What is the point of Drain Life (DL) next expansion?
Both the damage and healing of DL is, frankly, pathetic. It hits like a wet noodle. The spell is virtually useless for all 3 specs in both PVP and PVE unless you invest talent points into enhancing DL on Affliction.
Soul Rot (SR) makes DL worth pressing as a heal since it effectively multiplies the base healing by up to 6x. And Inevitable Demise (ID) does the same thing but only up to 3x base healing. It’s only when you combine these two talents that DL becomes a powerful heal.
Next expansion (as of the latest wowhead alpha talents) ID is being removed, and SR will now be a 60 second cooldown with no option to reduce it to 30 seconds. Furthermore, the Grim Feast talent is also being removed.
So I ask again, what is the point of Drain Life next expansion? Because as of the current alpha build DL is going to be just as useless on Affliction as it is on Destruction and Demonology on retail right now. This is also a massive PVP nerf to Affliction. Unless DL gets ASTRONOMICAL buffs to the base ability the dev(s) might as well just delete the spell and put it out of its misery.
If the dev(s) actually think this then there needs to be an addition to the tooltip that states something like: “Don’t put this ability on your bars unless you’re leveling up by questing outdoors”. Because the button does almost nothing at max level when geared because of the way the scaling of Drain Life works.
I can see you’re new to the forums so it’s good to remember that tone in a message gets lost really easily through text here. Couple that in with the fact that a lot of regular posters here lack social cues and/or have been thoroughly jaded by the culture of the game, and you’ll see why some conversations or responses can be so strange.
I agree. I find it a strange decision to remove Inevitable Demise rather than buffing it to be a meaningful damage (and healing) “cooldown” in PVE. They could have tucked it away as the final node under Soul Rot or something. Though in it’s current iteration it’s still a suboptimal choice in PVE so it would definitely need some buffs. Especially with the “nerf” to Soul Rot because of the 60 second cooldown.
Drain life could use some love for sure. It’s already tanking your dps to use it, the least it could do is be worth the trade off. Maybe with ID being removed it can afford to be buffed a bit.
Can swap it out for Accrued Vitality or Improved Healthstone (the leech one).
It has always bugged me how of all the classes in the game, the warlock tree has the least amount of spells that can crossover between each spec. Each lock spec might as well be its own class is how I feel sometimes. Minimal synergy exists with the class tree and the spec trees.
When did I ever state this? You need to slow down and read my post again. I’m asking what the point of the ability existing is. Because in its current iteration Drain Life does such little healing that it might as well not even exist. The dev(s) obviously intended the button to be a heal, hence the low damage and 5x healing multiplier on it. The ability should actually do meaningful healing for a 5 second channel that costs 15% mana. But ideally it would also do meaningful damage in PVE when combined with the various talents that enhance it.
Yes, it’s extremely concerning. Losing 30 seconds Soul Rot + Grim Feast is a hard hit to survivability no matter how you slice it. It’s ESPECIALLY prominent in PvP.
There are a couple of things Blizz could do with ID itself, but moving it to the class tree to make it spec-agnostic would be a boon for sure. Given that though, it would have to increase stacks via somewhat divergent means for the 3 specs, or it could just be given a universal gain x stacks per y seconds to keep it even and controlled. They other issue is the damage component; I favor stripping this out and letting the talent be a pure healing multiplier. Make it obvious that its for utility / survival and should be used as such and not confuse players into thinking its a psuedo-cooldown. I understand some like the idea of a strong drain, but I think that if ID is moved to the class tree we should focus on maximixing its utility.
I was referring to stripping the damage multiplier from ID the talent, not Drain Life itself. This is to comport it with Blizz’s stated philosophy of leaving damage throughput talents in the spec trees and leaving the class tree for utility and defense.
As it stands though ID is probably just gone and Drain Life will be left to languish until they come up with a different idea.