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Lots of people are complaining about these changes, and to an extent, I can somewhat see the validity of the concerns of the healers. Burnout was pretty common before and the mods did help a small bit. These mods are far from necessary though (my brother plays a priest and he never uses decursive or emergency monitor).

However, there were mods that created too great an inbalance for some classes, mostly in PvP (which is the big reason I rarely PvP). The devs never really wanted mods to make decisions for the players.

The one thing that I will miss is my ZHC macro, which checks if the cooldown is finished, and if the mobs is greater than 30% health, then triggers the trinket and casts shadowbolt. It'll be somewhat possible, but not nearly as clean (might require multiple clicks) and it won't be able to check for the health level.

I think the biggest complains come from paladins, who are - according to their players - now severly affected in their hybrid role in raids.

Dispelling is boring. No one cares how many debuffs you dispell, dispelling doesn't get any mods, it doesn't even have a satisfying animation. It's the worst part of a bland job, and they insist on making it unnecessarily tedious.

For good measure, the classes dispelling mattered against are getting counters, while the paladins get MORE EFFICIENCY and frisbees (granted, if you used decursive in pvp, you were a hoser, anyways).

Go and play a paladin while fighting Chromaggus. Woe the poor soul who uses Decursive (or a similar tool) here! Dispelling your fellow raiders is not a trivial job here.

And now, you can cast Dispell on a target, and if there is nothing to dispell, it will not cost any mana (global half second cooldown only).

So I'm wondering what the paladins are complaining about?

I, for one, am not complaining.

Huh? Why would you not use Decursive here? Chromaggus is one of those fights that seems built around the idea that everyone has Decursive. That's been one of my complaints. I resisted using Decursive for more than six months and then finally broke down and got it, when it became clear that Blizzard was designing encounters around it.



Why wouldn't you use decursive in PvP? It works well when used right and set up correctly. If you say that a person shouldn't use it because it's "dishonorable" or some baloney like that, then I'll just have to simply say that Decursive is allowed and enabled by Blizzard's own UI/modding scheme and does not benefit one side more than the other.

Being a "hoser" pretty much means you're a little lame, not that you're a cheatin' varmint who should be chased out of the game. Just because it's not cheating or game-breaking doesn't mean it's not cheese.

And, clearly, Blizzard is unhappy wth the way "[their] own UI/modding scheme" is working, indicating that they agree with this assesment. It sucks, and it shouldn't be in the game.

As to whether they are designing encounters around decursive or not, if people are successfully killing Chromaggus without decursive, why would that then count as evidence that it is necessary?

-Jester

To quote Slouken http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.h...20536&sid=1#305

Because I don't need to. Because dispelling fire vulnerability off the flag carrier is a waste of mana when the priest's sheeped. Because the abuse of decursive in pvp has lead to the new dispell-countering talents.

PvE, sure; #$%& fight design makes it necessary. PVP, it's a crutch and, often, unnecessary.

This is at least the third Decursive discussion.

Arnulf, I am a paladin.

Yes, I know.

Well, I want to explain why I think the opposite of Decursive regarding fights like Chromaggus.

When our raid does Chromaggus, he is pulled from his cell under the large doorway that leads to the next room. Most of the raid is stationed on the left wall (looking from the large room) and just out of line of sight. When doing damage, the artillery (mages, warlocks, hunters) are moving away from the wall. When the breathes are coming (someone announces them over TS) they're going back and hug the wall.

Two groups, off-warriors and rogues, are stationed on the other side of the archway. Along with a mage, a druid, a priest, and a paladin. When I'm on duty on that side, I have to dispell that druid, mage, priest, the rogues, and the off-warriors. When I was still using Decursive (a long time ago) it usually would select the wrong target. I would get nothing done except a message that that target is not reachable.

So, what I'm doing is to pull out the warriors and the rogues from the raid and have an eye on the druid, the priest, and the mage on my side. When not afflicted by bronze I am only dispelling and not healing anything. Also I have to dispell myself from the blue affliction first, since it eats my mana. While I can at least once use stoneform to get myself rid of a desease and/or poison.

I have witnessed that all of my mana was used up in a Chromaggus fight just with dispelling alone.

Similar rules apply when I'm dispelling on the artillery side. With some slight changes however. I am watching out for blue so that I can dispell paladins and priests faster on that side. What I am trying to say is that Decursive is more of a bane than a boon in this fight. I'm not on top of things right now about the utility of the newest Decursive. But I guess you can define priority lists etc. But still I wouldn't use it.

