As a sg I would not ask for a stress roll in a case like this. Maybe if I'm feeling particularly evil at the moment and got the whole day to torment the poor soul who tried me. "Go on then. Roll for damage in the first round. 'Aight did nothing. Second round?"
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+0 Damage with long duration is deadly as well. What kills is not the damage bonus, is the number of stress rolls. When the Law of Large Numbers kicks in, the target dies. Modelling in modern terms (which I don't particularly like because this is Mythic Europe), 0 heat transfer would mean no roll at all.
It is confusing because some base effects seems to be there as suggestions of a larger body of base effects; CrIg is the most obvious example there. Stepping up is ok: I wouldn't think twice if our group's flambeau decides to come with a boosted fireball of base 35 doing damage +40, and anyway Ritual limits always put a barrier on what the base can be useful for (and the availability of text on Spell Mastery will make Pilum of Fire and Ball of Abysal Flame more practical choices), but I don't think stepping down needs to be limited by default. When I first read about Searing Touch in Hermetic Projects, using a base 4 to deal +5 damage, I found it quite obvious. As always it is a matter of considering stuff case by case. Me myself wouldn't probably allow a base lower than 3 to create fire, and that would make a fire doing +1 damage, instead of 0.
And in general that's exactly why I place a hard limit on base effects of level 1. It have some odd consequences here and there, the most notorious being that the lowest Aegis we have is Level 30 (because it is R: Touch, D: Year, T: Bound, so its modifiers add +1 + 4 + 4 = +9, and thus the lower level would be base 1 + 9 = 30), but I find
these colourful more than anything else. After all, rules and limits are a way to bring fun into a game (particularly in a generally flexible one).
Damaging spells with higher than Mom. duration roll damage each round. See Coat of Flame in the corebook:
The target is swathed in fire, and takes +5 damage every round while the spell is in effect. That is, the damage must be rolled against Soak twenty times during the spell.
However I didn't invent anything: the idea is reaped straight from Hermetic Projects' Sulphurous Membrane spell, which does +1 damage for Sun duration at level 10. I liked it so much that this is the second time today that I'd been quoting it around here 
Anyway and back to the IT, I found the concept so dangerous and sweet that my main concern about your optimizing strategies is that they optimize something that is quite deadly already.
Why!?, poor player! They are supposed to come to have fun, not to be tortured by SGs!
When my player running an IT expert runs such a spell I don't make him roll countless dice; we just narrate the outcome figuring out what the average rolls make us expect and what the options of the target are. If he is a magus (he never tried that, because, you know, the Code), he would have plenty of options. If he is a mundane he might try go get help from supernatural means, like going to a church and asking for a blessing or running to a powerful faerie to heal him or something like that. Or just describe how the poor full agonizes and dies at some point.
Becouse I'm there to have fun too. If you try to break my game that effort will be met by an equal but opposing force. If the player wants to get more than minimal damage they better be ready to do more than minimum rolling. Probability is not to be hand-waved by the players to their benefit.
I will on the other hand allow them to "take 10" on said roll as a whole for I understand that basicly infinite rolls will do all the damage it's able to do.
[That being my and possibly only my preferences, each after their own hearts ectect...]
I understand that the stress dice are responsible for the killing. It's a lot like penetrating MR by casting all day long. The reason why I mentioned the bonus of fire damage is because of the heat and corrosion / immersion rules. When someone is fully immersed in a corrosive subtance, the bonus is doubled/tripled/quadrupled depending on how much the character is covered. If the bonus is +0, then immersion it makes no difference.
Thanks for the reference.
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I think we just have different views on what are attempts to "break" the game and probability hand-waving. There is nothing out of RAW up there; if anything is breaking your game there are damage and parameters as written in the corebook.
That being said I don't expect our IT expert casting Sulphurous Membrane and actually expecting to roll up to seven thousand times, nor that character trying to break the game. What he does expect is the narration of the outcome of his spell. The mechanics are there just to provide a tool to solve that, but unfortunately that tool have two issues: the nature of exploding stress rolls and the mess they become when there are just too much to roll.
I mean, if I had the kind of player who can come asking to actually roll 7200 (or 700000 or whatever) times, I might grab him out of the table and have a serious talk about game flow. But to be honest I find mechanics fun, and though I get that they are a tool to determine an output that the SG can just rule and move on, I think rules are what make things fun and I guess that I'd just build a quick spreadsheet and just roll them up, then figure out if the target have a way out (they might pray, dispell the magic, whatever) and if they don't just determine the time of death.
