Quote:
Originally Posted by RMS
While I accept that Sorcery definitely had it's issues (mostly to do with being too much accounting IMO), I disagree about this point. Divine Magic still trumps it on the top end, at least for overall power at "the point of attack". Sorcery has the advantage of being up long term, but it's upper end is nowhere near what a loaded up Divine user can get with unlimited Shields, Spirit Blocks, Dispel Magics, Extensions (negating the longterm advantages), and especially infinitely stackable damage boosting spells, like Slash and Crush. Of course, none of it balances out completely, but RQ is that way across the board, which is one of its charms IMO.
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There are two problems with this:
1. Most divine magic users didn't actually have the range of spells to be able to manage close to the boost output of a sorcerer; Slash and Crush weren't things everyone had available, for example, nor the divine attribute boosting spells.
2. It was unlikely any of them had _enough_ of these to be able to produce the equivelent results on the equivelent targets, even _with_ Extension, because that just required a bloody awful lot of Divine Magic. The fact that it stacked with spirit magic didn't help much because one way or another, you couldn't typically have the spell up and recover it to the same degree a sorcerer could.
In practice it might have been possible to match or exceed the sorcerer, but it probably was only possible to an incredibly dedicated practioner of some specific cult with just the right combination of spells, and I'm not even sure such a cult existed in any published work (maybe one of the Gloranthan Lunar cults; I wouldn't want to say for sure). Even if it did, how often can you throw that sort of opponent at someone before it becomes obvious you've had to distort hell out of what opposition is available just to have a credible threat?