drain soul nerf

[Deleted]

Drain Soul now causes double damage if the target is below 25% health, down from 4 times the normal damage.

Blizzard didnt anounce they would be nerfin drain soul.They only said they'd nerf searing pain which they did.I really didnt see this one coming.Our dps seemed fine.not too high not too low.Shame really.i really liked jumping up recount liek crazy after 25% and having ppl whisper me wtf u was 5th the whole fight and u came first in the last 25%.To be honest though id prefer they took away the whole ''i make insane dps in the last 25%'' and just balance our dps throughout the whole fight to be in par with the rest of the pure dps classes.Like our tier 11 looks wasnt enough of a let down they had to go and do this.

PS.make contests for tiers already so ppl can actually design and vote themselves what tiers they want.
PS2. remove our ''execute phase'' and buff our dps throughout the fight(i know some will disagree im just stating an opinion dont flame or anything ty)

Edit: DPS Ranking as of the moment based on the EJ forums is as follows
Destruction : 16697
Demonology : 15761
Affliction : 15301

[Yuanrang]

Well, Execution phases are all good and well, but they do complicate things in the long run with things like encounters (Yogg) or simply balancing damage output through an entire combat cycle, whether it's PvP or PvE.

I grew fond of Drain Soul and Soul Fire for Affliction and Demonology back when I used to raid, although I still don't think either execute complemented their talent tree very well. It's not very fun to feel like you're backloaded up until the execute phase, it makes you feel a tad limited because you're performing subpar up until a certain point, then everything is balanced out.

Anyway, even if it's nerfed now, they might or might not adjust it once 4.0.3 hits and we're all level 85, entering T11 raids. You just need to wait and see how things get balanced @ 85, there's really not much use in caring too much about now because no matter what, the 30 new talent trees given to us in 4.0.1 will mean that they'll never get stuff balanced for level 80 without messing up some core things they probably don't want to (and shouldn't) tamper with.

I'd honestly rather have them get things right for level 85 then fix it for level 80 when everything is about to change anyway, and by that, I mean that I don't really want to wait half a damn year for one spec to be viable (Destruction before Ulduar) like in WOTLK, just because some people couldn't accept that change was in the air.

They'll band-aid some stuff, but they're not going to balance things properly. C'est la vie.

[Deleted]

True.Blizz did say they are balancing things around lvl85 and not 80 and until cata things will be confusing.So simply on the assumption that things will be balanced in cata nerfing drain soul could only mean our dps throughout the fight will be more and that could only mean we wont be sitting in the middle of recount till execute phase.So actually this could be a good thing as i wasnt too fond of the execute idea myself although i did enjoy the occasional pwning of other classes on recount in a matter of seconds during the execute phase

[Deleted]

And I think Drain Soul was already nerfed. Yesterday in icc it was critting for me for MAX 35k. A week earlier in ptr it was critting for 70k etc. It's just hotfixed without correct tooltips etc. Meh..

[Varteras]

OP, you may want to take a couple things into consideration regarding the Drain Soul nerf.

1) Drain Soul can crit now.

2) Affliction gets 25% extra shadow damage. This should make Drain Soul scale with spellpower much better. So as gear levels increase Drain Soul will get more damage output than it did from gear increases in WotLK.

3) Mastery points will likely be abundant on gear in Cataclysm. I found greens at 80 that were increasing my mastery in the beta. Affliction gets a 13% increase to periodic damage right at 80 and it goes up by 1.6% for every mastery rating you get. It's very likely that this will easily exceed 20% extra periodic damage.

4) Dark Intent at 83. Giving you 3% haste and the possibility of indefinitely having 9% increased periodic damage.

5) Demon Soul at 85. With a Felhunter (which Affliction will be using at 85) popping this skill will get you 20% increased periodic damage for 20 seconds.

So with all of that considered it's easy to see why Blizzard nerfed Drain Soul. As gear levels increased it was probably becoming a problem where Affliction would get to a point of absolutely decimating the DPS charts during the execute phase. Heroism, an Eradication proc, haste from gear, Dark Intent, and the haste gained from the raid buffs could easily cause Drain Soul to do 5 ticks of damage in around 7 seconds down to as low as 5 seconds. Could you imagine the insane damage that would come from still doing quadruple damage plus the increases from mastery rating, Dark Intent, and Demon Soul along with being able to crit and in Cataclysm raid gear?