Lower Resist And Conviction

Couple additions:
The range of 1-11 on non-ubermeph mobs should nowadays be 1-12 as

Terror zones can push those mobs up to a high enough level (96+) to break the cutoff for 12.

A higher

Conviction vs a lower one will not "disable the latter altogether", it will only override it for the sources of said convictions. I.e. if you go in as a smiter with lvl 21 vs. meph with lvl 20, you yourself will not get hit by his

Conviction because your higher

Conviction will override his on you. However, that will not cancel out meph's

Conviction entirely, his

Conviction will still hit your merc or any other party members that may be with you.
Just one of the reasons why I'd personally never go with conv over

Salvation for a smiter against meph.

Winterkill wrote: 3 years ago

Schnorki explains how the mechanic is supposed to work.

However! I have seen a bug a few times over the last couple of weeks that I do not fully understand that introduces a 'Results may vary' element to this discussion.

It seems that sometimes if a player/merc with

Conviction faces off against an enemy with

Conviction, instead of overriding the convictions like it's supposed to do, both get applied and the enemy application does not go away until the player/merc removes and reapplies their

Conviction.

Whatever is going on here can cause the player/merc using

Conviction will to lose a ton of resistances and get struck that way for potentially a significant amount of time.

It's something to keep an eye out for, at least.

Aaaaactually, that isn't a bug so much as it is an "unintuitive feature combined with a bug" that has existed for ages. Not entirely sure if the bug part has always existed but the feature part enabling it to begin with has, so far as 20yr old Memory serves (there used to be a time where it was "first come first serve" for equal aura effects which then turned into this if I recall correctly).

Generally speaking, a lower aura loses to a higher one. And a higher aura overrides a lower one. BUT the lower aura, as noted earlier, doesn't disappear. It stays around and stays active on other, otherwise not yet affected targets and hence also yourself to make that possible. That's why uber meph will still convict your merc and other party members. This behavior of "one does not disappear entirely" leads to a special scenario in which 2 auras (mainly

Conviction) of the same level face off against one another:
Both hit, neither "wins" and they effectively merge into one.
Either source successfully convicts the other target meaning both users of the aura lose resistances.

In the past, this has really not happened a lot and outside of FoH vs. FoH PvP matchups basically never existed because in any other scenario, you generally either have a lvl 12 Infinity

Conviction or a >20

Conviction on an actual paladin. Those faced off against random mob convictions up to lvl 11 or

Mephisto at 20. Noone used lvl 20 against meph because everyone knew you had to beat it to not lose res so effectively, you just about never had a scenario where same-level convictions faced one another.

Now however, thanks to

Terror zones, random mobs do scale up to lvl 12

Conviction (see prior post). And because of this, you now run into this scenario all the time because any high TZ mob with

Conviction now happens to have the same lvl as an Infinity does. And everytime you face that scenario, both hit. That is intended. The 'bug' part is that this double-effect (both, positive and negative) gets anchored onto each

Conviction. So if you move away from the mob convicting you but you keep your

Conviction up, it keeps both, the positive and negative effect and you still lose res despite no longer being in range of the mob.

This, even for the .0000000000000000001% of the time where a same-lvl

Conviction did hit each other in the past hasn't been something you really noticed because in those rare cases, it was a pally

Conviction hitting a pally (or very rarely meph)

Conviction. And more often than not, once out of range, said pallies turn off

Conviction. Either to use a different aura in the meantime or to

Teleport or to do whatever. Or in the case of meph they died because same-lvl cost them too much res ^^. And as soon as they do, the double-effect disappears.

The persistence of it is only seen now because only now, thanks to lvl 12 mob convictions, do you ever see it happening on your Infinity merc (or Infinity wielding char) who generally do not turn off

Conviction. Ever. At least not the merc - the player chars would once they switch sets to BO or whatever. And because of that, you are now suddenly for really the first time ever seeing realistic scenarios of that double-effect persisting indefinitely.

This is also why unequipping and reequipping your merc's Infinity fixes it because that will briefly turn off

Conviction.