Before i begin, thanks to bob for finding me this <3

Dispel resistance is the most rng dependent aspect of the game. 30% chance for your spell to not work; when you consider this it is pretty ridiculous when people are legitimately complaining about the drastic bad effects of 4% miss talents (which by the way also need to go – they made redhot quit the game *i miss u mike :( *). I do however agree that dispelling would be overpowered if they simply removed dispel resistance from the game. Blizzard would need to change dispel magic and purge somehow so that mindless dispel spam would not instantly remove every buff, but also allow players to remove important buffs on demand without having to sit there while a single innervate resists 5 dispels in a row.

sadface

Another problem with dispel resistance is it makes the mana return talents for each of the healers horribly inconsistent. Sure, all of the mana returns can be stopped if used incorrectly, and if used correctly will be near unstoppable. But sometimes it is not possible to use your mana return at the optimum time due to the pressure that the other team is putting out and this is where they are unequal.

  • Shadowfiend can be cc’d, slowed and kited or even killed,
  • Mana tide can be killed.
  • Innervate can be dispelled
  • Divine plea can be dispelled

Innervate and Divine plea however both have 30% dispel resistance, making them unreliable to remove – yes sometimes they come off first time but every priest has experienced the frustration of a single innervate or divine plea failing to be dispelled for the entire duration at least once. Balancing dispel resist would bring this in line – so that you can reliably stop poor usage of all of the mana returns, but can also avoid them being stopped by using them well.

Miss Talents and Racials

These are probably the biggest rng factors in the game at the moment; Blizzard have removed the talent from balance druids for example, implying they clearly know that something is wrong with these types of mechanic, but why not ret paladins and rogues? It is not viable to pick up 10% spell hit to stop your spells missing on blood elf ret paladins and undead rogues – and sometimes a miss can on a cc can lead to a very bitter loss indeed. I still do not understand why these talents/racials are still in the game and in my opinion they need to be changed/removed asap because they can affect the outcome of not only matches, but entire tournaments.

Defensive dispel resist

The last type of resist that needs to be fixed is the 1% defensive dispel resist that is left over from TBC days when you couldn’t nullify the last 1% offensive dispel resist with spell hit. I think this is a bug and I’m not sure if blizzard even knows about it but I think it would be relatively easy to fix.

defensivedispel

Possible Fixes

There are two routes which blizzard could take to balance offensive dispelling; they could take a cooldown approach or a DR approach.

The cooldown approach (better, in my opinion):

Although this may initially sound odd I really do believe that it would allow for more skillful dispelling. This first option would assume that dispel resistance was removed entirely. Separate dispel magic into two componants, offensive and defensive so that they are two different spells. Remove the global cooldown from both of the spells and instead give them their own mini global cooldowns, 3seconds for offensive and the regular 1.5 seconds for defensive.

This allows good players to be fast on dispelling since they won’t be hindered by global cooldown. It will also be beneficial to newer players who do not know how to manage their global cooldowns correctly. This way you won’t be able to mindlessly spam offensive dispel, but continue to play a regular game and reliably remove key buffs that need to come off or you will be punished by them. This would stop dispelling from getting out of control due to no resists, but at the same time it would be reliable, something it currently isn’t.

If this was to go ahead then blizzard would have to disable dispel magic from being used in macros, similar to how they disabled targetting totems, else you could macro every spell to offensive dispel and faceroll would ensue. (I personally dont like dispel macros for your whole team either and think it’s lame)

The DR approach

Keep dispel the way it is but every time a dispel resists, the chance for the next dispel to resist is halved, ie 30% then 15% then 7.5% then 0%. Similar to the way crowd control and silences currently work. (I think something similar to this has been talked about before)

Mass Dispel

Since mass dispel is generally used once per game it would need to be treated slightly differently to regular dispel.

I have come up with two viable options:

  • Replace the talent that reduces the mass dispel cast time by 1 second with a talent that makes mass dispel unresistable. This makes it stoppable and doesn’t make immunities a non factor (again raising the skillcap with precasting mass dispel, stopping the priest casting mass dispel, stopping them from stopping your priest casting mass dispel… I digress.)
  • Change glyph of mass dispel to remove the resist chance on mass dispel rather than halve the mana cost.

I prefer the first since I’m up for pretty much anything that raises the skillcap.

There may be more options, these are just a few I thought were cool, feel free to voice any ideas you might have for dispelling in the comments