Questions on archmage retort

[DaveV]

Since I don't have the strategy guide, I don't have any real information on the archmage retort's ability to "make your spells twice as hard to dispel". A lot of the spells and effects are described as being "like dispel magic"; does archmage work against:
1. Disjunction
2. Counter magic
3. Node fizzle
4. Nightshade

And I wonder just how the "twice as hard to dispel" is calculated. Let's say it works against node fizzle: if I try to cast Healing in a node, the chance of fizzle is 50/65. Does that really drop to 25/65 with archmage? If so, that would be pretty powerful! I'm suspicious that it's more like 50/80, which is still decent, but not twice as hard to dispel.

[pchang]

This is very difficult to measure. The only reliable way is to check in a battle. For overland spells, you only find out about them when they succeed (unless you have detect magic and then you aren't sure if the spell was directed at you) so you have no way of measuring your anti=spell effectiveness. Personally, I never seemed to see a difference.

[Tuberski]

I think archmage doubles the spell strength with regards to dispelling.

If a20 point dispel is cast at healing it has a 57.1% chance to dispel it.

If the healing come from an archmage, doubling the spell strength, it lowers the chance to 40%.

To have the same 57.1% chance to dispel, you would need to spend 40 points on the dispel.

ACK!

[pchang]

That's the way its supposed to work, but based on how often spells work or don't work, I haven't noticed a difference.