Arelith

So today I found out that silence is kind of much stronger than I realized.

Lets go back a few years. Silence's main counter traditionally has been lesser dispel wand on the ground (or casting lesser dispel from your book because it has no verbal component).

Then, quite recently there was some sort of update to how auras work which may be related to the problem but I cannot say with certainty. I'm pretty sure said update was more about making spellbook silence more potent against low cl dispels, and that it was never meant to affect silence consumables, and as far as I know atm that update had nothing to do with consumables. This made sense at the time because if you're a caster, using silence, then you're also required to pay the silent spell tax or you're crippling yourself too, and in theory Silence from consumables would still be counted by lesser dispel.

Today we ran some tests and discovered that silence consumables behave like all other consumables in that the roll vs dispels and spell resistance checks character lvl rather than item lvl. This is quite powerful because it means a mundane weaponmaster for example can shut down any caster pretty hard, by having Silence source of the same strength even if not duration. Lesser dispel no longers work when targeted on the ground, even against consumable Silence.

Now, my two cents?
As a warlock player (who cannot even apply silent spell meta magic on blasts) I'm left without any answer at all to a low tier potion anyone can use without cooldowns (remember when Clarity was in a similar state eons ago and we added cooldown?). So I'm staying away from casters indefinitely until (if ever) it's changed.

Thanks for reading.

Spell resistance blocks it and globe of invulnerability as an extra note. It also lasts a very short time as a potion, and it's incredibly easy to get distance out of it. Granted, if, as a caster, I let a weaponmaster get in crit distance of me anyway, I'm doing something wrong. But that's just me.

For the spell resistance, I used a wand of it on a character and one person was able to resist it with their natural drow spell resistance, though I may have to test again. We tried it out a while ago.

Eira wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 11:30 am

Granted, if, as a caster, I let a weaponmaster get in crit distance of me anyway, I'm doing something wrong. But that's just me.

Please don't try to dismiss this as a skill issue - Instant use sprint makes keeping distance extremely difficult & is one of the main reasons why I proposed changes like the removal of spell disruption checks before.

• sprint keys off HARD STR & DEX, so a melee build can get 150% movement speed in 0 time while most spellcaster builds will have to cast haste to do the same (which takes time and roots them in the spot for the duration of the spellcasting animation)
• silence aura radius reaches even farther than the character's melee range - i can use a silence potion & hit sprint to catch a haste casting spellcaster in the effect before their spell resolves - now they've lost their spell, can't cast anything else & don't have the movement speed to escape the melee range or the silence effect = total checkmate (and all I did was hit two buttons before clicking the red man)
• sprint (along with smite, whirlwind and -prays) is a very questionable design. NWN's combat system deals with action economy, i.e. time translated into actions is used as a resource for players to manage in a battle of wits & skill. ANYTHING that then costs 0 resources (actions/time) is inherently overpowered and broken within the context of said combat system.

Furthermore, keeping distance isn't even the default behaviour for all spellcasters - hideous blow warlocks & defiler clerics play around meelee touch attacks.

But I don't want to digress too much here. I see the OP's silence potion and raise one anti-magic potion.

silence potions last 3 rounds

And yet, 1 round of any CC effect is being percieved and talked about as a death sentence: viewtopic.php?p=351129#p351129
Just putting things into perspective.

26 SR does not ever block 30 CL spell. Ever. Not from drow, not from headband. Cleric SR (which is higher, but is also a breachable spell) has better odds but will fail to resist it rather often too, as Ive discovered today in my tests. It doesnt seem fair to me that a lower tier potion will consistently pierce through this much SR, but maybe that's just my logic.

Also, it's not 'just' 3 rounds, it's a lot.

AstralUniverse wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 10:08 am

Today we ran some tests and discovered that silence consumables behave like all other consumables in that the roll vs dispels and spell resistance checks character lvl rather than item lvl.

That's definitely not how other consumables work. Consumables, like other items, check SR based on their own CL, not character level. If Silence is behaving differently, it is most certainly a bug.

