Scatman and I just discovered something interesting. When I am standing next to him and he is using his spells/abilities in combat, everything appears to be ok - he casts, lands his damage, kills his foe.
When I am out of visual range of him, he casts his spell, MY toon lights up throwing lightning bolts around at nothing (I am not in combat, just standing still).
He is using the SpellDamage() function, Ranger class, Seering Strike (1).

Sounds like a cool undocumented feature
I'll look into it.

Synchronized Remote Assault. A new skill? I like it.

Archiving this, as it may have been because we were assigning visual_states to spell_visual instead of the new table of spell effects provided by LE.