What is the point to purge and Dispel?

Is it me or does it seem like these don't actually Purge or Dispel anything?

I have Purges and Dispels on spam buttons and when I see stuff on my guys or the mob I spam them and I get the old Nothing to Dispell message.

So what is exactly the point of Purge and Dispell?

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Originally Posted by Phanes

Is it me or does it seem like these don't actually Purge or Dispel anything?

I have Purges and Dispels on spam buttons and when I see stuff on my guys or the mob I spam them and I get the old Nothing to Dispell message.

So what is exactly the point of Purge and Dispell?

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Purge only purges beneficial magic spells on enemies, not any harmful magic on you.

Dispel removes both harmful on you, and beneficial on the enemy. Are you trying to Dispel a disease or curse? Won't work.

Mages,(esp frost),priests and although they bubble paladins.
There is nothing as sweet as spamming purge on a retri palas with my team and watching him melt as your teamates bombard him.:)

Yeah I /purge on assist off of my tank and just always see Nothing to dispell. From what I read Purge is really only good on certain bossmob fights and PVP. My Priest uses /targetparty /cast Dispell Magic but pretty much everything you see on toons is non dispellable. With the cleanse totem poisons and diseases never stay on that long. Again it seems dispell is only really useful on PVP/Boss mob fights.

So for the most part they seem to be pretty situational and not useful for general grinding or clearing trash mobs.

You see that loooooooooooooong bar of buffs? Get a couple shaman and *poof* all gone!

theres also some dungeons and raids where a mob will cast some sort of shield, that absorbs lots of damage, like in Naxx the military wing, some mobs cast bone shield which effectively kills all DPS while its up, and must be removed. I just spam my priests mass dispel when that happens, but purge should get it as well. Too bad they nerfed mages spellsteal on the bone shield, after that one mage soloed razuvious in 25 man with that buff... Also in Utgarde Keep the runecasters cast a shield, I usually burn em down and stunlock em before it casts, but its nice to dispell it when it happens.

I don't often bother dispelling mobs, but I haven't run into many things that couldn't just be burned down through whatever protection they've put up. I do have a special case macro to dispel Paletress's Renew though, because that thing is a killer.

Folks have talked about putting a purge as the first "click" in their DPS macro.

Can anyone confirm a) that the logic works and the macro "moves on" if there's nothing on the target to purge and b) post their syntax? Seems like this would be a no brainer to include in all click macro's if this works so that you'll always try to purge if there's something to purge and there's no meaningful DPS/macro hanging concerns.

/castsequence dps,moredps,whatever
/cast purge/dispel/spellsteal

If you spam that you'll (attempt to) purge after every non-instant spell and it won't interrupt your castsequence, although if your sequence involves dots it will delay their refreshing when you get a purge/dispel/spellsteal off.

Also, are you sure you're dispelling the right target? With the exception of mass dispel you need to target whoever has the buff/debuff you want to get rid of. For example, assuming you're always targetting/assisting to an enemy, the above macro won't ever attempt to dispel a dot on your team.

Well what I have is this

Priest:
/stopcasting
/targetparty
/cast Dispel Magic

This cycles nearest to furthest party member. When I see debuffs pop up on my guys I spam this button. When I look at my preist 99% of the time I see nothing to dispel. When I look at my DPS meter at the end of few dungeon runs I Might see the priest has dispelled a few things.

My shamans have

/stopcasting
/assist emrict
/cast Purge

Same thing with them when I see beneficial stuff on mobs I spam this button. Sometimes they go away sometimes they do not.

I guess I was thinking that dispel would remove all the debuffs my guys get. What I learned after doing some reading is that is is really for boss mob fights or PVP.

Same for Purge. Most of the buffs/debuffs tossed around in trash fights cannot be dispelled or purged. However when I see alot of boss mob stuff get cleared off my guys that are usually DOTs of some sort. For example the second fight in ToC the memory summoned gets a renew put on it that heals a decent amount and it can be purged off.

The really dangerous things like posion and disease the shammie totem takes care of so for the most part these are a luxury in PVE and probably a must have in PVP.