Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Goodbye Decursive

Relmstein has the news that changes to the scripting language in the Burning Crusade expansion will make addons like Decursive stop working. Basically there won't be any addons possible any more which automatically target people based on a condition. Now if you ever played a priest, paladin, or mage in a raiding guild, you will probably have been instructed to install Decursive, and in some boss encounters your job was to just stand there and spam that one Decursive hotkey. Many Molten Core bosses, like Lucifron or Baron Geddon, have area-of-effect debuffs which are quite lethal, and have to be dispelled quickly. Doing that this fast will be very hard without the Decursive addon.

But in a way the current situation was untenable, because the difference in power between a player with Decursive and a player without Decursive was too big. Debuffs are for example heavily used in PvP, and Decursive can make quite a difference there. So Blizzard would either have to integrate the function of that addon into the game itself, or change the scripting language to turn it off. They chose the latter, to the delight of PvP warlocks and the dismay of raid decursers.

At least they got the timing right. Few people will worry about MC encounters getting harder for level 60 characters on the day they can start leveling to 70. And if the level 70 raid dungeons have similar AoE debuffs, well, at least the new raids are limited to 25 people, making manual targeting and decursing obviously easier than 40-player raids.

While Decursive made my life in raids a lot easier, I don't think I will miss it terribly. There was no skill involved in decursing, you just spammed a single key without thinking. Necessary, but boring. Iwouldn't uninstall it yourself, as that would be shooting myself in the foot, and get me angry comments from my fellow raiders. But if it is turned off for everybody, I can live without it. Macros and addons like Decursive are a terrible slippery slope to playing a bot.

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