Darkness change, hidden ultravision, true flame.

[Void]

As mentioned in the bug report on other forum, apparently, now every mob has 20% chance of being immune to darkness due to hidden ultravision ability. This basically, renders the ability useless, because monsters spawns in groups. So....

1 enemy --> 20% chance of running into ultravision monster
2 enemies --> 36% chance
3 enemies --> 48% chance
4 enemies --> 59% chance.
5 enemies --> 67% chance.

(formula - 100% * (1.0 - 0.2)^enemyCount)

This renders the spell largely useless by now, additionally, the chance is not affected in any way by mage's casting ability or enemy strength. It is pure luck with fixed chance, which doesn't smell right.

Additionally, players do not get magical random ability to see through darkness, which is rather asymmetric. And it also doesn't affect player-summoned undead.

On top of that, in case of true flame, other semi-defensive spells are party unfriendly, and abilities like wall of fire register as hostile for summon despite not harming them (the darkness spell used to behave in the same way, but that was fixed, apparently)

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What can be done instead:

1. The mechanic could be removed altogether (because hidden ultravision ability that doesn't have an icon feels like too much cheating from the ai) and replaced by alternate means of trying to detect the caster. There's listen ability, after all.

2. The chance of mob having ultravision could scale based on monsters HD. For example, HD * 2%. This way, a level 1 rat will have 2% chance of having immunity to darkness, and level 30 would have 60% chance. The chance could be altered in many ways, like 10% + HD*2 and so on. This will make more sense, because a more powerful monster will give you higher probability of trouble.

3. Darkness could grant concealment to creatures within based on spell DC. In this case a more invested caster will benefit from it more, and it won't be a "hahaha you can't see me" spell.

[Opustus]

Agree with most, the Ultravision randomisation is even a bit too fancy, even if I understand the good intention of making Darkness from 95% AI stupidifier into 1:5 AI stupidifier.

Listen won't work sadly. Firstly, Listen pertains only to Detect Mode vs. Stealth Mode; the common misunderstanding that Listen allows you to see through the invisible effect is false. Secondly, even if Listen mechanically equalled to the effect of See Invisibility (which it doesn't), there's a setting in NPC AI that doesn't trigger actions from Listen detection without line of sight. This means effectively that if you stand stealthed behind a door, you won't trigger hostile actions from the spawn until you open the door and the monsty picks up the cue for established line of sight.

Rather than trying to revert the nerf to Darkness, I would rather strive to simplify the logic by which spawns get Ultravision by following a simple ratio of [Monsters in spawn] to [Ultravisioned monsters]. This way monster behaviour would be much more consistent and players would learn quickly that there's always one target with Ultravision, and the players could reasonably learn to predict by monster behaviour who it might be. This could even be a fun aspect of combat to study. E.g.
1-3 monsters : 1 ultravision
4-5 monsters : 2 ultravision
6 or more : 3 ultravision

Those aren't numbers I'm actually proposing, they're just an example.

[Shadowy Reality]

All for monsters with Ultravision to show the VFX, that makes sense.
I also like that the probability of having ultravision increases with HD, that makes sense too. As it makes the spell work in lower levels, as it should, a become very useless when approaching epics and in epics.