Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Passive Decursing

I could have sworn I had covered this somewhere else, but I can't find it, and I was hinting at it in another post or two. So if you've already heard this, it's really nothing new. If you haven't yet, then it's brand new and will rock your fucking socks off! Give 'em a taste KG! Alright...

Passive Decursing, a.k.a Decursing Passively.

This is a short one, since it's a pretty simple concept.

Druids can abolish poisons and remove curses. Why not just make these skills passive, and a 10 yard aura surrounding the druid automatically cleanses said ailments? The poison can tick for a second, giving rogues a chance to mutilate, or it could just make poisons not work against druids (bear with me here a sec, I hear you).

The point is that these 'tools' suck, and using them in raids is boring. It's bad design to make a decurse heavy fight, but it's done (time and time again, hell I have a few I made), because the tool is THERE, and to not use it is a wasted opportunity. Having fights poison heavy gives poison cleaners something useful to do, even if it's just clicking boring little boxes in their UI. Nobody likes decursing, but they do it because they have to.

Here's the alternative: Mages are able to decurse. Let's just say curses don't work on them. Yes, warlocks get pissed but we'll get to that. During Lucifron, when he bombs the raid with curses, everyone runs to the mage, and stands near him for a tick (or is standing near him already, gasp!) and cleanses themselves. This opens a whole new avenue for careful raid positioning (which I think is fun), and forces more reactionary play, instead of 'zzz push that button 8 times'.

In PvP, this would suck, and the skills could remain for PvP use. Wow, skills that work differently in PvP than PvE? What? No Way! Obviously if a warlock is trying to DoT up a mage, they're screwed, but it frees up superfluous button mashing in PvE, which is a good thing.

As it stands:

Cure Poison - Druid, Shaman
Remove Curse - Druid, Mage
Cure Disease - Priest, Shaman
Cleanse (all) - Paly

This could be adjusted to give more classes access to these skills (rogues being poison immune would make sense, as well as warlocks being immune to curses, DKs being immune to diseases, etc)

This is a really rough idea, just throwing it out on a post of it's own, so comments about it can collect in one section.

Gimme some feedback. I think the PvE/PvP separation is the lamest part, but only because I've played a warrior, and felt like the reasoning behind taunt not working --that it would take control away from the player, like stuns, sheeps, fears, blinds, saps, hexes, blah, blah, and blah, don't-- is lame.

12 comments:

Rich said...

p.s.

THAT IS BACH AND IT ROCKS,
IT'S A ROCK BLOCK OF BACH,
THAT HE LEARNED IN A SCHOOL,
CALLED THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS.

<3 the D

Anonymous said...

Not to nitpick, but 2 quick corrections. Cleanse(Paladins) does not remove curses. Priests also have dispel magic, removing 2 magic effects from an ally.

Other than that, I think it's an interesting idea. The PvE/PvP implementation might be a bit difficult, but if they can bar items from arena, I'm sure they can find a way to bar spells. I also think this would be a great spot for your "aura" idea, maybe put a purple arua around the mage when he has the decursing field up?

Rich said...

ah, good call on those. I'm a lazy decurser, and just use smartdebuff. It gives me a grid interface type thing and puts a big L or R on anything i can remove, that I just right or left click on (zzZzzZzz...)

Anonymous said...

Cleanse removes Poison, Disease and Magic.

Anyway, I agree with you up to a point.
Remember the trash at the start of Black Temple? Those nasty little groups of slimes could wipe your whole raid with their poison volleys, and you were guaranteed to lose someone to them.

I think it does come down to keeping players active.
Remember when Blizzard deliberatley broke those healing add-ons so you just couldn't spam macros all day long?
There was a big uproar about it, but it didn't stop us enjoying the game.

Darraxus said...

Damn it you beat me to:
"THAT IS BACH AND IT ROCKS,
IT'S A ROCK BLOCK OF BACH,
THAT HE LEARNED IN A SCHOOL,
CALLED THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS"

I love the D.

Anonymous said...

Shaman totems beat you to it.

Anonymous said...

All hail the bong of destiny

Anonymous said...

BTW IXO - do you have a rss feed? want to subscribe

been reading since redguides... good stuff bro

Rich said...

rss is on the front page, or use this link:

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/Ixobelle

Cronoo said...

I kind of like the idea, but to have it constantly working seems kind of OP and a little pointless to have things like curses in the game if they can be so easily removed.
A method I was thinking is something that would make the player more responsible for their own curse removal. Classes that can remove each type of debuff emit an aura that affects all raid members within 10 yds or whatever. Rather than automatically removing the debuff the aura allows the player to remove the debuff at the press of a button.
For example, there's a mage fighting a rogue. Rogue poisons mage, mage runs to druid, mage pushes hotkey poison is removed.
Rather than having 1 button for each debuff type it'd be simpler to let them all work with 1. Depending on what aura you're being effected by or by a debuff priority system would it determine what is removed in a situation with multiple debuffs.

Hatch said...

I agree that decursing is a tedious mechanic currently, and it would be vastly improved by your idea of making it instead based on positioning. It also thankfully takes some burden for survival off the healers and puts it on the dps. Instead of yelling for a decurse, it's MY FAULT if I die to it.

One option to balance this for pvp is to add strong talented dispel resistance to player spells. This already exists in a few places (assassination tree for rogues, unholy tree for DKs). Just make it stronger and make it cover all of their applicable debuffs, so maybe your druid's dispel aura tick has a 50/50 chance of removing my poisons.


Or, make the aura something they can turn on and off, and have each dispel the aura does cost mana so it has some opportunity cost in pvp. Granted this would be tough to balance.

Melf_Himself said...

Nice idea imo - anything that encourages positional awareness is going to increase the strategy needed, which we all know MMO combat can always do with.

As a check/balance to prevent broken-ness, I would suggest that it costs the remover of the debuff (i.e. the person with the aura) some amount of mana. The person would have a choice on whether to have the aura switched on or not so that their mana won't be nuked if there are too many people being continually affected.