You know, that idea about disarm... gave me another idea.

What if a dispel did not immeditatly removed something but what if dispelled drop the duration to 10 seconds or 10% of its duration or some such. (Or maybe, actually a peacewise function 10 seconds if the buff would normally last more than 10 seconds, 2 seconds if the buff lasted less than 10 seconds but more than 2).

So in arenas most purges should cost 0 mana? Any proportion of 0, is still 0...

I think that people that are worried about changes to these mechanics hurting specific classes (shaman/preist mostly it seems) are taking much to short a view on this problem. These mechanics are confusing and difficult to deal with. Given Blizzard's trend of attempting to make things straightforward and intuitive, one would think they would care about the random and frankly odd way Magic effects are handled in this game. If this game is to continue to attract new players (although my feeling is that WoW has just about peaked) as the available talents and abilities increase this problem will just get bigger.

@ Class balance
If they change the mechanics unilaterally, then classes that get "nerfed" should balance out with those getting "buffed" since the change would effect everyone. And I do think that is what is necessary here. The game mechanics behind the random dispel are what is at fault. There should be a clear priority on every effect that is dispellable, so that the results would be the same each time. This would allow whomever to easily balance the amazingly powerful effects (BoF, AP, BoP, PI, etc) by making them come off easily every time, while making the bread and butter abilities that are clearly necessary to function (caster armors, earth shield, etc) much more difficult to get rid of.

@ Overuse of Magic
And part of the problem does lie in that there are FAR FAR too many buffs labeled as Magic. It seems like any buff that doesn't have an obvious leaning to curse or poision or disease is automatically labeled as magic, unless it comes from a physical class then its undispellable. That should really be looked at, why are physical classes given a pass on dispelling while magic using classes punished severely for it. Obviously this mostly applies to talents since the physical classes don't usually have much in the way of party buffs (I am ok with hunter/paladin aspects/auras being dispellable though).

Playing a resto shaman in arena I was very unpleased to see, that hunters got their "purge shot". While resto shamans may not be the uber buffing class, their survability mostly relies on earthshield to be up. Without it, you simply use up your mana much too fast and are stuck on flashing yourself standing still.

Most of the time in arena, if my earthshield is removed I will not recast it, at least not for as long as I don't see the opportunity for it to remain active for at least a few charges to proc. While earthshield is a major buff if not removed, it is fairly useless if your opponent is able to remove it, especially because shamans do not provide other magical effects that could protect it through a single purge. So as long as I team up with a warrior, my earthshield will never be up against a priest, shaman, warlock or hunter. I don't know if you realized, but a lot high rated teams sport warlocks and priests, either or both

2.3.2 changes are on their way. I read the change log. I stumbled. I reread the part on earthshield. I was shocked. "Yeah, reducing the manacost is nice, so you can more easily rebuff it if it is removed, this might make it worth simply rebuffing it and hope they miss it" but "OMFG?! They'll apply a cooldown on it?! WHY?!"

While this thread is not related to earthshield or shamans directly, the only reason I could imagine earthshield getting a cooldown is it will provide some sort of dispell protection. % dispel resist or some UA like effect come to mind (like popping all remaining charges on dispell) However, if earthshield will get a cd without a dispell protection I believe we have another spell "die" to it's unability to protect itself against dispel.

What are you referring to? With the exception of procced buffs like the Resilience bonus from arena Librams/Totems/Idols, most buffs on a player have some associated mana cost to cast.

Offensive Dispelling needs to stay (not least of which is to provide a useful mechanic option in pve), and there needs to be things it should be able to dispel in pvp from a balance perspective. They just need to take the pain suppression route on some talented abilities (e.g. earth shield, avenging wrath, arcane power). Having to take on average 3 GCDs just to dispel would be balanced on these things.

Remember the classes who get most hurt by offensive dispel are also the classes who can use it (priests, shaman, mages- via spellsteal), so that has to be taken into account. Arguably the problem isn't that offensive dispel is overpowered, but rather that the classes who don't have offensive dispel aren't seriously hurt by it (except non-ret paladins) and that now those classes can also be hurt by a class which is more or less unaffected by dispel (hunters).

If anything, the key would not be so much for offensive dispel to be nerfed, but for:

a) 31 and 41 point talents to have innate dispel resistance; and
b) physical class buffs be made dispellable to put them on the same playing field as magic. Why are things like evasion and death wish so special?

PvP re-balancing is something that's pretty clearly in the "we'll do it from 70 -80" basket. They've recognised that there's issues and inconsistencies- it just isn't worth their development time to do it now and to do it again for WOTLK.

This is what happens when you don't read threads.

