Summon Resists and Fire Golem

[kandrathe]

Yes. It is a very poor programming practice. I'm a huge stickler for maintaining domain integrity within software. The way that Blizzard should code it is to check for overflow or underflow before the calculation, and if the result is outside the acceptable domain of values, then set the value equal to the max value or min value appropriately. That goes for all stats, skills, etc.

As they add more options for manipulating the values, the opportunity for untested, and unexpected results skyrockets. So if you enforce your domain boundaries, then you should never overflow, and also never get unexpected results from pushing the values beyond the tested ranges.

This is why universities teach programmers courses on numerical methods, yet it is unfortunate that not many programmers paid much attention to them. The only tricky part is to determine whether the overflow or underflow would occur without having to perform the offending calculation. All this stuff is very available in open C++ libraries.