Can buffing someone fail?
Quite often when party members buff eachother, no icon shows up next to the portrait. Take for instance this combat log:
With the relevant line quoted as:
Spalk used Oath Of Desecration on Splint.
However, here are our portaits after this:
"Splint" has no buff icon for "Oath of Desecration". In other, different combats, the icon does appear. It is seemingly random... or is it? Can buffs fail? Why doesn't the log show that? Or is the display just buggy?
Best Answer
I have had buffs fail - in the Enhanced Edition, at least, all buffs have a percentage chance of success that is displayed on the skill page itself.
The chance of success is modified by the primary stat for the skill. In the case of Witchcraft for Oath of Desecration, it's Intelligence. If your Intelligence is less than the required 8, you'll suffer a 10% chance of failure per point.
So if your Intelligence was 6, you'd only have a 80% chance to cast that skill successfully.
Some skills don't start at 100% - for instance, Scoundrel's Walk in Shadows is 70% likely to succeed at Dexterity 8. Each point of Dexterity above 8 adds 5% to the chance of success.
There's some supporting material for this on the Divinity Wiki that makes for good reading on the subject.
On the subject of bugs, I have had log messages fail to display. It's also possible that you had the required minimum stats to cast at 100% and it bugged out for some reason. I encountered a few issues like this during play, myself.
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