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The coin flip for this patch downtime landed on posting a potentially beneficial suggestion for once.

Today I present to the Great Forum Council a suggestion to rework the mechanics of dispel. Aufhaben specifically highlights some fundamental issues surrounding dispel.

• Multiple classes have buffs which are requirements to survival. Suddenly losing Meso Guard, Magic Guard, and/or the party skill Hyper Body kills over 5+ characters each year. Players must be quick to recast these buffs before they get hit ("perfect frame" as some like to call it), but not TOO quick such as to rebuff before the dispel actually takes effect. While players have adapted in Horntail through various strategies over the years, the dominant strategy is still "Wash until its no longer a problem". HP Challenge(d) characters, specifically mages, will not be able to rely on this powerful strategy, and this issue is only compounded in aufhaben, where all but the healthiest of bishops are banished to the time-out corner, unable to fight.

• Some classes additionally have long rebuff times for a string of critical buffs. Usually this is not an issue when dispels are infrequent (once or twice every few minutes), but this becomes more noticeable in situations where dispels are a common, mostly undodgeable attack. Some classes deal better with this than others in aufhaben. This generally requires one or more of the ability to ignore buffs, rebuff quickly, or prevent most dispels with high avoid, iframe attacks or with meso-draining face-tanking (just ask the epic TTEPICName how much more he spends on potions just to avoid being dispelled). While this leads to an issue with the amount of touch damage dealt to face-tanking warriors such as heroes/paladins with power guard and even possibly a shield (DKLUL), this issue is probably better addressed within the context of class changes and/or defense rework(soontm).

Previous think tanks have suggested to make survival buffs such as Hyper Body, Meso Guard, Magic Guard undispellable. While this may well solve the issue of survival, it leads to a slippery slope of asking for other buffs to be made undispellable. Invincible? ACA? Shadow Star? It also feeds into the ease of muling in any content including aufhaben. Its already pretty easy to mule in aufhaben once you have a squad capable of freeing a slot, and content should be rewarding active participation by mages/dks/sedowers. The idea of dispels requiring user intervention to maintain survival isn't an inherently bad concept, but it leads to an either all-or-nothing approach where these buffs must sometimes not be included into survivability if dispel is a threat.

Congrats on reading the patch downtime rambling this far: your reward is the actual suggestion (and point) of this post : retool dispels to set all dispellable buff timers to 1 second, rather than the current instantaneous removal. I suppose the exact number is up for discussion of typical human reflexes, but I believe this would be more than sufficient time to 1. realize a dispel is coming, 2. prepare to deal with it (will may be required), 3. have a small grace period post-dispel before actually losing your buffs. Your buffs will still be gone upon being hit by dispel, unless they are immediately rebuffed. The goal is to provide the ability for an active player to maintain the magic/meso guard mandatory for survival, or in the case of hyper body time for you to either withdraw or get hyper body back. This makes dispels still an immediate threat, especially for your average HP challenge(d) character, but returns some agency back to the player without hopefully making content more muleable than it already is.

I present this article to the masses to tear apart, as all threads should be.

tl;dr: make dispel set remaining buff timers to ~1 second, not 0 seconds.