Skyrim talk:Lightning Cloak

Lightning Cloak Duration

Frost, Lightning, and Flame cloak all have description of 60 seconds, yet flame cloak lasts for 62 (my guess is 62.5 rounded down) and storm clock lasts for 65. I tested this both with and without different perks. Flame cloaks page already had the correct 62 so I just added a note, this page had the original 60 so it seems I need to prove/disprove it. A quick way to see for yourself is to just use it and look at your active effects. After casting it will say 65 seconds with "1 min" remaining, count to 6 and open it up again and it will now say 59 seconds remaining. I dunno, maybe I'm missing something. AutoPilot (talk) 17:39, 2 February 2014 (GMT)

When viewing the spell in the CK, it displays 65 as duration. Inspecting it further it is described there as "Duration: 1m, Taper Duration: 5s, Full Duration: 65s". The taper duration is more or less a fade-out phase, more about it can be read at CK wiki. Not sure how to document that, but it would need to be done consistently among all spells. --Alfwyn (talk) 17:51, 2 February 2014 (GMT)

Nice find, interesting stuff. I think the best way would be to have the text at the top read the ingame description, and the table would have the full value. If the taper is set to change the damage we can add a note with that info at the bottom. 60+5 might not be clear enough. Makes me wonder why frost has no taper, flame has 2.5 and lightning has 5. Odd stuff. AutoPilot (talk) 18:35, 2 February 2014 (GMT)

Well yes, the text at the top should read whatever it does ingame. Plan would be to link the "Duration" word in the infobox to somewhere explaining it. --Alfwyn (talk) 18:47, 2 February 2014 (GMT)

I implemented that. Looking at game data, the taper duration for the Flame Cloak is just 2s. No idea why it is that random. Anyway, I would like to do it that way for the other spells too, making it clear that the additional time is different. A note about it at the spell page might still be in order, but I currently have no idea how common the phenomenon is, or how to (should we?) document all those other taper parameters. --Alfwyn (talk) 19:18, 2 February 2014 (GMT)

After poking around a bit and feeling in way over my head, I found stendarr's aura has a taper too, along with all of the flame spells. I would assume this is how the game does afterburn. I checked out the blizzard, lightning storm, ice storm and the wall spells (as logically these are the only other spells that could possibly use a taper) and none of them have tapers. I felt like this was a complete list, only to find thunder bolt has a low flat damage split second taper. I give up, and have a new found respect for the people that have dug through this data to fill the wiki. AutoPilot (talk) 20:04, 2 February 2014 (GMT)

The more I think about it, the clearer it becomes that those taper parameters need to be documented at the spell effect page (where they are found in the game data too). Currently it is documented a bit inconsistently, Firebolt says its primary effect lasts 1 second, when that is just the taper duration, while for Flame Cloak it says 60 seconds, not including the taper duration of 2 seconds. --Alfwyn (talk) 21:22, 2 February 2014 (GMT)