Shattered Kingdoms

Nope.

If true, thats just bull-love.

That would be magical protection, however.

I remember Iori used to walk around with a full set of magical resistance equipment back before the weapon update patch. Reason being that it was better for you to wield a mottled lance and rip through everything. Healing you was less important than making sure you took no extra spell damage.

The idea of barb MR is an interesting one to play with, but no matter how hard I tried, it just wasn't terribly effective, and made it hard to do anything at high levels. Without ability to fly along with the group or to be healed, the MR barbarian can often be as much a liability as a help. It seemed a huge mistake that even though I had max MR trains, 'magic' based weapon attacks still hurt me. I should have resisted those, perhaps even healed from them just like I healed from resisting magic spells.

On the other hand...

The MR barbarian is pretty awesome for levelling. The healing from resisted spells can be effective enough in some situations to make the MR worthwhile and then some. I was able to march through some areas that non-MR characters have great trouble passing through.

It brings some really really cool benefits but it definitely prevents you from playing the most effective stereotype SK pleveller/PKer route. One of the strategies to use is to acquire access to whatever you can to cast spells on yourself as much as possible. Resisting them will give you your healing. Those powerful sleep herbs that most people avoid like the plague I devoured in mass quantities because they gave my barb equivalent healing to a cure serious herb, and I resisted 99.9% of them. By targetting groups of warrior/mages, I never tripped/bashed/blinded the mages so their spells could heal me while I fought their tank. After any death I was immediately a competent adversary, even naked & empty handed, against every general type of opponent, which made it easy to re-equip.

The biggest potential opportunity to me seemed to exist in a barbarian's relationship with a bard. Bardic magic affects the barbarian with no consideration to MR from what I've seen. A bard's song could buff my MR barbarian as well as heal my MR barbarian, and the enemy bards could definitely affect me negatively. I wish I'd had a reliable bard friend to experiment with that more.

Why not just make a barbarians MR trains work only against hostile spells? So all the buffs and healing would land with ease, but an acid blast/charm would get resistance? Would this make an MR barb too OP?

Incredibly so.

The fix is to increase the heal multiplier for resisting a spell. More MR should mean more healing, to the point where a fully trained barb could get the same benefit from a heal vial as a HP barb.

Successfully resisting a malicious spell should have a chance of healing or awarding a random buff, as the barb becomes further enraged and focused. You'd think twice before trying to charm an MR barb, you might just haste him!

This wouldn't fix them either. The problem with MR barbs isn't so much that you can't heal them but rather that you can't buff them.

Remove the dispel effect on the end of suppression.