It sounds like it warrants another look, for sure. If PC/Mobile was changed to match your description, I would agree that this is a step backward.
Stan, I don’t know why folks are beating you up on this. I have seen this exact thing many times in many flavors. Dimetraxia casts, a troop has 2 life left and is burning, but the burning doesn’t “stick” and they live. It seems to happen more often with trait-generated status - Jarl’s burning and Mab’s frozen are the ones I have noticed.
Others have alluded to a “guaranteed stick” for 1 turn, but I have never seen that. Maybe there’s an RNG glitch that makes is 1% instead of 0% for the first turn and +10% after or some such, but it does dispel on first turns.
[quote]General Spell Effect Changes
Death Mark will now no longer activate on the first turn
Barrier now blocks devour[/quote]
Whoever said that this wasn’t in the patch notes didn’t read the patch notes very carefully. 
It is very much in there. Yes, death mark is a pain in the butt, and I am glad to have this fix after a 4x insta-kill by a Death Curse. That is just too crazy, so I approve the change to give you a round to deal with it. However, to SaintLevitan’s point, it should now stick around for an extra turn to have a chance of activating.
All that said, I completely agree with the original post. Status effects (besides death mark) do not have a big enough impact on the game. If I play a troop with cleanse, it is almost by accident: Celestasia on Whitehelm week or on a Dragon team where I need yellow-blue, most likely. But the status effects do need a bit of a buff, and I think this is a good compromise without unbalancing the whole apple cart.
I stand in the middle here. I think some weaker effect like Stun , web and disease could have a longer grace period.
And keep stronger effects like Freeze, Entangle and silence as is.
There are still differences in gameplay. We know for sure that gem creators like the Guardians have different over-write rules between the two versions and there are a couple other minor differences that aren’t coming to mind for me right now. I believe you’re right about the way that auto-cleanse processes for general status effects on console. I’m 95% certain I have used Gard’s Avatar to silence Famine, only to have him immediately cleanse and cast against me.
Thanks for the positive replies 
I would just like to add, that this solution has no real drawbacks because:
- like @Jainus pointed out, effects usually stick for 3-5 turns, thus setting a minimum of 2 turns (i.e. below the average) would not increase their average duration, and as I proposed, on turn 3 the chance to dispel the effect would start at 30% going up by 10% each turn, so the auto-cleansing chance would be exactly the same as it is now on any given turn, apart from the first 2;
- the chance to dispel an effect on the 1st turn is just 10%, so it theoretically happens only 1/10 times. This is so rare, that there are no sound decisions to be made with the assumption, that at any given moment, auto-cleansing will happen to our advantage or disadvantage on the first turn. But happen it might, and that 1/10 could be in Guild Wars, and the fact that one doesn’t expect it makes it that more dangerous.
From personal experience I will add, that Status Effects can be a great measure against uber powerful paragon teams (especially since a one-color team setup for maximum points very much limits your options), but I lost many a battle due to them wearing off before I could collect mana for another spell.
Applying Status Effects is a more strategic approach to controlling the fight, an alternative to gem spamming and raw damage, so it would be a shame for it to completely fall out of use due to ineffectiveness.
I know nobody looks at this thread anymore, but I’ve done a lot of testing and I just wanted to correct myself and clarify, that @Lyya was right - Status Effect do in fact hold for minimum 1 turn also in the ps4 version of the game.
I apologize for any confusion I might have caused 
That being said, I don’t believe it defeats the logic of my argument 
: 2 turns to grab mana + 1 turn status effect = 1 turn completely wasted. Think this: Hunter’s Mark doubles skull damage, if I can do the same dmg with 2 skull matches than with 1 vs an enemy with Hunter’s Mark, there’s no advantage to use it in the first place.
Here’s a video showing a legendary troop proving to be completely useless in the current state of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4Ha5NenZws