I don't recall ever being afflicted with more than a single casting of crimson scourge at a time, but someone mentioned stacking it shortens the duration, which had never occured to me (given that stacking plague increases both effect and duration). I don't know if CS actually works like this, but anyway I thought it would be a good way to make plague a bit more tactical as well. Rather than the current no-brainer 'more is better', you'd actually have to decide whether the stacked -str is worth the shorter duration. Naturally the difference should be significant, maybe even up to halving the remaining duration for each -5str. This might seem like a drastic downgrade, but it's just one weapon in the shaman/a-p/wand-user arsenal and as such would only marginally affect their deathfulness. I don't know... I just think it's much more interesting to have an ability that requires some thought instead of simply growing quasi-exponentially in power with each use. Any thoughts?

Considering its terribly hard to land as a shaman, AP and especially wand user I'm against this. Right now the incentive not to stack it is its hard as hell to stack and usually you aren't doing it for the extra -strength unless you're out of other options. Its curable as well, making it usually useless at higher levels near cities. Anyway, scourge is like this because it hits for insane damage. Plague should stay like it is IMHO.

Personally, when I play APs I tend to use it mostly to make people piss away their money before I do actually try to land the kill on them.

Could just be me though.

If an ap can keep someone in place for 100 hours, unable to heal, they'll die. If an ap can only do it for 10 hours, they'll recover before the ap finds them. In particular, it makes a difference against cloud giants.

Personally I think it is balanced as is.

You still only need one cure to fix a stacked plague.

And don't forget, mobs give plague too.

You want one example of what I could do under your solution?

Give myself a short duration weak plague, then go and fight an ap. That way I know that any plague I get will be uber-short duration.