Another small example. Our raid has still issues with the bug trio in Ahn'Qiraj. Fearing, poison volleys, and random charges are still a good way to kill morale and the fight deteriorates into a heap of chaos. One of our priests had the idea that we assign at least one druid or paladin to a group. And that their responsibility is to dispell only that group of poison. Suddenly it worked!

Newer versions of decursive have easily configurable priority lists that greatly help in situations like what you describe. But yes, it is definately a tool suited for volume cleansing, not precision- thus my abhorrence of it in PvP.

Now, I want to start raiding again. Dangit.

That's a subtly different matter.

It's one thing to say "we can't make an encounter with a certain type of decursing challenge, because it'll be blown away by decursive." This means that Blizzard is limited in their ability to design encounters.

It's another to say "aha, well, players can beat this encounter even though it contains retardedly difficult decursing, since they all have decursive." This means that all players either need decursive, or need to abandon all hope of progressing.

Is there an encounter that can't be beaten without decursive? I've not yet been to AQ40 or Naxx, so I'm not sure (and am a mere warrior anyway). From my limited experience, I think Blizzard is thinking the first, not the second.

-Jester

You mean limited in their ability to make really really stupid lame encounters?

Please, oh please... do not make us an encounter that decursive makes too easy. People make fun of the 'whack-a-mole' aspect that raid healing occasionally takes on, but it is dispelling that is really that way. Volume dispelling encounters suck. They just suck. If the removal of decursive is to make even more stupid dispel spam encounters... bleh.

No.

I've heard noth is nearly impossible, but no words as to actually possibility.

That's the wrong question. Dialbo II's Act I could be beaten by a naked sorceress with no stat or skill points assigned -- and all the way up though the last boss in Act V as shown by someone in the Basin --, but that doesn't mean that the game was designed for that. One *can* beat all encounters in the game without Decursive, but if you try to tell me that Chromaggus, Viscidus, and Noth weren't designed with Decursive in mind, I'll call you nuts.



Well, yeah, stupid people will always use tools stupidly. You always have the choice to override Decursive's target algorithms by simply selecting the player you want it to dispell first just like you normally would. On the other hand, if you see someone getting dotted up or sheeped, you can quickly hit Decursive to remove it without taking the extra time to select the player before dispelling him or her.

Nicely stated.



Right back into crazyland.

Here's your reading material. You know how to roll characters- go play a warlock (or please, please say you already have one. That would be the cherry on this sundae of missing the point).

I don't understand why anyone uses Decursive when CTRA has all (as far as I know) of its functionality.

The /racure in CTRA is junk compared to decursive. I stopped using it after it got stuck on the same out of range person on Chromaggus all the time. Decursive does range/LOS checking before it trys to cure people. That and I don't use any raid mods anymore, except for raid frames.

Well, yes - the thought was probably "You know what, guys? Decursive is really going to make this fight a lot simpler. That's a shame, isn't it? We should get the UI scripting team to look at ways to prevent it working without breaking all the other addons that don't play the game for you".

If you try to tell me that they specifically designed encounters for people that had Decursive or Decursive-like mods installed, I'll call you nuts. Can I be pistachio?

Well they probably thought: Anyone has decursive, let's reduce the time by 2 seconds and up the damage by 50%.

Read that quote by Slouken. To me it quite clearly states that their encounter design did take into account that most people use decursive.

I'd be interested to know how it does LoS checking. Range checking you can do in an add-on using an action button, but LoS checking is as far as I know impossible. Both CTRA and Decursive handle this by having a "blacklist" of raid members who a cast has failed on, and don't try them again for 5 seconds or so.

The feature of decursive I like is that you can simply make it show a list of of who has what and you can then use that as your casting selector. That's how I use it in PvP on my paladin. My little list of who has what, clear the sheeps ignore the stupid stuff. I can tell decursive hit this person or class first, second, third, etc if I'm just in button mashing mode. It's a lot better than what CT has.

Anyway I didn't use it for a long time, but I realized after asking the RL if he could swap some groups to make things easier for me to track on a learning run on Chromaggus that I should probably get it just to be able to set the priority list. Now I generally click on a list instead of hitting a key can clicking. Sometimes I still hit the same key I did before I just don't have to click the mouse on display name, it saves either a key click or a mouse click. I can also lazy mode in a few of the other encounters while running around and paying attention to health, just smack the key and let it go off it needs to.

I still feel a bit dirty for using it though, but I'm convinced that this mod was considered when the Chromaggus fight was designed.

I did read it (why wouldn't I have?)

