Is it possible for a spell cast by a monster to trigger a spell with the 'caster' as the player or different monster?
I don't know how it took me over a month of messing around with xml files in my free time to accidentally stumble across this irregularity, but it turns out that it is entirely possible for a spell cast by a monster to use the player's stats for scaling damage or checking for buffs etc. Presumably because a) beam spells are never used by monsters in the core game and b) DoD's dev team are lazy, the end result is c) beam spells always count the player as the caster. So you can have a monster-cast spell trigger a taxa-restricted beam on the player and away you go.
Which explains why me previous answer was negative - I never really made a beam spell, always making template insanities instead. Sorry about that, and thanks for that bit of knowledge you just shared with us.
Unless my ancient knowledge is failing me, wasn't Beam one of those targeting types ripped from the clutches of the exe with a hex editor? That might explain its wonkyness- it was not meant for mere mortals.
Beam type spells are used by a couple of skills in the expansions. Depressing Elemental Blast and so forth. I'd already used it a couple of times successfully in my mod too, I just hadn't noticed this particular oddity because I hadn't used scaling damage or any distance-by-tile-counting stacking-dummy-buff shenanigans before now.
