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Game Mechanics

A 'disease' is a Damage Over Time (DOT) attack. While a target is diseased, their affected HAM bar will take on damage and wounds at every 40 second tick cycle of the disease after the target has been diseased. As an example, if a player is hit with a 100 damage disease, 40 seconds passes by and then the player takes 100 damage and then subsequently takes 100 in wounds. A disease will last until cured by the cure disease ability, teras kasi artist meditation, Force Cure Disease, Total Heal Other, Total Heal Self abilities or its duration runs out. Each form of disease attack has a base chance (possibly a potency value) of applying the disease effect. This base chance is checked against the target's disease resistance to determine the ultimate percentage chance for the effect to land.

Diseases cannot be used to kill or incapacitate a target as it will only bring the target down to 1 point of HAM at the least. Diseases can only take the target's ham bar down to its base value. For instance if a player's original mind bar stat is 1000 and has a 500 stat mind buff while diseased, then this will result in a ham pool that is 501/1500 with 999 wounds to the mind. Diseases will be removed from the player when they are killed. Only one type of disease can be placed on a HAM pool or secondary stat, regardless of the source. Furthermore, the highest strength disease overwrites lower strength disease if the target is already diseased on that particular ham pool.

Battle fatigue along with combat medic effectiveness skill modifiers are factors that work to affect disease damage.

Note: NPC and creature diseases may be stacked on a player or pet's same HAM pool even while using the same special. This was presumably done to make PvM more challenging to players. Player pets however do not have this functionality and are limited to the normal rules affecting players. When the same specials are used, the added damage gets included with the ticks therefore if a 150 damage dot was originally applied and a 2nd 150 dot from the same special is applied also, the next tick will be 300 damage. The creature/npc disease timers and ticks are probably refreshed as well.

Note: No known formula exists for calculating the chance of a disease to be applied to a target nor for the effects of disease resistance on these chances but there is probably a 5% base chance to apply a disease as well as a 5% chance to resist a disease attack, similar to the mechanics of other dots.

Disease Sources

Diseases have a number of sources including:

• Special Attacks
• Creature Attacks
• Inherent Weapon Features

Special Attacks

• Apply Disease -

Combat Medics have the ability to launch disease canisters at enemy targets. These disease canisters come in area of effect and single target varieties. Combat Medics have access to diseases that can damage primary and secondary stats.

Creature Attacks

Creatures have access to five forms of diseases:

• Mild disease
• Medium Disease
• Strong Disease
• Plague Strike
• Sarlacc Disease

All creature diseases target the primary ham pool only and may randomly choose which ham pool is hit using the same HAM pool targeting frequency mechanics that combat uses. The sarlacc disease lasts for 1 hour and 30 minutes and probably uses the strong disease value per tick (3 damage).

Note: During pre-cu it seems that the disease timer was affected by other things such as potentially CL or perhaps certain creatures were given custom timers for their disease duration. This information seems to be impossible to find so the timers for their disease durations can only be generalized within the range of data collected.

Note: The sarlacc disease is specific to the sarlacc creatures on dathomir and tatooine. If a player gets within a certain range of the sarlacc pit, they will be diseased (disease resistance apparently affects the chance for the sarlacc to apply the disease to the player). There is no data presently for the sarlaac disease strength but it is probably a strong disease variant.

Inherent Weapon Features

Weapons with inherent diseases will execute this effect on any target that is hit by the attacker. Weapons with inherent or potentially able to have disease effects include:

• Gammorean Battle Axe
• Nightsister Lance
• Nightsister Energy Lance
• Exceptional Weapons
• Legendary Weapons

Presumably special attacks that utilize weapons with inherent disease effects can be considered area of effect dieases if the special utilizes an area of attack. The disease effect from the weapon would attempt to apply its effect individually on each target within the radius on the attack if the diseased weapon has a radius attack or if an area of effect special is used with that given weapon. Weapons with inherent disease effects also have a potency value which makes a check against the defender's disease resist modifiers to determine the percentage chance of successfully applying the disease effect. Dots from weapons will only execute on the target if the player is certified to use the weapon. Each successful hit on a target consumes one dot usage from the weapon.

Some things to note:

• Diseases from different weapons that apply their dot to the same ham stat will not stack with one another unless the weapon used are of different damage types, meaning two kinetic damage type weapons with dots will not stack but a kinetic and energy based weapon dot will stack on the same HAM pool. - (This seems to be an exploit that allowed multiple dots to be stacked onto a target. For example a player using a health dot stun pistol then a health dot energy pistol to stack two health dots on a target)

Disease Types

There are 4 types of disease attacks in SWG:

• Area of Effect Disease
• Single target Disease
• Multi pool Disease
• Targeted pool Disease

Area of Effect Disease

These attacks will hit all targets within a certain radius of the attacker, where the radius is dependent on the special used and area of effect radius component on the weapon used (if the attack is done with a weapon that has an aoe component to it). Area of effect Diseases can consist of Multi Pool Diseases such as the creature attack Plague Strike. Presumably special attacks that utilize weapons with inherent Disease effects can be considered area of effect Diseases if the special utilizes an area of attack. The Disease effect from the weapon would attempt to apply its effect individually on all targets within the radius on the attack.

AOE disease sources include:

• Plague Strike
• ApplyDisease

Single Target Disease

These attacks target a single target

• ApplyDisease

Multi Pool Disease

These disease attacks will randomly target one of an enemy's ham pools to apply the effect to. These attacks can have their effect applied to all of the primary ham pools.

Multi pool disease sources include:

• Plague Strike

Targeted Pool Disease

These disease attacks will target a specific HAM pool to apply the effect on.

• ApplyDisease

Formulas

Disease damage is based around three things:

• The disease effectiveness (or strength)
• The target's current battle fatigue
• The combat medic's Combat Medicine Effectiveness modifier

To calculate disease damage, the following formula is used:

Real tick damage =

((disease effectiveness) * (1 + (CM effectiveness) / 100)) * (1 + (target battle fatigue / 100))

Disease effectiveness includes the disease strength stat on a creature's attack, the combat medic's disease packs or the strength value on dot weapons. Disease sources that dont use CM effectiveness modifier would use 0 for this part of the formula.

As diseases run their course on a target, they will accumulate battle fatigue. The rate at which diseases generate battle fatigue on the target uses the following formula:

Battle fatigue incurred = Real Tick Damage * .075

Source References