I made small changes to the Fire Storm spell, just adding a knockdown effect and increasing the damage. I don't remember any issue with that, even more being a so simple modification.. until installing patch 1.5. Now everytime I cast it I kill myself and my body goes flying through the air by the impact. I don't know if the issue really started with patch 1.5, but it seems.

IIRC, Fire Storm is a "Fire and Forget" "Self" spell. Are Self damaging spells now supposed to affect the caster as well? Any other way to explain that?

You know, I have always wondered why the "self" spells do NOT damage the player too, since looking at how they are set up, they should.

I have a theory that hostile spell effects that are not "aimed" only affect hostile actors. E.g. Deep freeze Paralyze does not fire for the player or any allies while inside a blizzard, even though the effect is applied on "self".
Maybe the knockdown effect is an exception, and since spells seem to apply the properties of every single magic effect to all other magic effects (like keywords etc.) in the same spell, that might cause the damago portion to now also affect you.


Edit: a quick test confirmed this. Adding the "daedra push" effect to blizzard makes it damage the player. Another strange quirk of the magic effect system.
Edit2: Theory confirmed: Not aimed hostile spell effects only affect hostile actors, stagger being the exception. Put stagger on a non-aimed spell, and ALL its effect will fire for non-hostile targets.
Put the stagger on the "contact" spell cast by the hazard instead, that works.

Thanks for the reply and your tests.

I'll play a little bit with Fire Storm and knockdown effects to see if I can completely fix it.