Antimagic...

[wobbly]

I'm not certain, but I believe that at one point wearing even generic antimagic gear could cause spell failure in your foes, if you were AM. I could have sworn I'd seen that occur a time or two.

Chances are they were wearing antimagic equipment. I see lots of mages, vampires etc. generated with antimagic equipment on. Ziggurath patrols seem to be wearing arcane powered equipment too.

[Hunter]

I'm not certain, but I believe that at one point wearing even generic antimagic gear could cause spell failure in your foes, if you were AM. I could have sworn I'd seen that occur a time or two.

Yeah, I thought I remembered this from way, way back, where antimagic was a field effect and it could affect everything in range of its area. That's why I was surprised it wasn't applied in this manner in current versions. But I could be mistaken in my recollection.

[greycat]

A brief look through some of the code shows that targets (other than yourself) can be inflicted with a "spell_failure" status (power = percent chance of spell failure), but it's pretty rare. It looks like it can only come from the SPELL_FEEDBACK effect (e.g. from the prodigy of the same name), or the SPELL_DISRUPTION effect (e.g. weapons/ammo of disruption), or the BROKEN_DREAM effect (from "dreamforge" damage type).

Inflicting spell_failure on yourself is much simpler -- just wear anything with the antimagic power_source. This gives (10 * material_level) spell_failure.

But I might have missed some sources, so don't consider this a canonical, exclusive list.

[BoomFrog]

The key to success with antimagic lies in the second skill tree you get from zigur: the fungus tree (you did beat Urkis and talked to protector Mysil afterwards, did you?);

OMG, thank you finally for spelling it out for me. I wish the quest told you where to get your full reward.