I think dispel should be tweaked just a tad. As it stands, it's a spammable, low mana, easily landed spell/supp that really makes fighting certain people a major pain in the ass. Not that thats necessarily a BAD thing, but really all some twink has to do during a fight is cast it a couple of times, and with a minimim of mana strip like 4-500 mana's worth of spells off of you for a fraction the cost.

A major balancing factor, I think, would make it a combat opener only. I mean, stripping off all of someones spells ought to be more involved than flicking a finger at them, with little lag or cost involved, no? I'm not looking to nerf the whole spell/supp, just balance it out a tad.

Failing this, maybe a cost or small lag associated with each spell/sup stripped. I mean, it SHOULD be more effort to strip someone of say 5-15 things than 1 or 2, no?

Dispel is fine. And shamen don't have spellcraft, so when going up against mages dispel is very difficult to land on most affects. It is not unbalanced. And what happens if the shaman dispels someone? They can just go away. The shaman can't keep you there to fight without your spells.

Have you played a shaman? To hero? Try it and see how often you really get to dispel all those spells and supplications on your enemies. Saves and level are important, and you will find that more often than not it takes several attempts to dispel the majority of affects on your enemy, all the while taking whatever damage or lagging attack they are doing to you while you try and dispel.

Sounds like not. Saves have nothing to do with dispel, just level. Shoo.

I second Vlad on this one. I have a character with around -70 saves and a shaman can't do anything, but dispel me. Which usually takes about 4 rounds for him to strip me of everything.

Just to name two you might know, I was Farnsworth and Jhishesh.

And I have lots of logs where dispel would get armor and one piece of frenzy, and nothing else, then get the detect invis, then get one half of bless, then get sanctuary or prot shield, etc. Nine rounds later of course I've done pretty much nothing to hurt them and they have had free rein to do whatever they want.

Conversely, I've played hero paladins and warriors and all that who have fought shamen and found that when I had good saves the dispel worked less than when I had bad saves. Certainly I am not privvy to the code and maybe save vs. spells has nothing to do with it and so my experience is merely coincidental. But that takes nothing away from the point of my post which was that dispel is not overpowered or unbalanced, that for spells the shaman is always working to dispel a higher level spell because of spellcraft, and that level differences are also important. The dispel rarely if ever gets more than a few things on the first or even second shot. And, as noted above, nothing prevents the enemy from going away and putting up whatever was dispelled.

So you shoo.

It seems to be one of the shamans main fighting abilities. Its also fairly a good bit under used. I could see making mana costs higher and making it two rounds instead of one, but I also see rot/wither/flee as more a one trick pony sort of thing that should really be changed.

I have agreed with this for a very long time now.

Namely, a shaman's dispel is utterly sick. It can dispel song effects and supplications at the drop of a dime. I'm not entirely positive about magical spells though. I recall shaman's not being able to dispel magic, but I could be entirely wrong. If I'm not, then that could be the balancing factor. But currently, any idiot warrior and shaman could take down a lone healer. Which in my opinion, shouldn't be happening. Healers are meant to be survivor's (not unkillable though). Take a paladin vs. shaman match up for example. Your typical paladin has no way of dispelling the shaman, but with minimal mana cost, the shaman can dispel numerous supplications in a matter of a few rounds, leaving the paladin with little-to-no way of sticking around for fight. Then they'd have to rest, then reuse all their supplications, and hope for better luck next time.

Also, I don't think save vs. spell works that great against dispel. Even with a large number of saves, this supplication seems to knock down some of the more potent supps at just the wrong time.

Dispel magic should be looked at some too. But it isn't as severe as a shaman's dispel. At this time, I have no proposal of a possible fix. Should get some people to kick ideas around, see what we come up with.

I think its good that there's some combos that can take down healers and paladins.

The balancing factor is that if you are a paladin or healer, you should not be allowing a lone shaman to kill you. So if the lone shaman wants to kill say, a paladin, he shouldn't want to spam dispel, as that should only cause you to FLEE, not DIE (which, is a very large difference in my books).

Save vs spell doesn't help against dispel at all I believe. I came to this conclusion after noting that tower of iron will doesn't prevent dispel.

I'd like it to more greatly involve saves. As far as I know, its straight level of caster versus level of spell affect. Which, means, you can't really defend against it, except by heroing. To offset this, make the level counteract the saves if the level is extremely low (ie, level 5 haste should be easy to dispel, even with divine saves).

Aside from that though, I wouldn't put lag on it unless you could target what you were aiming at. Its really a shaman's major tool in group versus group fights. When I'm playing say, a paladin or druid, I can live with having a class that counteracts my defenses against bash/damage, but at the same time I'd like to be able to improve my defense against dispel so if I'm a level 43 druid/paladin I don't lose all my sups in the first shot.