I never thought Take 10 could fit into Ars Magica rules (except obviously for simple rolls) because that just cancel the nature of stress rolls. But anyway damage is cumulative; what would you do, asume 10 for each of the rolls? That would just turn into "if damage +10 does something, let's do it a lot and see if the target dies, otherwise he walks away", which I think is quite simple and safe (and that's exactly why I don't like it, buf of course YMMV 
)
Anyway, and going back on track, that was pretty much only an example of the kind of nightmares that may come by allowing 0- base effects. Not liking it is ok, that was exactly my point, as cutting the minimum base effect level serves as a firewall to stop the most extreme cases forcing final levels to be high enough to allow Magic Resistance to do its job.
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It might be me who is in the wroing here but if neither the player or their character is even remotly anxious about the results of a roll they make, it is not a stress roll in my games.
There is RAW for this on p.9 in the core book:
Stress dice are rolled when a character is
under stress, and thus might succeed spectacularly,
or fail with equal flair.
Do you feel like the roll of 4th round of the 33rd minute in the 7th hour of the12th day will have this quality? I dont think so. Thats just a player speaking who wants to abuse a mechanic to his advantage. And there is an expression for that "breaking the game".
Yes. Even if not "ALL" of them are max damage rolls, 10% of the time for every 6 seconds for a month will do what work it possibly can, there will be enough 10s rolled if we would actually roll. I'm not denying that this spell will do much, I'm denying that it should have bursts of awesomeness granted by the nature of stress die. As in -40 to -20 damage on the overwhelming majority of the time will be unnoticable(since it has such high penetration PM does not notify the target that he was subject to a spell) so the oblivious target walks aournd for days without any changes at all, then goes BOOOM and gets erased from existance by a stressroll that did noticeable(= 120+)damage (remember that the only difference in a noticable and an unnoticable roll will be the amounts of ones rolled, so it will not be noticed mnost likely before this one) and that does not fit with my vision based on the description of the spell.
-40 damage is basicly a toddler beating at your head with a foam sword. Anoying? Yes. Certain death in 20/400000 times? No, I'd be dead many times over. A month of bad sleep/headaches and some long term fatigue loss? Yes.
While writing this I had an idea. What if we would allow negative magnitudes for duration if the spell works slower than what is considered effective? Moon, instead of mom, duration would give -3 magnitudes that can be used to boost the damage(done only once, slowly ramping up over the duration) of the spell. Mages and more importantly witches will suddenly be able to spont cast curses and all. This houserule will only ever not break the game if I am able to find (And thus confirming its a thing not just me remembering wrong. But I don't seem to be able to currently) the clause in the book that spells ruled by the SG as sufficiently grandiose are always rituals so that magic users don't start to move mountains sloooowly.
Ignoring all this other stuff...
Yes, Vim is a great key to being a generalist. Multiple times I have shown that statement about overspecializing in the core book's section on character creation is erroneous. One of the main ways I've shown it is by designing a Vim specialist who is a better generalist than the non-Vim-specialist generalist.
Many times I've demonstrated the power of ReVi to reduce spell levels on Duration and Range as well as some other benefits. That allows you to both cast effectively higher-level things more easily as well as allowing you to do so in more favorable situations, allowing for even higher levels.
The whole MuVi method doesn't necessarily make you the best generalist, though. It's fun. I did it a long time ago with Deft Vim and a whole bunch of CrVi spells with different R/D/T so they were easier to adapt. But there are other options, such as combining ReVi with LLSM. ReVi is still key, but you don't need the MuVi method.
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I agree that the 4th round of the 33rd minute in the 7th hour of the12th roll isn't interesting a priori. But the rounds when a stress roll burst do get interesting. Anyway it's really RAW. Page 181, just at the beginning of the Injuries section, is quite clear:
Non-combat sources of injury have a damage bonus, which is added to a stress die to determine the amount of damage done.
That HR you propose sounds dangerous (modifying the base effects on the fly!?). But I don't think it's a matter of a grandiose effect. It is just a consequence of how stress die rolls and what happens when you do a lot of them. It is OK, every game mechanic fails at some point (if you want perfect realism, after all, go bike or do something real instead of playing a RPG!). But I like to incorporate the failure into the game world. A swordmaster fighting a child with a stick wouldn't be as potentially dangerous in real life than in Ars Magica, but in the game the swordmaster can botch and the child can lucky. So what? Wolves are also explicitly more dangerous in Mythic Europe than actual wolves, and so can be anything involving as stress roll.
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