Dispelling Dispelling and more Dispelling!
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.
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.
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
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January 30, 2010 - 03:52
I totally agree of these changes.
Ontop of this I would like to see some changes made to Devour magic aswell, and when it comes to trash debuffs.
Sometimes getting a grand total of 0 useful devours when using the spell to its max potential is really sad.
Dispelling overall for PvP needs to be looked at and changed in some way, especially if they plan to give it to ever healer.
January 30, 2010 - 04:12
how would you treat spellsteal if you add a longer gcd to offensive dispells? cause you do not only dispell offensively, no you also buff yourself with that buff which would make offensive dispell for a priest on mage even harder. if spellsteal stays on 1.5 a mage could still spam dispell and get 2 buffs up each time you dispell 2. weird thinking i know, and i know 1v1 is not a factor to balance around. i think the dr thingy on dispell resist would be easier to apply and kinda like more balanced without having to change each classes dispell mechanics.
and on the other hand i think blizzard will try to lower the influence of arenas on wow by releasing those rated battlegrounds. funny they start testing with resilience ON THEIR LAST SEASON of this expansion. i think a late resilience buff and the announcement to almost double hitpoints and keep dmg on an equal level to wotlk sounds a bit like toning down not only bursty arenas, it could also make coordinated 10v10 a bit more imaginable.
sorry for my noobish english, 2nd language ftw ;>
i hope you can still understand what i am trying to say
January 30, 2010 - 04:15
oh and btw, totally agree on the “miss talents issue”
January 30, 2010 - 04:31
I do like the Mass Dispell option one cause i get tired of seting 4 resists… when i have 150 Spell Pen and 130 hit = /
January 30, 2010 - 04:52
Remove dispel resistance but give dispel a 0.5 second cast time? So you’d have to stop moving to use it, at a cost of it guaranteeing to land.
January 30, 2010 - 05:21
Good potential changes, I really hope blizz is listening to the players who know the game better than they do.
January 30, 2010 - 06:29
Yarr, having a dispel get resisted is a bitch, but also can save your butt, due to just mindless dispel spam countering some classes defenses by a ton and/or plain stupid damage incoming… Very tricky to balance out, but you’ve got some good ideas as always my lil fluffy bunny from hell.
January 30, 2010 - 07:57
I like the DR approach better as it wouldn’t affect PvE. All PvE jokes aside, majority of players of WoW are PvErs and as such Blizzard won’t consider changes that affect PvE too much. DR approach dodges that and I had the same idea myself.
One other idea I had was (seeing they’re reducing the amount of “boring but valuable talents”) to have a PvP talent for dispel, giving you a buff to reduce the chance your dispel gets resisted (ie stackable 3 times but only has 2-3 seconds duration so once you need to heal, it will fall off). It’s similar to DR approach but it would require a 2-3 talent points.
I know you’re not all fans of spending talent points for stuff like that but my personal opinion is that if you want something to be 100%, spend some talents for it. Or it could be a glyph. Doesn’t matter I just think you should sacrifice something for it! I know, I’m mean =P
(Playing a priest as well so I know exactly what you’re talking about here ^^)
January 30, 2010 - 08:06
I think DR on offensive dispel is a really good idea. But I doubt that Blizz will separate the dispel CD with global CD, that’ll just make things a big mess and defeats the whole purpose of having global CD. And 3 sec CD for offensive dispel might be too long, think about how many trash buffs every player might have when it gets to CTM?
I think the 1 sec reduction time in casting mass dispel is a key to separate disc from holy and shadow priests, and in situations where needed, mass dispel should be handy for disc priest.
I think one thing can be changed tho, is since mass dispel can dispel 1 buff each for up to 5 targets, it’d be better for it to remove 5 buffs, regardless of how many players. So if only 1 player is affected, 5 buffs will be removed, resistance still applies. So say, if you really wanna remove that inervate, cast mass dispel and boom, even if a few buffs are resisted, you still have a good chance of removing it.
Since in CTM all healers are gonna get some form of dispel, they should really do something to enhance priest’s dispel magic without homogenizing everything. I think it’d be good to make dispel magic a “smart” defensive dispel so that it gives you an option to in UI to pre-set the type of debuffs you wanna remove in a certain order. Also, if you have UA on, dispel magic should have a certain percentage of chance, say 70%, to remove other debuffs first.
January 30, 2010 - 12:13
Your cooldown idea has some scary consequences if mana isn’t gonna be a serious concern. Being able to ~triple your apm isn’t healthy unless it has some sort of drawback.
Personally i think they should just give shit charges instead. Like Earth Shield. Consider if normal shit like fortitude and stuff had 1 charge and would come off immediately while stuff like barrier, pw:s, innervate etc had 2 charges and wouldn’t come off before you dispelled it twice. This wouldn’t really have any impact on the game except it would remove the gay rng outside of the fact that you still dispel randomly.
