Level 10
Rain of Destruction [R2]
Cooldown reduced from 100 to 70 seconds.
Mana cost reduced from 90 to 80.
Level 16
Darkness Within [Trait]
New functionality: Dealing 600 damage to enemy Heroes causes the next cast of Life Tap to cost no Health and grant Gulādan 25% Spell Power for 5 seconds.
I have been picking up Darkness Within for a while before they made this change. To me, someone who has a high level Guldan, it seems like this is a huge buff. Not just a small shift in how things work.
I have played around with it and once you get a handle on how it works Guldan suddenly is a very scary mage. He could always do a lot of damage with Corruption but if he missed you knew you were safe for a little bit. With the new Darkness Within everything hurts.
The old version was actually a trade off. It made you Tap for your next ability to do increased damage. Which could be a good thing. The new version is dealing āxā damage and everything you do within the time frame is buffed.
Rain is still meme and will always be unless they make it completely broken. Fear is just too good in every way, so unless they make something even better than fear, thereās not way Rain will ever be picked for a serious Guldan play.
Itās hard to give up Ruinous Affliction because of how good it is when it comes to bursting someone down, but I can see Darkness Within being picked in some situations for a more sustained damage build.
Rain of Disappointment still lives up to the name, trash compared to fear. The new 16 I think is solid. Itās half the bonus on both Q and E from the other 16 talents but itās on demand with lesser requirement than either of the alternatives. You can have it up stored for fight and hitting 2 people with Q gives proc to it again and it saves you some health from your trait conversions on top of it all.
Break Even: Hit 5 ppl constantly with Fel Flame on Darkness Within buffed Fel Flame.
so yaā¦ other than that damage wise it doesnt compete, but in terms of keeping you going since you have buffed Life Drainā¦ buffed Health Stone (possibly if you picked it)ā¦ and buffed Consume Soul (if you picked that one), then you have a lot of sustain just like before they changed how it works. Only difference now is the spell power can stay up easier and doesnt hurt you when you tap.
Yeah, thatās what I thought, Darkness gives more sustain healing/damage, while Ruinous gives more burst. But because Guldan is drafted for the burst on his E and not to have incredible sustain, we know what will be best in high levels/competitive. But I can totally see Darkness being good for SL overall especially lower levels.
I wouldnāt count that much on this because you donāt want to stand still for that long.
Rain of Destruction is still a useless heroic and a mere cd reduction like that will not change that, and just to prove this Iāll list several buffs that they COULD have made to it by now that would at least make it a plausible ability:
-Meteors home in on enemies afflicted by Corruption within itsā radius
-Passive: Fel Flame reduces RoDās Cd by 5s for each hero it hits
-Cd reduced from 100s to 20s, Mana cost increased to from 70 to 100
-Meteors are now larger
-Unlimited range
-Channeled, but during the channel Gulādan becomes in invulnerable for the duration.
-No Longer has a Cd and can channel indefinitely, but costs 50mana per second and additionally, can life tap during the channel.
Itās just astounding that they made such a creative and useful change to Darkness Within and make a boring and ultimately useless change to RoD in the same patch.
The change to Darkness within addresses one of the biggest issues with Gulādanās build viability: his Q buildās mana (and therefore health) thirstiness.
See, Gulādanās Q is really strong due to its 4.5% damage scaling. However, its low cooldown means that dealing its damage consistently to optimize its impact can severely tax Gulādanās health reserves.
Because he had few talents to affect his ability to balance his mana and health more effectively, it was usually safer to pick the more one-and-done Corruption playstyle, which often had just as much impact without the issue of it severely hampering Gulādanās survivability. This is why his E build was so astronomically more popular than his Q build.
I suggested about a month or 2 ago on another thread about Gulādan that Fel Flameās build would actually be worth picking if they added a talent that would reduce its mana/health-thirstiness, like something that refunds mana on hero hits or the like. This new version of Darkness Within effectively does just that by removing the health cost of Life Tap after hitting 2-3 heroes with Fel Flame, greatly increasing Gulādanās ability to keep up his sustained damage.
The only problem I have with this change is that it should be at a lower level, preferably level 7 (though accordingly weaker). At level 16, it has to compete with one of Gulādanās normal Q build talents, Rampant Hellfire.
Considering that the main purpose of this change is to allow Gulādan to get more use out of his Fel Flame talents, forcing players to choose between Darkness Within and Rampant Hellfire is counterproductive. I know Iād certainly never take RH over DW if they were at the same level, because +25% damage on all my abilities almost permanently at no cost to myself is way better than +50% damage on a single ability that will burn through my own mana and health too quickly to get any comparable sustained value out of.
