Shattered Kingdoms

I mostly just care about holy word but, sure, other area attacks could bypass images too. Some already do. They should not wipe them out, just bypass them. Something that's not a true area attack, like chain lightning, should work the way it does now.

Why would an area attack bypass an Image? If a Image is destroyed by any physical/magical damaging attack, the image goes poof right? So why would there be an exception made for AoE attacks? If everything is being struck, then they all should go poof.

I agree with Chem's logic. And MI doesn't need to be as powerful as it is, anyways.

I agree with these statements.

In all other games that have mirror image, you don't lose all of your mirror images by getting hit with an AOE attack. Balance-wise even in SK that would make MI extremely gimpy, because even just flamestrike on your party would eliminate them all. It's an illusion spell, the images don't actually exist.

However, I do think that holy word ought to ignore mirror image, given that it's a room effect. In its current incarnation it's still better than just freely eliminating all images, which it should only do through dispelling (as it already does).

I would not think a group-affect spell like flamestrike or cone of cold would be treated like a room-affect spell like holy word/ fireball/ f minor

Dalamar is right. Oddly enough, Cone of cold, flamestrike, burning hands and group spells entirely bypass mirror images. I have casted cone of cold at several sorcs and I have never once seen it break an image. It always hits the sorc.

Chain lightning however absolutely DESTROYS mirror image. Every image is wiped out. Fireball on the other hand is hit or miss. Sometimes it kills them all, sometimes it leaves 2 or 3 behind. It's pretty weird.

Makes sense to me. Chain hops. Nothing else hops like that.

Fireball also hits everything in the room. In melee combat, 3 strikes takes out 3 images potentially if all hit an image. Fireball hits everything in the room once, which means it should hit all images and vaporize them. Same with holy word. It hits everything in the room. It doesn't make any sense for only 1 image to absorb it and others to be left unscathed when they should all ultimately be caught in the blast.

The point isn't that the images are tanking for you, it's that they confuse your attacker into hitting one, which is what causes the illusion to break. For area of affect spells, all the illusions react the same way, so the illusion isn't broken.