We can confirm that due to an engine-level bug Silence is using HD to calculate its SR penetration, instead of its item spell level.
We'll be coming up with a fix soon, I hope.

God bless you, Ice.

Silence is only really a problem when used by a cleric, due to the duration.

Furthermore when extended.

-XXX- wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 12:43 pm

And yet, 1 round of any CC effect is being percieved and talked about as a death sentence: viewtopic.php?p=351129#p351129
Just putting things into perspective.

Silence isn't a hard CC. You can still run away, stealth, drink a potion, ect.

On the general topic though.

I've never considered silence to be all that useful in actual fights. It feels like something that comes up (once again) in PGCC pvp/theorycrafting.

As others have mentioned, it's only 3 rounds from a potion. So 18 seconds.

Additionally, there are two other components to consider when using silence on yourself. Firstly, you can't receive bard song. If you have it, it remains, but if you leave the radius and then come back, it won't apply. This will also apply to your allies in the silence radius.

Which speaks to the second element. If you are grouped with any sort of caster/bard that would be negatively impacted by silence, you are actively shooting yourself in the foot. At any point, a mundane with a silence aura might need to run next to their caster ally, who now suddenly can't do anything.

As was mentioned before, if a martial(especially a WM) is already in melee distance, the last thing you should be doing is casting. You want to be as far as possible, and should already be running.

There are only really two builds that I see this shutting down, but even then, they still have counterplay.

• Defiler: Cleric's spell book SR, sitting at 39, Silent Spell (which they take for more harm slots), mantle.
• HB Warlock: Ethereal Visage, swapping to ranged blast, mantle.

Speaking from my own personal experience, after playing a caster for the last five months, and getting involved in a lot of pvp...

I've never seen a silence potion used, nor a spellbook silence cast. It wasn't like this was some unknown factor either, it just typically isn't practical.

Silence instantly strips the bard song effects from any creature entering the radius.
But yes, in paper it's immensely strong. In reality, it seems seldom used, mostly because the casters that have access to it would have to actively cripple themselves to make use of it.

Also, LMs.

Kythana wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 3:18 pm

A good post with facts.

I guess I just disagree with you that 18 seconds isnt long time. Perhaps it is worth mentioning here that loremaster has access to 5 round wands, or 8 round scrolls, and we're not exactly lacking loremasters left and right.

The other part is that (and yes as many of you know, my main is hideous blow warlock) I really dont want to relay on Ethereal visage, mantle or any other breachable thing. If I'm fighting a cleric with spellbook silence I have some tools to deal with it, but weapon master? Not so much, and I definitely want to melee with them. At least allowing people to counter consumables with a headband/race sr seems like a reasonable middle ground, if we consider it is no longer possible to lesser-dispel the ground in order to remove the aura.

I do agree with you that in a party pvp setting where bards are involved, usage of silence is far less binary and more tricky.

Lots of counters + metamagic that entirely overcomes the worry. I don’t know why we have flavour of the week feedback freakouts after someone gets pvp’d with a new strategy they haven’t encountered before.

It's undeniably bugged though.
I sipped the silence potion (which has cl of 3) as a lvl 10 character and not once have i failed at overcoming sr of 26.
No breaches were involved.
Mathematically, i should have... Negative 15% chance of overcoming that SR (ergo: literally impossible).

It's bugged and the bug should be fixed. The end.

Dreams wrote: Fri May 16, 2025 8:48 am

Lots of counters + metamagic that entirely overcomes the worry. I don’t know why we have flavour of the week feedback freakouts after someone gets pvp’d with a new strategy they haven’t encountered before.

I havent gotten pvped by a silence user anytime late. I was infromed by fellow players on discord and then I thought "this doesnt sound right :thinking face: " and I went ahead and tested on pgcc. I was also not sure if it's a bug or not because there was an update to auras semi-recently so here we are in the feedback section. Apparently it is indeed a bug.

I think this thread as ran it's course and can be locked. Thanks for reading and participating.

Archiving into fixed bug; we have a patch in the pipeline. Should arrive soonish.