Silikten is exactly right about how easy magician spells were to resist, and much closer to correct that Darwoth.
http://web.archive.org/web/200108011...sz_summary.jsp
Shortly(2 mos^) after SZ opened and before the majority of players had even farmed a full set of resist gear, there is -one- magician in the various top 20 overall rankings. How many enchanters? 4. Flip through any of the months and the results are nearly the same.
Which means that by the opening of SZ(late June, 01) spells were so easy to mitigate and resist that Sony had to act to buff casters, then, even after the buff, PvP was still dominated by classes with irresistible damage. And again, that scoreboard was taken 2 months after the server release before most players were starting to wear full resist sets.
There is no possible way that magicians(with nearly the same damage per spell as wizards AND an unresistable -50 M/F/C/PR debuff) would be a total non factor if their nukes really were landing through 220 resist, especially at a time when most players weren't even at 150 yet. And how about enchanters? SZ chanters weren't getting kills even with -59MR tash on undergeared opponents. You think people were sporting 200+ unbuffed MR 2 mos after server release? All actual reasonable evidence suggests that before the complete rewrite of resists after PoP, spells that could be resisted were very easy to resist.
At some point in time, Sony must have changed the basic resist mods to the various spells. Ice comet has the exact same resist mod as the wizard rain spells according to the p99 wiki, yet on live you would never use a rain unless the mob was debuffed, and even then I would expect at least 1/3 to resist.
As for this server, Bromontana is exactly right. Live EQ should not be canon law. Null or whoever needs to just pick a magic number and scale around it.