Affliction, soul shards for haunt. do you use drain soul other than hp<=20% ?

[Mephista]

gonna start raiding this week and i'm wondering how important 100% uptime on haunt is.
i don't nearly get enough nightfall procs to keep it up for 5+ mins, so the question is: should i use drain soul if i'm running out of soul shards even though the boss hp is over 20%?
the leading affliction spec over at simcraft.org doesn't do this, and seem to be doing fairly well . still i'm not quite sold here.
so, drain soul on demand to get 100% uptime on haunt. or just go with malefic grasp till 20%.

[Deleted]

If it's tank 'n spank, no. Under certain circumstances I guess there might be situations where you want to do it - I've drained soul on one of Gara'jals totems before going into the spirit realm so I was able to get a SB:SS off on an add (and then drain him once he's below 20 to max out).

In a standard dps rotation it's a loss as far as I'm aware.

[Mephista]

ok thank you

[xskarma]

If it's tank 'n spank, no. Under certain circumstances I guess there might be situations where you want to do it - I've drained soul on one of Gara'jals totems before going into the spirit realm so I was able to get a SB:SS off on an add (and then drain him once he's below 20 to max out).

In a standard dps rotation it's a loss as far as I'm aware.

It is a loss, no doubt about it.

Getting free shards by Draining low health mobs <20% is just sensible. More shards = more Haunt = more damage. With a steady supply of adds like on Will of the Emporer it also means we can use SB:SS more speeding up our target switchign and multi dotting. Other than that, only in emergencies, and only knowing you either had terrible, terrible RNG or were not prudent enough with your shard management to make sure you had a shard available when you needed it.

[Ericprydz]

What ever happened to all the talk about drain twisting and Blizzard saying they are fine with it being a 3%ish increase for those that min/max?

[David Cavalheiro]

What ever happened to all the talk about drain twisting and Blizzard saying they are fine with it being a 3%ish increase for those that min/max?

They nerf it, because wasn't intended to use Drain Soul like people were doing it, only <20% boss hp.