At level 7, DW would not overlap with any other talents in his Q build, removing this issue entirely. DW would just need to be nerfed slightly to bring it in line with other talents at this level. Hell, they could pretty much get rid of the spell damage bonus entirely and itād still be a big improvement to his current Q build.
question on that then because personally even when i went Q build before i was never really mana starved. i mean maybe i just manage things better.
anywayā¦
in Q build Rampant Hellfire is on the same tier. So if you wanted to go full Q build why not go with that?
for Fel Flame, Rampant Hellfire gives you more damage being up to 50% ability spell power vs Darkness Within 25% general spell power.
personally i mean i see how you can think its for the Q build but the talent has always been there. its always been part of the Drain build primarily with the option to pick it up for other ones.
Fel Flame build is a front-loaded build, in 2 ways actually.
Fel Flameās build encourages you to dump all your damage out as fast as possible on the enemy, then retreat before your low health allows your opponents to pick you off. You basically try to burn down your opponent at the start of a fight so your allies can follow up and finish them off. After the first ~4 Q>Q>D rotations, you enter the yellow zone for your health, about 50%. Another rotation or 2 and youāre in the red, low enough most heroes could pick you off pretty easily if you arenāt already running away.
Basically, your ability to safely keep up your sustained damage for any significant length of time is pretty limited with this build.
Additionally, the majority of Fel Flameās build does not significantly improve on what is already there, at least not in comparison to Corruptionās build.
Late-game, casting Fel Flame on cooldown can easily net you 250+ DPS in an AoE. Thatās close to what many Rangers can deal to a single target, and Rangers are the ones who are supposed to excel in DPS. You donāt really need the talents to get serious impact out of Fel Flame since itās already so strong.
Corruption, on the other hand, is a pretty wimpy ability early game, but its talents make it scale into a monster late game. It is also significantly less taxing on your mana/health, which a much higher cooldown but comparable damage output late-game nonetheless.
If you could choose between greatly improving on a weak aspect of your kit or only slightly improving a strong one, the sensible choice would be to greatly improve the weak aspect.
This is why E build has been both more popular and more successful than Q build for a while now.
Because DW now also removes the health cost of Life Tap. It basically turns Gulādan into an infinite-ammo flamethrower. The max number of Q>Q>D combos I could get out without bringing my own health into the yellow or red would become literally unlimited so long as I was consistently hitting at least 1 or 2 heroes with each cast of FF.
Rather than getting about 5 rotations of my Q>Q>D combo at 150% damage FFs out, I would absolutely prefer getting an unlimited number of those combos out at āonlyā 125% damage.
Weāre talking about an almost completely new talent now.
The Life Drain half of Darkness Within has been completely reworked. It no longer grants additional healing on Life Drain; instead, it removes the health cost of Life Tap. That makes Fel Flameās build far more appealing for the reasons I outlined above, but the talent is now completely useless for Life Drainās build.
The 25% increase to Spell Power INCREASES the healing of Life Drain. It stacks additively with Hunger For Power at 7, and multiplicatively with Harvest Life at 13.
Itās a solid option for Q builds, and the ONLY option for W builds. Note that a full channel + 1 Q is enough to proc the talent, and once itās procd, is enough to fulfill the damage requirement by itself.
it actually does
anything that gives flat spellpower is going to give a boost to healing abilities. this is also what i noted earlier in the thread. Health Stone, Consume Soul, and Life Drain all benefit from it with their healing. this has not changed except that its now 25% spellpower vs 30% spellpower since they nerfed it a little.
just to point out the per tick numbers of Drain itself though
@20 Drain = 103 per tick (untalented)
@20 Drain = 129 per tick (Darkness Within only)
thats an interesting point there that while Rampant can give āup to 50%ā extra damage it can be inconsistent with that damage output and has no other benefits. meanwhile the new Darkness Within is a more consistent 25% has the benefit of Tap not hurting you.
The change to Darkness Within is a straight nerf to his Life Drain build, because that was one of his most important talents and he could afford it for every ability including Rain of Destruction (the only build for which I used RoD, but it was an amazing siege tool).
Now that Darkness Within is damage and not health dependent, a Life Drain Gulādan has to choose between 3 talents with no synergy with that build at lv16.
The one thing I havenāt tested and which deserves to be tested is whether the increased damage from Darkness Within applies at the beginning of an ability or for every damage tick, ie whether a complete RoD would still be buffed by having it up during the cast like it used to be. Without that, itās a net nerf to RoD and not a small one.
Since Meph release when they changed spellpower functionality, it was the moment buff is applied, regardless when buffed ability was used (as it was before).
You proc DW with Q/E as before and finish combo with W. W is actually somewhat more effective because you dont lose hp every time you press D.
For RoD you have to meet the damage requirement twice, what shouldnt be difficult tbh. Main change is that you cant engage with RoD (if you want full RoD to be empowered). EDIT - actually, after reading talent description again, I think you can. There is no cd/time period limitation added, so it procs every 600 damage.
