<div class="quoteheader"><div class="topslice_quote"><a href="https://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=328236.msg15702966#msg15702966">Quote from: Annaamarth on 02-01-2021, 01:09:12</a></div></div><blockquote class="bbc_standard_quote">I definitely disagree with RGSAlex here - I think Counterspelling is valuable in cases where there is an enemy mage in a relatively secure position dropping battlemagic - or Chaotic Worlds - on the party. "Geek the mage first" <em>is</em> very strong shadowrunning advice, but shooting a mage in the face doesn't do anything about the stunball that already went off.<br/><br/>However, I'm not going to say to take my advice over his - just putting the pros and cons of alternatives out there - because yeah, multiple mages will chew through Spell Defense.<br/><br/>A strong active magical defensive option might be to use Mana Static to effectively nullify the ability to efficaciously do magic at all in an area - I think I've heard of builds that relied on a mage tuned for such to ensure a run would be non-magic, and was otherwise a utilimage.  Or, y'know ... Stunball.  Or the AoE Euphoria spell.<br/></blockquote><div class="quotefooter"><div class="botslice_quote"></div></div><br/>I'd debate it on one ground for each of the two uses.<br/><br/>If the refresh wasn't as bad, base Spell Defense wouldn't be as bad. But even one mage can chew through the best case of 7 dice by having two passes or multi-casting. It just takes too much guessing about the enemy's actions to get the best out of it and it because of how slowly you refresh it a bad guess/allocation can just wreck the usefulness of even a quality boosted set of extra dice. It's useful, but some reagents and a mana barrier spell can do better because it won't degrade on each spell and can even counter spells that Spell Defense normally wouldn't.<br/><br/>The major downside for dispelling is that other than rituals any debuffs that can hit the party have a caster that can be hit back and it'll usually be faster to hit them outside of marginal successes where you only need a hit or two. Because otherwise it's like casting the spell multiple times yourself for direct casting and the dispellable rituals quickly get out of hand with how each participant adds their magic to the resistance pool which contributes to the variable amount of drain. Also, while buffs are nice, if somebody has them strong enough to want to dispel them, they probably are high enough force that doing so in combat isn't a good idea.