Reverse Missiles / not an "attack"

[RGTraynor]

Originally Posted by ravenfish

This is a tempting reading, but it runs into the problem that, due to air resistance slowing the projectile both coming and going, a strict reversal of its direction would almost certainly fall well short of a shooter firing from anything greater than point-blank range. Unfortunately, this may ultimately be one of those spells that "does exactly what it says on the tin by inexplicable magic"- it works out where the attack came from, and uses the incoming missile for counterbattery fire.

My take is that we need to take into account what the spell's supposed to do, which is to attack the attacker with his own missile. If air resistance was to be a factor, one would expect that the spell would have language along the lines of "Double the range for the purposes of the attacker's 'to hit' roll, as well as assessing any resulting damage."