Originally Posted by
Osanger
The goal post have been there from the outset i'm afraid mate, how you originally interpreted my comment is where the confusion lies here. When i read the blue posts their wording opened up an avenue for future change that could result in the buff becoming more maintenancy, if you choose to see a different meaning behind my words, even though i'm telling you the opposite then that's your issue, not mine.
You seem to think a maintenance buff needs to be up 100% of the time for it to qualify as one, which is totally wrong. A maintenance buff is any buff a class should look to keep up for as long as possible because they are balanced around the damage increase it produces. Now with the changes each soul produces 5s of buff uptime so you can stack them for increased duration, currently unless there is a consistent flow of mobs to kill this buff duration is not going to exceed 10s due to the spawn/despawn rate of souls "occasionally escaping" the artifact. If that rate is increased we will creep towards wanting to stack as many souls as possible to maximize the buff uptime. Which is the whole concern behind my OP, if we are balanced around this damage buff it is just going to feel like mana tap as we want it up all the time.
The whole reason it is good atm is because it is so short, therefore gaming around trinket procs/other buff windows will produce more damage. If the possible uptime far extends those type of damage windows, then not having it up will water down the power of those procs over the duration of the fight because of the RNG i.e if you can have 20s of buff uptime but you are waiting on that trinket to proc and it doesn't until 21s later, clearly to wait would probably be the wrong decision. All it would take to create a situation like this is 2 more souls than we currently have possible on ST.