Your Play Experience - How Important is Disease?

Hey folks! As some of you may know, I have a ton of homebrew content I'm always working on, and one of those things right now is a revised goblin PC race.

My goblins are basically garbage-eating, trash-recycling communists—think equal parts goblin and womble, gobwomble if you will—and one of the things I'd like to give them is a complete disease immunity. (Eat trash live free!)

To me, this is a very minor thing; I don't think I've ever had a disease seem like a real threat, either as a GM or as a PC. That leaves me feeling like I might have an unfairly low opinion of how strong this ability would actually be. It seems to be thrown in on several epic-level abilities as gravy, but I don't think that's a fair indicator of its value since those abilities are primarily about other things. Revenants can get it for a paragon feat, but even that feat also comes with poison resistance, so it seems like the disease part isn't worth all that much on its own.

So, in your experience, how important are diseases in 4e? Assuming a neutral setting, would you go very far out of your way to be immune to all diseases?

Thanks in advance!

Minor in my experience these are heroes after all, remove affliction is a level 8 ritual and you could allow a martial type a martial practice called "sweat it out" to do some sort of athletic confrontation with the disease they might go back into a cave to avoid interacting with others and engage in extreme athletics to pump up their systems so they are literally fighting off the disease. Probably generate super amounts of Cu Chulainn body heat ie self induced fever doing it.

A character who had pure disease immunity is just narrower and less vivid perhaps

Thanks! Yeah, between here and the other places I've asked, people seem to think it's not a big deal unless you're playing very gritty—and I think 4e is poorly suited to gritty anyway, so I don't mind that. (Besides which, this is goblins we're talking about, so in a gritty game they will probably have roleplay bias to contend with and could use every advantage they can get!)

Now if I could just decide what I want to do with their race power...

Fox Lee wrote:

Thanks! Yeah, between here and the other places I've asked, people seem to think it's not a big deal unless you're playing very gritty—and I think 4e is poorly suited to gritty anyway, so I don't mind that. (Besides which, this is goblins we're talking about, so in a gritty game they will probably have roleplay bias to contend with and could use every advantage they can get!)

Now if I could just decide what I want to do with their race power...

There was something I believe called 4th Core that demonstrated how gitty you might take 4e if you were so inclined it is not my cuppa but it could be done I am sure removing those raise dead and remove affliction and disease rituals and such are on the list