1. #1

    The drain life conundrum

    Looking at the new Dragonflight talents for locks, I'm overall pretty excited and optimistic.

    One aspect that sticks out like a sore thumb is how drain life is being treated as a class ability when it's tuned around affliction multiplying its effect by 750% then using it as an aoe with soul rot. I just don't think it's realistic to balance this for affliction and also make drain life useful to demo/destro at the same time.

    There are several class wide talents dedicated to drain life, including one that blocks demonic circle. At this point it seems like it would make more sense to treat drain life as an affliction spell and use the class talents to give a drain effect to spells demo/destro would use.

  2. #2
    Herald of the Titans enigma77's Avatar
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    Drain life is useful for all warlocks.

  3. #3
    Respectfully, you're wrong
    Its easy to tune drain life with purely class related talents. The only buff it gains from affliction is soul rot aoe, and the infrequent agony stacks talent. While powerful, its easy to tune its healing in pvp in any number of ways, and its infrequent enough that the power isn't game breaking.

    Its a very useful tool for all locks and should be kept as such, especially with its current power level it can save your life even in pve, rarely, if a healer misses his timings or you got hit by bad stuff. It's also very nice for soloing tough elites with mechanics that do unavoidable dmg.

  4. #4
    Channel demonfire should be a drain life replacement with leech

  5. #5
    I don't think we will see AoE Drain life as a viable build. It was a cheesy ability in BfA, it was cheese in SL and it never really saw play even as NF.

    I don't think it will be viable in DF either, regardless of buffs from the class tree, which are mostly self heal related anyway. Agony just doesn't deal damage fast enough.
    Last edited by LordVargK; 2022-08-23 at 06:53 PM.

  6. #6
    Blademaster Caligs's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by LordVargK View Post
    I don't think we will see AoE Drain life as a viable build. It was a cheesy ability in BfA, it was cheese in SL and it never really saw play even as NF.

    I don't think it will be viable in DF either, regardless of buffs from the class tree, which are mostly self heal related anyway. Agony just doesn't deal damage fast enough.
    Obviously going to depend on tuning, but something like this might make a viable drain life aoe build
    https://www.wowhead.com/beta/talent-...VFKlWIKRQBgEBU

  7. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by Caligs View Post
    Obviously going to depend on tuning, but something like this might make a viable drain life aoe build
    https://www.wowhead.com/beta/talent-...VFKlWIKRQBgEBU
    The problem is, that this scales so horribly. Obviously it's not viable in ST, but even in AoE you only get one buffed AoE Drain life every Soul Rot window. So every ~45seconds. That's not that good. And casting more than one Lifedrain on each Soul Rot, resets the inevitable demise buff. I can't really see that work.

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