Leafiara (prime)/Fun Facts Friday/Door F

208 Living Spell is one of the less understood spells, probably in part because of its complexity and lots of unknown (or at least undocumented, to my knowledge) factors that influence its success.

It's a Major Spiritual spell that can be used to "steal" a prepared spell from another character or creature and then cast it yourself one time. It uses CS vs. TD resolution, so on the surface it looks like an attack spell and that's probably one reason many dismiss it. There's no way to identify what spell a creature is casting unless it only has one spell, so casting 208 means spending 8 mana to steal an unknown spell and then spend additional mana to cast it (though Spiritual Mana Control reduces the cost of the stolen spell).

Where 208 comes in real handy, though, is when you cast it on other characters--your friends or alts--to steal outside spells that you otherwise couldn't normally have. You can use it to take spells that are rarely found on scrolls, like 613 Self Control, and you can even use it to take spells that are never found on scrolls, like 1612 Champion's Might.

Each cast will only give you the base duration of 20 minutes (or less in the case of spells that have shorter duations), so you'll have to cast multiple times, but the payoff can be well worth it.

Lest this sound too OP: no, you can't gather a bunch of characters and slowly steal every offensive and defensive buff in the game. Each outside buff you have on, including ones that are normally obtainable even without 208 (like wizardlies and rangerlies) increases the difficulty of stealing the next spell--until you reach a point of being unable to steal any more and potentially killing yourself with nerve damage merely by trying.

Training in Arcane Symbols, Minor Spiritual spell ranks, and Major Spiritual ranks will allow you to steal more spells. But exactly how many, which ones, and in which order--well, for now I'd say it's something to figure out through experimentation.

Of note: a successful cast of 208 against a character will drain 1 or 2 spirit from them. It can't take them under 1 spirit, so you can't intentionally give them a spirit death, but you'll need to coordinate if casting against members of a certain society to not accidentally give them a spirit death. And, lastly, no, you can't roll up an F2P alt and cast it on them.