This one has been annoying me for some time now. Silence prevents all mana gain, Diseased just halves it. They both wear off based on the same formula. Technically, that makes Diseased half a Silence, which feels pretty redundant. How about cranking up the uniqueness and scariness factor a little, by also draining one point of mana each turn it is active? It does seem to fit the theme…
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Disease does need to be buffed. The slight difference they have now is that disease has a lot less counters and plays better with a troop like a fully traited Psion. The issue with its synergy now is the best disease troop is the same color as the best troop to support disease.
Adding 1 mana lost per turn would definitely make disease a viable consideration opposed to silence. Another change it could have instead of that could be 1 random stat loss per turn. The third possible option could be to make it like poison by removing the 10% cumulative chance to be cleansed.
Perhaps disease could spread and infect adjacent troops?
That or cut their magic powers in half for the infected troop while diseased? That would make it quite effective.
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Diseased is nice as is. It doesn’t need a change. I find it much more accessible than the frozen trait.
The ‘drain 1 mana per turn’ is thematically excellent but presents the problem of making the troop unable to charge and cast without an extra turn. You charge, end turn, opponent takes their turn, your turn and you lose 1 mana. So that’s iffy to work with. A 50% chance to lose the mana would cause, uhh, recall bias problems…
The disease spreading would be neat of course.
While being somewhat fitting to the disease theme, that would be a huge kick in the balls of Venbarak. 
That actually wouldn’t be a problem. Any effect being reapplied resets the timer, so any troop with disease all would basically be a ever lasting disease. The problem with a spread is even a single disease could end up just looping a refresh across an entire team.
But his chance of applying disease is so low, with a spreading disease effect, a single target 100% disease (burning scythe for example) would probably be more effective to get all enemies diseased than Venbarak is.
In any case this change to disease would diminish his spells strength, and either the chance on his disease should be increased or the damage of his spell itself increased to make up for it.
All of these debates on the disease spreading idea - varies on the relative percentage chances of spreading vs cleansing…
An alternate idea is that disease could prevent mana surges for troops of the affected color.
Goblin gets diseased, Shaman prepares a 5 green line for them, BAM, only 3 mana instead of 5!
That’s gotta sting.
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You mean 3 instead of 10?
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No, I mean 3 instead of 5. Diseased already halves mana gain (reducing 10 to 5), if it ignored mana surges on top of that, it’d make 5 (because no surge) into 3 (because mana halving). Doubly effective!
That’s just my idea anyway, I think it fits disease well without making it too obnoxious.
Well you are right. But I for one think it is meant to be weaker than silence. Just look at the mana cost. Venbarak also delivers a hurty amount of aoe damage, while all the Silent One does is the silence.
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Silent One has a 100% chance for the effect, Venbarak is only a 30% chance.
I really like the idea of preventing mana surges, fits in well. It should probably behave similar to Frozen, hit all colors of the diseased unit. I don’t think spreading disease is a good approach, based on the numbers it will either dissipate fast or keep bouncing around forever after a single application.
I think you are both right and the truth lies in the middle.
If you compare Silent One and Venbarak disease indeed seems to come at a lower opportunity cost as silence, and is meant to be less powerfull than silence.
But there is still a lot of room between current disease and silence in terms of power and disease sure could use some extra effect to make it more relevant and add more flavour to it at the same time.
With any of the proposed changes to disease in this thread, silence would still be significantly more powerful, but disease would get more relevance than it currently has.