So, pipe afflictions (and herb afflictions, practically) used to be useless until they shared a balance.

So then I got to thinking, what if vial balance (sanguine, choleric, melancholic, maybe phlegmatic too) couldn't be drunk unless you had health vial balance. They would then have their normal balance, but wouldn't stop you from drinking vial again. So you would need both types of balance, but couldn't spam every type at every health vial balance recovery.

Thoughts? It would be a huge upgrade to said affliction types, but currently they're rather useless so hey. I think it could be tweaked to be balanced and interesting.

I don't think that's going to happen primarily because of aeon and so forth. I wouldn't want to be fighting a Moondancer, sip mana, and then get waned while QS was still coming back up and not being able to cure it until I got my sip balance (AFTER they've had another eq, and probably forced me to sleep with an enchantment/hex/something). I don't think this is necessary, although I don't get into combat on quite that tiny level of detail.

Hehehehehehe. Knights after this change..

No.

Blademasters have two potion-cured wounds, so it wouldn't be a big deal.

Aeon can be cured with reishi as well as with a potion.

There's a reason everyone uses phlegmatic to cure aeon rather than reishi.

And those two potion-cured wounds would become extremely lethal, too.

Well yeah, the reason is that potion balance is never occupied. It's really not hard to trigger 'you return to the normal timestream' to 'outr reishi' though. I used to cure it with reishi regularly and I didn't have herb balance at that point, like... once. The delay of aeon is less than a second slower than the decay of herb balance I believe.

As for the lethalness of those two knight afflictions, I kind of doubt it. Scalping does 300 the first tick if you heal it or not, then adds 100 per tick. So you'd take 400 if the ticks didn't add up correctly as opposed to what it is (without clotting) now, about 250. Not that big a deal.

Anyway, I highly doubt they'll do it, but I wanted to throw it out there. I think it could work well provided that some other things were tweaked and make a rather pointless part of the game relevant. Potion balance == teh yawn currently.

What about purgative balance? There are only a couple vials that require no balance at all, like quicksilver, and the rest require purgative balance. If you've discovered that this isn't the case, it's a bug, right?

Well, by potion balance, I meant purgative balance.