Decursive - You're Beautiful to Me!

So, Chirri posted something about Decursive on her blog. I couldn't let such an awesome opportunity pass by without a comment of my own.

You see, I play a mage and I remove curses. I don't enjoy it exactly, but I see it as part of my role as a mage. Decursive was one of the addons I determined to be necessary if I was really going to be raiding 25 man raids in Wrath.

Maybe I'm old school. Maybe I just need to "l2p" my mage "properly" and be a DPS whore. But, I don't think so. You see, I always thought it best to do whatever I could to help the group overall. This certainly includes doing a lot of damage to the intended target, but that's not all mages can (or should) do in a group or raid setting. Removing curses is one of these "other" things that often gets forgotten by many a mage.

Sometimes though, it's not forgotten so much as disregarded as "not my job". "Let the healers get it" is a line I've heard far too often. You know what? The healers are busy keeping your agro-pulling ass alive. Help them out a little! And besides, if it weren't "your job" you wouldn't have a neat little spell called "Remove Curse" available to you at all times. It's not like it's something you can spec into or out of like a resto shaman.

Another "excuse" I've heard for not removing curses makes me die a little inside. "Decursive is too invasive / ugly to have on all the time." Excuse me? It's a group of small green squares that only yells at you if you need to do something. You can move it anywhere you want, turn the squares off when you're not raiding, and it makes removing curses a breeze but it's too much of an inconvenience to have it on when you might need it? Riiiiiight.

I wouldn't mind it so much if they could still remove curses well without a mod, as I do have a dislike for too many mods and prefer not to rely on them when I can avoid it. But inevitably, it's not "really" how the mod looks or the room it takes up or anything like that - they just don't want to remove curses. After all, time spent removing curses could be time spent DPS'ing!

This "ugly" excuse is a favorite from one of the mages in my guild. He supposedly has it downloaded, BUT HE NEVER HAS IT ON WHEN IT'S NEEDED. Granted, it's not as big a deal now as it was in Naxx since fewer mobs in Uld and ToC curse. But even back then he hated it and would log out before and after Noth / Sapph to turn it on and off (I still don't get why he couldn't just turn off the micro frames). And the spider wing trash? Curse removal never happened. Ever. And I don't think he ever removed more than a couple of curses per boss encounter either; he always claimed the rest of us were "too fast" for him. (It's plain to me that he'd rather just be DPS'ing; the spider packs were tasty AE'ing opportunities, after all!)

It's pretty sad when we as a guild have always ran mage heavy (talking 4-5 mages a run, back in Naxx) yet the only mages removing curses was myself and maybe one of the others, depending on who actually showed up. These days, our mage population is just as big but less consistent on attendance so we only tend to have myself and one other (though sometimes we end up with four again).

Yet I bet if we did a Naxx run today, I'd still be the only mage removing curses.