Either way, the point is that we apparently cannot find a classic source that says dispels were resistable. Meanwhile, pretty much everyone remembers that they weren't, and an old-school PvP guide specifically states that five charges of golem wand will dispel 15 buffs. Any references to individual buffs resisting and causing the dispel to skip are from the mid/late-2000s. Conversely, it was a classic fact of life that two clickies made you immune to the commonly used dispel (only enchanters could dispel more than two slots at once) which would not have been the case if dispels would regularly skip the first and proceed to the next buffs. In fact, that would make the "weaker" dispels better as they would be able to dispel buried buffs. The only thing that in any way suggests that this was the case is that Annul and Nullify both have the same number of applications of cancel magic, but against all the contrary evidence, the weight of this sole fact is questionable. It might have been part of a later change that made it possible for buffs to resist dispels and cause the skip. This would explain why it seems that any reference we can find to buffs resisting/skipping dispels is from like 2003 and later. There are no references at all to outright resisting the spell itself, and as far as I can tell, that phenomenon is unheard of outside of this server.
To shed some light on this, we should try to find two things:
1) the classic (1999/2000) raw spell data for one or all of the dispel spells to determine whether it even said anything about "Cancel Magic (4)" and such.
2) any reference from that time period that mentions buff-skipping or failure to dispel the listed number of applications of cancel magic.
It should be clear that dispels should not be literally resistable, as in the "Your target resisted the Nullify Magic spell." Dispels aren't even meant to be detrimental spells, so that resist check should never occur. The question is whether the skipping thing is classic. The odd thing is that none of the dispel spells appear to have any Allakhazam comments prior to 2003.
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