Harvest Life, what role is it meant to have, will it succeed?

[Ogawdspider]

We are doing fine this whole season with MG, I don't get it why people think channeling and casting is impossible?

I don't think people are saying casting was impossible. I think they are just saying it isn't easy. Not that casting during pvp has ever been easy.

[Werst]

Harvest life as a filler or reactive defense is fine. I'm a touch worried they have to make it so strong due to how little you can use channeled spells in pvp. That being the delta between casting freely (pve) and dodging 2-3x interrupts/stunDR/silenceDR/and misc other cc's. Meaning when you have 9K haste w' no 5% buff in pvp with itemized 522 gear vs being 550-576+ gear 13-18K haste and 700K HP casting freely its a pretty big swing.

In other words...if its situationally OP and balanced normally it tends to get nerfed, usually overnerfed, and often with collateral other things broken in the process. Fixes seldom happen and not for major patches if not entire expansions. Thus I might have preferred losing a bit off the top but have it be uninterruptable and castable on the move. Something that makes it easier to use vs people trying to prevent you using it but trimming down the top end delta that induces nerf beatings. That said, it will be very good for solo'ing old stuff. I can see a DA drain tank coming back vs trying to soul link to a voidlord and DL/ember tap though it. Especially since soul leech no longer seems to work on pets in terms of shielding so your pet will get destroyed far easier.

TLDR = you'll see tons of people crying about unkillable locks in bgs or whatever when they get to cast it but you'll see locks destroyed in arenas when thug or random melee cleaves just mongo them down without a tick going off.

[TyrantWave]

I'm gonna enjoy it for demo tanking, I know that for sure.

[Grubjuice]

It has previously been changed to prevent it competing with the normal fillers.
It is not intended to be that.
If it starts being competitive again, then it will be adjusted again.

it almost goes without saying, but now that it has been made talent, the effectiveness of talented DL against our three fillers has to be taken in the context of the other two talents. Since it costs a talent, it can afford be 'strong' because you lose the opportunity of using the either of the other two talents.

For example, on the one hand, Soul Leech provides shielding (which is stronger than healing for a variety of reasons) and doesn't reduce our dps by interfering with our ability to use our spec fillers. and on the other hand, DL, as you say, will always be adjusted down whenever it's damage is comparable or exceeds the filler it is replacing. Given these two points, in order for the HL talent to be able to compete with the soul leech talent, it still needs to be strong enough to be viable after you've balanced the dps loss for not casting a spec-filler and relative healing value of each talent.

Looking at some basic Napkin math (comparing DL to SB for Demo as a model spec) DL does about 90% of the damage of a Shadow Bolt, scales 5% less efficiently with SP, and does not proc Wimps; so it will alway be a DPS loss to use DL over SB (for similar reason DL is also always a dps loss over Inc, and MG), but if DL is both glyphed and talented it heals nearly 5% of your health every second (scaling smoothly with haste as channels do).

As for the dps loss, Using DL over SB constitutes about a 10% dps loss of a portion of your rotation that itself only accounts for about 5% of your total dmg done (since SB itself is so weak), so it's really only a fraction of a dps loss to use DL over SB whenever Demonic Calling does not need to be proc'd, which is probably worth healing it does in a large enough number of contexts to justify choosing HL over Soul Leech, and using DL to replace Shadow Bolt occassionally.

A channel like DL also has some mechanical benefits over casttime spell like SB, when casttime spells are interrupted all the time spent casting before the interrupt is waste, Channels on the otherhand are useful from the moment they cast up until they are interrupted, meaning you can get the half the benefit of half a DL but no benefit from only half a cast of SB.