I think Evasion and Death Wish being undispellable is (partly) a result from them being on long (for PvP at least) cooldowns.
If they were on 1 minute CDs things would be difference (as in: my PvE rogue just wet himself from the very thought), but having long-CD abilities purge-able is a rather large change.

I would be quite OK with purging Death Wish, Last Stand, Shield Wall etc if it wouldn't screw over their player too much - suggestions for improvements include:
a) their cooldown was also reduced at the time of purge - purging Evasion after 5 seconds (1/3 of duration) would reduce the CD to 1/3
b) the ability was physical for a limited amount of time (1/3? 1/2? 1/4?) then purgeable (note that this would change some PvE fights as well, but not that badly - Garr would be a tonne of fun)
c) purging the buff would remove the buff BUT add a temporary (max 5 second duration) non-purgeable version of it (essentially a variant of b) but in reverse, promoting the use of dispel).

Anyhow, just making all physical buffs magic without other changes would be far too unbalancing, in my opinion, and would require some drastic form of melee buff (like talents that make Rogues/Warriors have a high % chance to dispel buffs on hit or whatever).

Like avenging wrath, BoP, arcane power, presence of mind etc ? I don't see how you can make a case for it being because they are long cooldown when so many "magic" abilities are easily purged and have long cooldowns, some even having consequences to the caster for casting said buff (forbearance).

Nature's swiftness and Elemental Mastery also both have long cooldowns and are purgable. In fact with a fel hunter around you need to be really aware of when to use it so it doesn't get auto-devoured. Personally I think 21/31/41 point talents (really its the 31/41) should be dispellable, but with high resists. So that includes AP, Earth Shield, EM, NS, DW, etc. Even though I'd like heroism/bloodlust to have dispel resists, its not something I really care much about.

That just turns it into a game of rolling dice to see what stays and goes.

What really needs to be done is a full rework of the system to categorize buffs and debuffs and match dispel mechanics to each.

For example a priest could have dispel magic which would remove things like blessed resilience, blessing of freedom, bloodlust, frost nova, entangling roots, and similar short term effects. This would be an instant cast as dispel is today.

They could then have dispel greater magic which would have a two second cast time and would remove 'greater magic' such as fortitude, earth shield and the like.

I don't see any reasons not to deal with those abilities the same way as I'd deal with current-Physical effects. Decrease their CD when they are dispelled (to a minimum of a GCD for that class to prevent spamming of abilities to keep other buffs up).

I do not know any reason why Avenging Wrath can be purged (but I still snicker when I do it).

My main pet peeve is the really long cooldown abilities - popping them and having them purged right off is discouraging and non-fun, but if the CD was affected (or if a lesser / less duration version remained) it might not be that bad.

At first I thought the idea of the unpurgable shorter version of a buff being applied after a dispel was awful. But, really the change would be a very similar to how silence effects are dealt with now. Rather than increased resist, the duration is shortened. However, even if you implement that type of idea, it could work for talents that have durations, but you'd have to consider buffs like PoM and inner focus that stay up until used.

Here's the problem. In a typical 5v5 I can toss 15 purges in to someone and only hope I pull off half the buffs.
It gets worse as a paladin/shaman with the arena relic, as it places a magic buff on the target with a 75%~ built in dispel resist which stacks with whatever other talents they have.

Due to this, my 5v5 gladiator 4dps team completely ignores disp priests and resto druids due to the sheer fact they are just too hard to kill while the sides are equal, and spending the time to remove the buffs which would make them killable just hogs up your gcds, some of which are just completely useless due to dispel resist.

I found it completely ironic that we found it easier to kill drain locks with a spell damage heavy team then a priest.

I've gone through combat logs after several games and found that in some games I've had more purges fail then go through.

It's kind of ridiculous.

Perhabs an ability to target certain buffs/debuffs and dispel them could fix things like UB.

I agree, the real crux of the problem is that the Magic category is huge, generic, and thoughtlessly applied. Blizzard should redo the buffing system in a more sensible, intuitive manner; one way to go about it would be to split the generic "Magic" into its various schools: Holy, Shadow, Nature, Fire, Frost, and Arcane. Purge/dispel mechanics could then be more specific and tactical; perhaps hunter's Arcane Shot could only dispel Arcane type buffs, mages couldn't steal Holy or Shadow type buffs, while priests could only manipulate Holy, Shadow, & Arcane spells, and purge would only work on elemental types (Fire, Frost, Nature), while Cleanse wouldn't remove Holy or Arcane debuffs.

The system could be further fleshed out with the addition of new dispel mechanics to fill in any gaps or modify balance accordingly. Poison/disease could probably be very harmlessly folded into the Nature category (disease is pretty nonexistent anyway), while Curses may want to remain intact.

