of Stones?
5. How are the meteors from Gifts from the Sky spread? Do they ever hit the
same spot multiple times?

[Foodstamp]

You mean "Gifts from Heaven"? It won't matter much if they hit the same square, seeing how they do a gazillion damage a pop.

[Xietor]

Arrow fend only works on spells that target a single person, and does not work on battlefield spells like rain of stones.

If you look at blade wind and shadow bolt, as examples, the area of effect is a single target. Arrow fend does work on these spells.

It also only works on "normal" damage spells. Magical spells like mind burn are not effected by arrow fend.

[CUnknown]

I'd like to know how these work, too. But, let me make some guesses:

1. Does arrow fend help with either of these?

Maybe against Rain of Stones.

2. Do the stones/meteors cound as magic weapons?

I'm sure meteors do. Stones probably not.. but I believe the manual would say for sure.

3. Do Luck, Twist Fate, Mistform affect the damage?

I bet luck and twist fate would, mistform I seriously doubt (unless they are not magic weapons).

4. What are the chances a random unit is affected (not necessarily damaged) by Rain of Stones?

I thought it was 100%, isn't it?

5. How are the meteors from Gifts from the Sky spread? Do they ever hit the same spot multiple times?

From experience, they seem to be in a roughly identical pattern each time, fairly equally spaced. With their precision modifier (negative), if they were all 3 individually targeted, they'd be wildly spaced out and that doesn't seem to happen.

So, I don't think they can hit the same space.

[Micah]

1.No
2. No/Yes
3. Yes
4. 100%
5. Spell descrip says it hits 3 separate squares, and I don't recall seeing otherwise. Targeting is based on precision and scatter.

[Shovah32]

Micah has it right as far as I remember. For number 5, a mage with incredibly high precision might hit the same square with more than one, but it might not work that way.

[Twan]

If I've understood correctly (and my memories of using this spell had results around this) rain of stone has one effect per square and so touches about 1/3 of all units per cast (if they are size 2, and so are 3/square).

Like earthquake, it's mundane dammage, so body ethearal works against this, and mistform is only negated if dammage roll is high (but it's less safe than earthquake, the 14 dammage + DRN often remove mistform on some protection 0 units like unfortunate mages).

[llamabeast]

Twist fate definitely works against Gifts from Heaven, as in my last MP game it saved countless of my S9 sacreds from it.

Mistform is amazing. Even against magical things they will only take 1 damage, although it will be negated. So with something like Gifts from Heaven, that's an extra life. I bet it will make units almost immune to Rain of Stones.

[OmikronWarrior]

Llamabeast beat me to it, but mistform is pretty neat. Yes, magic weapons will dispel the effect (as will really lucky hits or really hard hits), but the dispelling hit will still only do 1 damage, even if it is magic. I'm sure this effects Gifts from Heaven as well.

[atul]

Are you people really certain that Rain of Stones affects every square in the battlefield? That isn't what I've seen. If you pause the game just at the RoS animation, you see that the visual effect doesn't hit every square, maybe about 1/3 of all. If it'd hit every square, it'd be even better mage-killer than it is currently.

Mistform really is a life-saver, especially against Banefire-casting nations, like LA C'tis...