Right now, we have FirstAid (a godsend, by the way!) to handle afflictions, and it does its task admirably. However, curing afflictions is only half of the defensive fight; defenses is the other half. Having a built-in system for that would be awesome, although I realise that would be a rather large project. In my mind, it'd work just like FirstAid curequeue does, but for defenses instead of afflictions. Examples of commands for it:

DEFENSE ADD : Adds the defense to the to-do defense queue.
DEFENSE REMOVE : Removes the defense from the to-do defense queue.
DEFENSE PERFORM: Tries to put up the defenses that is in its queue.
DEFENSE QUEUE: Shows the queue of defenses to put up
DEFENSE CLEARQUEUE: Removes all defenses from the queue

And this is how it would look (roughly):

DEFENSE ADD DEAFNESS
You have added deafness to the defense-queue.
You want to put up the following defenses: DEAFNESS.

DEFENSE ADD BLINDNESS
You have added blindness to the defense-queue.
You want to put up the following defenses: BLINDNESS, DEAFNESS.

DEFENSE ADD SHIELD
You have added shield to the defense-queue.
You want to put up the following defenses: BLINDNESS, DEAFNESS, SHIELD.

DEFENSE QUEUE
You want to put up the following defenses: BLINDNESS, DEAFNESS, SHIELD.

DEFENSE PERFORM
You want to put up the following defenses: BLINDNESS, DEAFNESS, SHIELD.
* Defense Sending: outr faeleaf
You remove 1 faeleaf, bringing the total in the rift to 273.
* Defense Sending: eat faeleaf
You eat a stalk of faeleaf.
You begin to concentrate on the sixth sense...
* Defense Sending: Invoke Circle
Spreading your arms wide, you spin clockwise and visualize a circle of protection. A shimmering white orb springs up around you.

You have recovered equilibrium.

You may eat or smoke another herb.

You now possess the gift of the sixth sense.

DEFENSE QUEUE
You want to put up the following defenses: BLINDNESS, DEAFNESS, SHIELD.

DEFENSE PERFORM
You want to put up the following defenses: BLINDNESS, DEAFNESS, SHIELD.
* Defense Sending: outr faeleaf
You remove 1 faeleaf, bringing the total in the rift to 272.
* Defense Sending: eat faeleaf
You eat a stalk of faeleaf.
You already possess the gift of the sixth sense.
* Defense Sending: Invoke Circle
Spreading your arms wide, you spin clockwise and visualize a circle of protection. A shimmering white orb springs up around you.

You have recovered equilibrium.

You may eat or smoke another herb.

DEFENSE REMOVE BLINDNESS
You want to put up the following defenses: DEAFNESS, SHIELD.

DEFENSE REMOVE SHIELD
You want to put up the following defenses: DEAFNESS.

DEFENSE PERFORM
You want to put up the following defenses: DEAFNESS.
* Defense Sending: outr earwort
You remove 1 earwort, bringing the total in the rift to 163.
* Defense Sending: eat earwort
You eat a piece of black earwort.
You now possess the gift of truehearing.

DEFENSE CLEARQUEUE
Defense queue cleared.

I don't think this is such a useful enterprise.

Could you elaborate a bit? Why wouldn't it be useful?

Why I think it would be useful: Right now, in order to get an even halfway-decent defensive system going, you basically have to make an affliction system as well; many things share the same balances. That means keeping track of all afflictions, handle them all internally, keep track of all balances, making sure to make failsafes against illusions designed to make you think you're off the various balances and knowing what cures what. That's no small task for someone just going into combat. And before you say "Well, just download a free system", that won't make them learn the various afflictions like FirstAid does (even though it keeps track of the afflictions for you, you still have to either use the diag-functionality of FirstAid or add/remove them all manually). Making a FirstAid-like system for defenses fills the exact same functionality that FirstAid does for afflictions: It lets you off the hook when it comes to keeping track of balances, while still not being a full-feathered system (there would be several reasons to get a better system in the end).

Imho, first aid kind of failed when they put in standardized aff messages but no standardized cure messages... giving people half a system so that they can waste their cures didn't make a lot of sense to me.

It's admins decision of course to implement what they'd like, but defences are a much simpler matter and typically I see newbies setup simple defup aliases with timers and not have much of a problem.

Nobody manuals defences anymore? I do. It's not difficult.

This could be useful, but if your goal is just to put up defenses, you actually don't need the full balance/afflictions/anti-illusion tracking system just for that. A simple 'You have recovered...' trigger that checks your list of defenses remaining is all you need for most defenses. Add in the herb, elixir, etc stuff and you're done.

(As for standardized cure messages, you don't have it such that you can (easily) use a single trigger for all cures, but those cure messages are publicly available and not changing (much). So, in a way, they have always been standardized.)

I still manual the defences, just saying, but I do admit, I've always wanted an auto-defencer. It's really nice for those of us who DC a lot.

Zarquan:

This could be useful, but if your goal is just to put up defenses, you actually don't need the full balance/afflictions/anti-illusion tracking system just for that. A simple 'You have recovered...' trigger that checks your list of defenses remaining is all you need for most defenses. Add in the herb, elixir, etc stuff and you're done.

(As for standardized cure messages, you don't have it such that you can (easily) use a single trigger for all cures, but those cure messages are publicly available and not changing (much). So, in a way, they have always been standardized.)

The problem lies in that you need to keep track of the balances in a combat situation. If you just trigger it to "You have regained balance", you would have to prioritise defenses over FirstAid, or you wouldn't know if FirstAid would take herb/salve/smoke-balance before you tried to put that defense up. And most of the times, you'd want to prioritise afflictions over defenses. This wouldn't be used for a simple defup; you can do that with just a few aliases (although this would, of course, help with that as well), but rather for putting up stripped defenses in a combat situation, where you don't know if you have the correct balances or if you need those balances for afflictions.

I kinda doubt anyone really uses FirstAid in a real combat situation. It's just not that practical.

Putting up defenses initially is the best place to start. Once you talk about keeping up those defenses during combat, you are building yourself a combat system, no matter whether it's server-side or client-side.

Of course it'd be a combat system, but one that only adds and removes afflictions/defenses. FirstAid already keeps track of what is added, how they are cured, and whether or not you have balances to cure it, meaning you don't need to bother about that. Of course, it has its drawbacks, but for a rudimentary system, it's actually rather usable even in combat situations. Adding a system for defenses would complete the set needed for fledglings combatants that don't want to build their own system from scratch (which takes a lot of work), rely on a free system (are there any good ones still after Treant stopped?) or shell out the credits for a system.

While I am not good with making aliases and stuff, I did manage to get most of my defense into one command of defup. I just make a list of the commands, and used the #wait command in my nexus thingy. I was quite proud of it! I doubt it goes as fast as it could, because I have to put long wait times in there sometimes, because lag will make it skip commands if I'm not careful.