It can quite clearly state to you whatever it likes, but that doesn't make your interpretation canonical. To me, all it says is that the designers no longer need worry that certain encounters will be made easier by decursive, not that they ever specifically designed dispel-heavy encounters purely because they thought most people used it.

Which is odd, because it's the one dispel-heavy fight that I've never used decursive on. I find it easier to have ctra show me who is debuffed, and target them and press dispel, than to set up decursive to do it automatically. It's certainly a lot more interesting. Slower? Yes, but not wipe-threateningly so, and lets me control exactly which hunter I dispel BP:Blue from first, especially if they've had to stand in the way of a breath to tranq.

I just don't get why people think it's such a big deal.

They said a long time ago they looked at breaking just decursive, and they couldn't do it without breaking everybody else. It seems now they are willing to break everybody.



Well if you look at Luci, you will see that the idea of a decurse heavy fight has been in their head from the start. They just had to tone it up becuase of Decursive.

That is kind of an unfair statement. Many AddOns will be "broken," but the vast majority can be updated, and will emerge better than ever due to the additions of the "focus" target and new slash commands.

The only categories of AddOns that will not survive are decursive-like curers, clickable emergency monitors, and "lazy player" mods that cast all your spells with one button.

If there is a type of mod that does not perform automation of spellcasts that will be unfixably broken, I have confidence that it will be examined, and the UI will be changed to accomodate it if possible.

The mistake people are making is assuming that Slouken is like the other blue posters. Slouken is on "our" side, and is very responsive and helpful. I know that's hard to believe from a blue but it's true!

Oh I'm not blaming them. This is the perfect time to break everything. There *should* be a lot of lead time for mod developers to work around this, and everybody needs to level to 70, and the leveling process should be less mod intensive.

The one casualty, which unfortunately looks like it'll be broken if I'm reading the API changes correctly, that I'll really miss is Whispercast. Not so much that it'll be a pain buffing people without out it, so much as it'll much more annoying getting buffs without it...

It will be easily fixed. The author just has to change it so that it takes the incoming whisper, looks at the name and spell, parces and does /tar whisper /cast spell(rank max)

I thought /tar functionality was being removed from addons and macros?

I do not think that WhisperCast will be able to do this, since mods and macros can no longer target or cast.

But WhisperCast will still work, at least out of combat. It can create a protected button that casts the selected spell on the target person when clicked. In-combat, it can't dynamically create this button, but it can still queue up requests.

Targetting functionality is being removed from the scripting language but not from macros. So you will be able to have a macro that targets a specific unit, but without script you won't be able to change that unit.

No, it should still be able to work with macros. They're not removing the functionality from macros themselves, just from /script. So instead of typing in /script to target, you will instead type /tar target.

You are correct that macros can still use "/target Bob." However they can't change the text "Bob" dynamically. So macros can target people, but not dynamically. They only way I know of to target someone dynamically is to use a protected frame in an AddOn, and the unitID's of these frames can't be changed in combat.

So AFAIK WhisperCast can work out of combat, but in combat will only be able to queue up casts.

I have a warlock, but your link is broken, so it might help everyone if you simply stated what your point is, because you seem to change the point you try to make from post to post and sometimes sentence to sentence. Sometimes, your point seems to be that Decursive is a cheesy mod. On this point, we agree. Other times, your point seems to be that Decursive doesn't help you at all. On this point, we disagree.

I find that Decursive is a powerful mod that I also find cheesy in both PvE and PvP. I wish it did not exist. However, in PvE, Blizzard has clearly balanced several encounters -- Chromaggus, Noth, and Viscidus most obviously -- with the idea that most players use Decursive. To not use it would be to punish my raidmates so that I can make some sort of "statement" that nobody but I would hear. In PvP, most decursing players on both sides use it, so if I don't use it, I again gimp my team in comparison to my opponent. I will be happy when Decursive is removed. However, until it is removed for everyone and game encounters are balanced around the assumption that players don't have it, I'm going to continue to use it.

So, where exactly are we in crazyland here?

One feature of decurisive that i haven't seen mentioned yet is that it makes a great workaround to the horrible UI behavior of the priest's dispel magic spell. Since the spell can be used on both allies and enemies, it behaves in a very broken fashion, particularly if you want to dispel a friendly without dropping your current hostile target, something that works fine with friendly-only spells like heals.

Horrible?

All I can see is that Decursive even more so relieves the user from making a decision. This works both ways, what if both allies and enemies have magic buffs/debuffs at the same time? How does Decursive decide which is more important?

No, the basic function is: Select target, and then dispell it. I cannot see anything at fault with this.