Warlock: Harvest Life

[winterfox72]

Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)

Talents
Harvest Life no longer replaces Drain Life. Harvest Life is now a passive talent that increases Drain Life damage by 50%, and healing by 150%. The talent no longer turns the ability into an area-of-effect spell.
For Affliction Warlocks, the Soulburn empowered version of Drain Soul also receives a 50% increase to damage and 150% increase to healing.

Does anyone else really think that this sucks. I farm alot of old content for items, cloth etc. Its a very useful spell. I am loving playing my lock. From BC to the end of WOTLK my main was my druid, then they changed them so much I hated it. They gimped the crap out of them. So I made my lock my main all the way through Cata till now. And here goes Blizzard again messing with classes that they dont need to. I just dont understand why they would break something that is working great.

[ComputerNerd]

Because we do not understand the reason does not mean that it is not a justified or necessary fix.
If we got some reasoning from blizzard then maybe we could judge that better.

[Applenazi]

I am kind of amazed anyone was actually using this terrible talent. I mean even your example, farming old content for items? I couldn't think of a less efficient way to do that than AOE drain life spam... Just go Destro, rain of fire everything in sight, unlimited embers, unlimited healing, unlimited ember cleave.

[Kathranis]

It's a sucky change because it takes out what made the talent cool, conceptually, to begin with (draining multiple enemies at the same time). It basically turns the talent into "Improved Drain Life," which is as uncool as a talent can get.

[Abysal]

On the flip side, this makes Drain life semi-useful in PvP and on bosses when you need some self healing as the damage will be ~50% of spell power instead of ~17% of spell power, and the healing will be 5% as opposed to 3-4.5%. With the Glyph, the healing goes up to 6%. With 500k+ health locks, that's 30k HPS. Not trivial in the least.

Is it better than the other 2 on average? Probably not, but if you need some on demand self healing at unpredictable times, it is certainly going to be useful and won't make you feel like you're doing no damage at all.

Also, this might bring back "old school" drain tanking.

Also, for Affliction with the MG nerf, the damage isn't even that far behind. I'd have to check the math, but the MG damage itself (as opposed to the extra DoT ticks) may actually be less than Drain Life with Harvest talent now.

[winterfox72]

I am kind of amazed anyone was actually using this terrible talent. I mean even your example, farming old content for items? I couldn't think of a less efficient way to do that than AOE drain life spam... Just go Destro, rain of fire everything in sight, unlimited embers, unlimited healing, unlimited ember cleave.

I run Demonology and it works great with metamorphosis using hellfire and Harvest life. I can still use my minion without worrying about it killing mobs and me not being able to loot.

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Because we do not understand the reason does not mean that it is not a justified or necessary fix.
If we got some reasoning from blizzard then maybe we could judge that better.

It might have something to do with what Ghost crawler said last week "Adding additional spell effects for classes is nice, but it has to be balanced with adding even more visual noise to raid encounters. Bosses and player skills that are used less frequently will likely get the more impressive effects, rather than the filler spells used in rotations." Maybe its too much visually..I dont know, but I love the spell myself..I love playing Demo and I wish they would leave it alone. The only other AOE Demo has is hellfire and because it causes damage to you as well as the mobs..It makes for a really bad way to farm.

[Szarala]

I am kind of amazed anyone was actually using this terrible talent. I mean even your example, farming old content for items? I couldn't think of a less efficient way to do that than AOE drain life spam... Just go Destro, rain of fire everything in sight, unlimited embers, unlimited healing, unlimited ember cleave.

Before it's damage was nerfed in 5.2, it was actually a better AOE option than SoC for small trash.

[Deleted]

On the flip side, this makes Drain life semi-useful in PvP and on bosses when you need some self healing as the damage will be ~50% of spell power instead of ~17% of spell power, and the healing will be 5% as opposed to 3-4.5%. With the Glyph, the healing goes up to 6%. With 500k+ health locks, that's 30k HPS. Not trivial in the least.

Is it better than the other 2 on average? Probably not, but if you need some on demand self healing at unpredictable times, it is certainly going to be useful and won't make you feel like you're doing no damage at all.

Also, this might bring back "old school" drain tanking.

Also, for Affliction with the MG nerf, the damage isn't even that far behind. I'd have to check the math, but the MG damage itself (as opposed to the extra DoT ticks) may actually be less than Drain Life with Harvest talent now.

well if you use GOSac regularly and the glyph as afflic and use soulburn when you drain life in ilvl 540ish gear, you can easily reach 108k hps, whiich is healer lvl hps, you can basically heal yourself 540kish hp back in 5 secs.

[Eroginous]

Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)

Talents
Harvest Life no longer replaces Drain Life. Harvest Life is now a passive talent that increases Drain Life damage by 50%, and healing by 150%. The talent no longer turns the ability into an area-of-effect spell.
For Affliction Warlocks, the Soulburn empowered version of Drain Soul also receives a 50% increase to damage and 150% increase to healing.

Does anyone else really think that this sucks. I farm alot of old content for items, cloth etc. Its a very useful spell. I am loving playing my lock. From BC to the end of WOTLK my main was my druid, then they changed them so much I hated it. They gimped the crap out of them. So I made my lock my main all the way through Cata till now. And here goes Blizzard again messing with classes that they dont need to. I just dont understand why they would break something that is working great.

I don't know about you, but Harvest Life is a garbage talent now, and it will be in 5.4. It doesn't do enough healing to justify taking it over Dark Regeneration. They designed it after the old 'drain life' warlock rotations from BC, without realizing that Drain Life heals for shit since Wotlk.

You are better off just killing your opponent than trying to outlive him by spamming Drain Life. The first tier itself clearly shows you that Blizzard wasn't even awake when they designed those talents.

[winterfox72]

So far I am hating the change to Harvest life. It seems to heal me a little better, but doesnt seem to affect Soul Link like it should. The mobs on timeless Isle seem to destroy my pet and I am having to resummon every mob.
I solo Onyxia every week and before I could use harvest life on all the whelps and it was great. Now I can only target them one at a time. Sure I still have Hellfire but it burns my HP as they are all attacking me. I just feel gimped.

[ati87]

The only people I saw taken Harvest Life where alts, their was absolutely no justification to take anything else then Soul Leach.

[winterfox72]

I can see how the shield would be nice, but how do you replenish you and your pets HP. It seems like Soul Leach would just delay death where as Harvest life could heal You and Your pet.

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I did just notice that soul Link was changed to "Soul Link now transfers 20% of damage taken by the Warlock to their pet, and 3% of all damage dealt by the Warlock will be returned as healing for the Warlock and their pet. This ability is always active while the Warlock's pet is active.". So I guess its ok to lose the AOE aspect if we can AOE with Hellfire and it heals us and our pet except that "Hellfire damage has been reduced by 20%." So really they took away one AOE and nerfed to only other we had. Does anyone have a better rotation for farming and running older content?

[Zynx]

Yeah, it was niche, but there were situations where it was useful. And the visual was cool. This new version is basically the same thing: very niche. I guess it's better for Affliction in an Arena, but even then I think most people would go to Dark Regen. Prefer the old one myself.