Warlocks trading health for damage is just so iconic to me that having no way to trade health for damage in modern just makes the class feel so toothless and tepid, like a Diet Mage. It’s so iconic to damage yourself as warlock and it synergizes naturally into your abilities like healthstone and drain life. Life Tap is absolutely iconic and i audibly gasped when i found out they removed it from retail.
Even if they dont want to bring back lifetap as mana isnt really a mechanic anymore, i wouldnt mind a rework. Something like Lifetap giving you a temporary damage boost like that artifact trait in legion. But what would be even cooler is if each spec had their own ways to trade health for damage;
Destruction could get Hellfire back as the spec is currently slow in AoE anyway. Make it apply immolations and generate soulstones to then spend on Rain of Fire.
Affliction could get a new ability that applies all their DoTs at once to the target at the cost of health, like Soul Swap but you dont need to store it in advance and it has no cooldown, to make the spec faster especially in dungeons.
Demonology could get a rework to Power Siphon to have no cooldown but instead trade health for charges of Demonic Core.
Even then, i would still like to see lifetap back as i think having a baseline, universal core class ability to trade away health for damage would be important, it’s really core to Warlocks class fantasy for me and the class just doesnt feel the same without the ability to kill myself for big damage.
thank u
:>
No. This is a terrible idea in todays game.
4 Likes
They attempted to reintegrate the trading HP for damage thing back into affliction warlock with soul tap in the 1st version of Dragonflight talents and it was the absolute worst so I hope this concept stays shelved
2 Likes
Didn’t we only really had two ways to trade health for damage? Hellfire for AoE and Life Tap for mana? Life Tap became useless after the mana redesign and the only reason we needed it in the first place was poor balancing. Hellfire was ok in the right circumstances, but nothing crazy.
I wouldn’t call a healthstone as something you’d use to heal yourself because you’re hurting yourself. You can only use it once per fight. It’s like a bonus health potion, not a drain life. Speaking of drain life, you’d do so little damage during the drain life phases that you’d probably lose out on any DPS gained from abilities that hurt you.
I would just like to point out that we never had the ability to “kill ourselves for big damage”. We’d have to Life Tap and would get enough mana to cast 3-4 normal spells. That’s not big damage.
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The idea of life tapping into a ret/warr/fw team sounds unpleasant.
No thank you.
I think changing soul burn to cost health would work and fit this fantasy. Having it cost a shard causes the cost to be very disproportionate to each spec.
Destro takes forever to build shards so it’s kinda costly
Afflictions shards are entirely rng so it’s very costly to them
And demo builds shards with shadow bolt so it costs almost nothing to us
It’s weird.
The health cost would have to be low though, like 5% or something. Having it cost 20% would kill it for pvp
This would hurt high end gameplay and the trade off for fantasy is not a good idea.
It’s an extremely outdated mechanic.
Uh what?
Demo builds with demonbolt actually.
Or it can stay as designed.
It’s both. I’m simply highlighting that demo has far more shards to spend on soul burn than Afflic or destro, making the cost of soul burn steeper if you don’t play demo.
Affliction in particular since they have no way to intentionally generate a shard outside of sniping.
Demo also spends 3 shards on hand so it still affects demo. The effect on all three is extremely minimal.
Affliction isn’t affected that much either.
suppose if we had the levels of crazy self-heals that we did with drain-soul in legion, it could work. But not in today’s WoW i’d say
Yeah no thanks. I prefer to spend other people health.
1 Like