Well in Dec 1998, my record was to magic reflect 2 FSs. and that's with 98.8 magery. And magic reflect lasts FOREVER until taken down.
However the classic magic reflect doesnt work "off a pool". The new version I will assume has a set value of "shield vs spells". And each spell will deduct x amount of point from the shield, and once it reaches 0, reflect drops. Or those pesky little myst cookie cutter mages will just instantly purge you (why wouldnt devs give real mages SOMETHING, myst mage is pretty much the end-all mage temp rightnow)
For those who have never played classic. Magic reflect gave a shield of "chance". It works likes this... the higher circle the direct damage spell cast, the higher chance the MRef will break, and after each successful reflect the chance of Mref breaking increases.
It's possible if the RNG rolls right, magic reflect will reflect more than 1 flame strike, but you can take down MRef in 1 fireball or magic arrow as well. It was hella fun. Oh and back in the days MOST players including warriors had some magery for recalling. And a lot of warriors casts magic reflect back in the day as well.
In the earliest days, prior to the era that WarUltima mentioned, magic reflect would reflect exactly 1 spell, then be removed. Any harmful spell will do. So a tactic to bring reflect down would be to target your opponent with a magic arrow first, just to bring down reflect. But if your opponent is fast, he cast recast reflect immediately, hopefully before the attacker can cast his next spell.
Having a 5th circle spell easily negated by a 1st circle spell resulted in a call to relook into magic reflect. Hence it was changed so that spells only had a chance to shutdown reflect. The chance is based on what attacking spell was used. A circle 1 spell has a low chance to bring it down. The higher the circle a spell belongs to, the higher the chance of it bringing down reflect. FS was the highest spell that could be reflected.
The problem after that change was that consecutive spells did not weaken magic reflect. It would remain up until the RNG decides that the reflect has been used up. Sort of like the initial Doom artifact drop chance, you fail the RNG roll, tough luck. No reward for your prior efforts. And iirc, it can still be recast immediately.
During AOS, instead of trying to balance it by putting in a tracking pool like reactive armour, or like what is being done now, the devs decided to radically change it so that reactive armour and magic reflect just modifies your elemental resists (AOS introduced the elemental resists as opposed to AR).
What they are doing now is taking into consideration what failed before, and re-implementing it by balancing it better, ie having a pool that tracks how much magic reflect has been weakened, instead of letting it be negated by a circle 1 spell, or overdoing it by having it possibly remaining up for all eternity if the RNG favors you, or letting folks recast it immediately.
They also tied it in to the skills like magic resist skill to give more incentive to get these skills higher.
I actually like that abilities are tied more closely to skills. This is a good change imho.
Edit: The devs have since put in a needless -10 penalty to physical resist cap (yes, not just reducing phys resist, but actually reducing the cap so that you can't get higher than 60 phys resist), I am re-thinking if they should be making any changes to reflect at all.
