Board Thread:Suggestions forum/@comment-25012056-20181223225841/@comment-25841881-20181226012252

It should be very difficult. It should not be impossible. No item in the game should be a guaranteed 'i-have-resources-so-i-win.' That's acceptable balance for PvE, but not at all for PvP.

30-seconds-wither gives a single survival scenario, which I described above: The fight ends shortly after you are hit, and you have near instant access to a remove-status-effects. For all practical purposes, you are dead from the moment you are hit. If they get in a couple of hits on you with a decent weapon as you run to safety, or if you have to dig around in chests for a bit to find your cure, you are dead. It's literally a guaranteed kill if you're attacked in the wilderness.

A long-term-death of less than 10 minutes with an athelas cure is basically a one-hit-kill. The only time it isn't is when the victim has athelas readily available. If they don't have it already made, they literally cannot survive.

I'd propose a syndrome with gradually increasing symptoms.. A rough scale would be permanent hunger at 2 minutes, slowness at 4, weakness at 6, mining fatigue at 9, nausea at 10, slowness 2 at 12, blindness at 13, and wither at 15. The only way to stop it would be with athelas.. Or, alternatively.. Athelas removes 5 minutes from your timer per potency level per drink. In order to remove the syndrome, you'd have to get it to -30 minutes.. Meaning that a potent athelas(-25 minutes) is not enough to remove it, only to vastly delay it.

What this would do is implement a balance between lore-friendliness and pvp-compatibility. It takes 3/4 of a gameday -- approximately 9 hours -- before you get permanent wither and shortly die. In the meantime, you have gradually increasing symptoms that will harm your combat ability. If you don't have an athelas handy to delay the symptoms, you are pretty much guaranteed to lose the fight.. As long as the wielder of the blade plays it right. Attack, and back off. In a few minutes, the victim will be suffering from permanent hunger. In the context of a fight, this means they cannot escape. They can run, except they will have to slow down and eat more frequently. This means that, as long as the wielder has kept the victim in their sight for 2 minutes, they cannot escape. At 4 minutes, the victim is actively, directly slowed down. They can't win in even a short run, and are massively disadvantaged in melee maneuvers. At 6 minutes, they start dealing less damage. At 9, they attack slower.. And so on. As long as the person attacking them has a basic ability to engage in PvP, they will win. If the victim does win, however.. They will have 15 minutes to get an athelas or die. In the wilderness, this would be 5 minutes to find a barrel, 3 buckets, water, and 6 athelas plants. If the victim was carrying athelas.. Then the strategy for the person attacking changes radically. They should have already consumed some form of combat buff. This means they are now buffed, while the victim may be(the victim may also have already buffed for combat -- which is why they probably dont have an athelas to drink, and this is the less likely scenario). The victim is now standing still, not attacking, for a couple of seconds. This is a couple of seconds for the attacker to deal damage unhindered. You should be able to take away more than half their health in that time. Of course, a smart victim will act like they don't have athelas. They would allow the attacker to back off like the attacker would want to do in the first scenario I described. And then they would drink the athelas, be cured, and charge the attacker.. However, as a morgul-user, this is easily countered. Don't back very far off. Stay close. If your victim starts drinking, start killing.