You can dispel Fel Domination and Amplify Magic (Warlocks).
It takes incredible timing and luck though.

As a side note, a very long time ago (when WoW just came out) a buff like Aspect of the hawk was dispellable.

Other physical buffs like Battle Shout were never dispellable.

While it is somewhat facetious, I don't see it as being fair that it should cost me large quantities of mana to dispel something that was cast for free. Even with the current mana cost I can still blow large chunks of mana trying to keep vital buffs purged.

You mean like Arcane Power, Combustion, Nature's Swiftness or Presence of Mind? There are a number of vital zero-cost buffs that get eaten all the time (or would if they weren't so retarded to spec into given the current state of the game). They are exclusively specced into, on long cooldowns and truly should not be dispellable at all.

I think there's a kernel of merit here. I heavily disagree with the elemental breakdown, but there's potential in this idea of breaking down Magical effects in categories since it's a rather bloated and heterogeneous category that currently gets treated in a homogenous fashion by dispel mechanics. Unfortunately, I don't know exactly what a good (ie both balanced and inuitive) category breakdown might be aside from Major and Minor magical effects. Perhaps the division between long-term and short-term buffs could be established. I dunno. I see the start of a good idea but it's a long way from complete.

I also started thinking that offensive dispel mechanics don't necessarily have to resemble defensive dispel mechanics, and that making the two resemble each other so much (remove 1-2 effects with X% resist chance) might be a source of the problem. It's a good model for defensive dispel mechanics, I think, but there's really no reason why offensive dispels should operate the same. Right now I'm in favor of reducing the remaining duration of all current magic buffs by a fraction of the original duration, with that fraction being a hard-coded and distinct property of the buff (instead of/in addition to the dispel effect), and of course modifiable by talents. I can easily be persuaded this is a dumb idea if given a good counterarguement. I will point out the following properties that I currently think are advantages:
A soft-counter system of dispel sreducing, but not completely removing, the benefit of magical buffs, making the decision to dispel instead of taking another action a strategically interesting and nontrivial choice
Removing that whole silly thing about protecting your important buffs with useless buffs
Makes it deterministic compared to the casino it is right now
Abilty to hand-tune the resistance of particular abilities to dispels (this is the most important one)
Of course, the balance of this depends almost entirely on how you pick values for each buff, which would no doubt take weeks to arrive at initial guidlines and months to finally achieve good results across the board.

First problem: Weighing opportunity costs of dispelling vs the value of the buff that is dispelled, and this has been covered (casino-style purge/dispell).

The system can't begin to be balanced until you know what you're getting BEFORE you purge something. It's not right to use a GCD and HOPE to dispell that arcane power. Similarly, it doesn't seem right to use Arcane power and HOPE to have your other buffs dispelled first. Once we determine that purge will ALWAYS remove arcane power first, then we can take measures to protect the mage's opportunity cost of casting arcane power in the first place. If we declare that Arcane Power should at least get X seconds of its duration, or dispelling it causes the dispeller to take extra damage for X seconds, it then makes sense to always have it removed first.

The mage considers: "There's a shaman, if I use arcane power he'll likely remove it, but I can still do extra damage to him at least. I'm not totally ineffective just because there's a shaman."

The shaman considers: "There's an arcane mage, if I purge his arcane power, I know it will be purged and he'll deal less damage, but I have to deal with the consequences."

At the same time, the warlock won't bother to buff the mage with underwater breathing, since it won't offer any extra protection any way. Underwater breathing was never intended to provide dispell protection. At the same time, putting one talent point into a 3/3 or 5/5 talent just for the dispell protection was never intended either, and such things should be among the last things to be dispelled.

Can it be argued that, caster shields aside, most of the buffs you want to dispel have durations of less than 10 minutes? And, further to that, could you safely make all buffs with durations of 10 mins or more undispellable in arenas? Thus allowing casters to keep their shields and eliminating UB and Detect Invis as trash buffs and possibly keeping the standard buffs (AI, Mark, Fort) useful(less) in their own right as opposed to being buffers.

From there you can balance the shorter duration buffs: make the high talented buffs undispellable because being able to dispel AP, PI, and Shamanistic Rage while being unable to dispel Bestial Wrath, Soul Link and Cold Blood seems fundamentally unbalanced in some ways. And so on.

Alternatively, you could fool with the ranks... Make all ranks of dispel remove one debuff versus a player. Or make them both remove two versus a player. Adjust mana cost accordingly. Make it so that Rank 1 Purge favours long buffs and Rank 2 Purge favours short buffs giving you some control over what's being removed by virtue of the rank you're using to strip. Again, I'd set the breakpoint at 10 minutes.