January 30, 2010 - 13:25
I knew it, as i said to my brother: “wow is all about being lucky with dispellings”
and damn right, a week after the great Lord Hydra wrote about it.
January 30, 2010 - 13:37
Machinae Supremacy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKkmyMKbPKE
January 30, 2010 - 15:37
I think all resists should be counted once per buff. So if that innervate had a 30% resist chance and it resisted the next time you try and dispel it, it should have 0%. But only that specific buff that already resisted dispel once.
January 30, 2010 - 20:22
Decent post.
I do agree that dispelling mechanics are fairly outdated and I do like the idea of the DR dispel.
Though I think the cooldown idea on dispel is decent, I think that this kind of change (especially on offensive dispel) may hinder a priest playstyle and momentum especially in comps such as RMP though it would encourage more clever and thoughtful play rather than dispel spamming targets.
January 30, 2010 - 20:25
This one goes out for you Hydrá:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdnE1CIwOV4&feature=fvsr
This just shows how bitter losses you can get – Mass dispell RNG Check it out at 1:13
January 30, 2010 - 20:32
I also think the possibility of adding some kind of buff protection c/d could be useful at pinnacle times in many arena games.
Say for example you need to keep your innervate up, you pop the c/d to have an undispellable buffs for maybe 10 seconds or so on a 2minute.
Or maybe instead for priest/shaman with offensive dispels, an ability which decreases the targets dispel resistence mechanics so its a 100% dispel.
Not sure how this would play out but it maybe a decent way to also increase skillcap and decision/consequencial gameplay.
January 30, 2010 - 20:33
2minute c/d*
January 31, 2010 - 17:50
i really like this idea, change the current 30% dispel resist talent to a single point that is a usable 2 minute cooldown that makes you undispellable for 5 seconds
January 30, 2010 - 23:46
DR on dispel would be win imo
January 31, 2010 - 02:44
I approve of your choice of music! MaSu is awesome.
Check out the rest of the Overworld album, it contains alot of good songs.
I like your first option on the Mass dispel issue and the DR on dispels would be really cool.
January 31, 2010 - 07:05
“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.”
They’ll be hindered by a CD instead. Say you’re trying to get a fear off someone and they have other trash things up and you don’t remove it. You now wait 1.5 seconds for your second attempt to try to get it. Paladins especially would be hindered by this change because their dispel only gets one magic effect per dispel, and I’ve gone up to around five dispels getting DoTs off my target instead of the thing I intended to dispel.
(I.E winter’s chill stacked on someone with polymorph or someone in a frost nova/deep freeze, fear on someone with mulitple DoTs on.)
A CD on dispel would just make spell cleaves a lot more popular. Which is another big problem.
I see where you’re going with this, but it’d need a lot of work.
January 31, 2010 - 17:51
please think your replies through before you continually disagree with everything i have to say
January 31, 2010 - 12:56
You realize that a 1,5sec debuff on defensive dispell is the GCD? Fair enough, you wouldn’t have the benefit from haste. On top of that you could heal your target inbetween defensive dispell CDs.
February 1, 2010 - 15:35
I don’t really like your gcd suppression idea, currently we have to make choices between classical spells and dispell, with your change that would be like two different dimensions of the game, on one you dps/heal/cc, on the other you change into a machine that dispells anything as soon as it happens – limited by its own cd of course.
You say it’s fine if you forbid it in macros, but i doubt it, you’d still end up spamming dispell whenever you cast (or even during gcd) just in case an instant dispell is needed, that’s not an interesting gameplay imo.
The DR approach is a good bandaid if they can’t overhaul the all dispell system, but it’s still based on rng.
Imo the simplest change would be to get rid of rng, get rid of trash buffs/debuffs (ie make them undispellable), and add a cd to offensive dispell / purge / spellsteal. Druids would probably need some changes also to keep an off dispell vulnerability (maybe making lifebloom act like one buff would be enough ?).
Introducing a cd making oneself immune to off dispell is not a bad idea, but might become one if there’s no drawback / limitation : then it would be used in a macro with innervate / divine plea / ps, end of story. Imo one way to make it interesting would be to make the cast conditional : for example as a druid you could cast your “immune buff” only when affected by natural perfection.
Concerning mass dispell, I feel getting rid of rng and going back to 1,5 sec cast is a very good idea, it allows the paladin’s teammates to protect him, but I’d go further and reduce the radius and add a cd, to allow bad priests to fail. In fact my ideal mass dispell would also allow movement while casting (grenade-like).
Last I feel the game lacks some kind of abolish magic spell, I’d love to see it introduced either through lightwell (the hot would also dispell) or through mass dispell (ie the targetted zone goes on dispelling for a few seconds – the cd, radius, duration and nb of ticks would keep it from being op).