Iolair,Sep 23 2005, 04:34 AM Wrote:I was hoping some of you guys could fill me in on this because that article got me curious :)
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Corrupted Blood is a two-second long damage-over-time debuff. When it expires, it inflicts somewhere around 250-270 damage (which is from 0.2 to 1 percent, or so, of high level characters' health and rather more of low-level characters' health), and also immediately checks if there are targets friendly to its previous target in the vicinity. If there are, it immediately applies itself to those targets.
The implication is fairly obvious: just two entities that are friendly to one another in close proximity can pass this debuff between them indefinitely if they don't die. Among players, the plague can fairly rapidly exhaust itself; it quickly spreads to everybody, and everybody reacquires it every time anybody's plague debuff "expires". That kind of damage results in many deaths in a short period of time.
However, the way it works has an additional implication. The plague checks for targets friendly to its original target, player-controlled or not. Hence, it can hop to computer-controlled NPCs - including ones that don't usually move. This would not be meaningful except that computer controlled NPCs obey a rule for all NPCs in WoW - if they are not in combat with something, they cannot take damage. This is so that players can't use damage-over-time debuffs of their own to disengage from enemies and kill them without fear of retaliatory attack. In this case, however, what it means is that two NPCs who don't move, and whose usual positions are next to each other, will pass the plague back and forth between each other indefinitely, "infecting" any player who ventures near.
