Haunt uptime and drain twisting.

#1 - June 20, 2012, 6:15 p.m.

In the numbers feedback thread a question was asked whether using Drain Soul instead of Malefic Grasp to generate shards above 80% in order to maintain Haunt on the target was intended (i.e. drain twisting).

GC response:

06/19/2012 08:14 PMPosted by Ghostcrawler
Haunt is balanced around Nightfall procs. While it may currently be a small DPS upgrade (3%?) to swap Drain Soul and Malefic Grasp, the intent is that you use Drain Soul to generate shards when you need to hit a burst window or of course below 20%.

I'm concerned that the Dev team doesn't seem to think Warlocks are going to chase a 3% dps increase. A 3% increase in dps is a lot. In the previous and current talent trees we have talents that require a significant talent sink to increase dps by 3%. What player would bypass a talent that would give that much of an increase in damage?

History has taught us that players will do anything to squeak out even a 1% increase in damage.

Heck we have a version of drain twisting on live now - I'm sure pet twisting isn't intended but it's an expected part of the rotation.

I might be missing something or not understanding something (I can be dense), but thinking that drain twisting isn't going to be the rotation for affliction locks because it's only a "small dps upgrade" is disregarding how players play.

Again, if something has gone over my head please explain it to me.

Ghostcrawler

Game Designer

#99 - June 23, 2012, 12:01 a.m.

Haunt is balanced around Nightfall procs. While it may currently be a small DPS upgrade (3%?) to swap Drain Soul and Malefic Grasp, the intent is that you use Drain Soul to generate shards when you need to hit a burst window or of course below 20%.

I feel like my statement was confusing. Let me try again:

-- Haunt is balanced around Nightfall procs. We don't assume you can keep Haunt up 100% of the time.
-- Currently (meaning at this moment on beta) it may be a small DPS increase to swap Malefic Grasp for Drain Soul. This small increase has led players to speculate that you're supposed to do that.
-- You aren't.
-- The primary intent is that you use Drain Soul in execute rage.
-- The secondary intent is that if you know a part of the fight is coming up when you absolutely need to kill something, that you can drop your DPS by using Drain Soul to build up shards to keep Haunt up 100% of the time during that window. This will hurt your sustained DPS, so if that is all you care about, don't do it. Your friends may yell at you though if you can't beat the encounter.
-- If the temptation to twist channels is still there, we will keep nerfing Drain Soul until that is not the case. At some point however, we will discourage locks from using Drain Soul for the burst window scenario mentioned above, because the total DPS loss wouldn't be worth the momentary DPS gain. That would be unfortunate.
-- Therefore we have to be careful not to make Drain Soul too good or too bad.
-- If that means that very skilled locks can occasionally sneak in a Drain Soul for an extra shard for a small DPS gain, we're okay with that. If it looks like lots of warlocks are trying to do that rotation though, we'll continue to nerf Drain Soul.

Ghostcrawler

Game Designer

#113 - June 23, 2012, 1:08 a.m.

I think you meant to say " we will keep BUFFing MG until that is not the case" and " If it looks like lots of warlocks are trying to do that rotation though, we'll continue to BUFF MG"

I see what you did there, but we also don't want MG to be too large a portion of damage (including the haste benefit) because then you're even more dependent on shards. We still want lots of damage to come from the dots themselves. (We could buff MG and dots of course.)

We could just prevent DS from working above 20%, but then we'd lose the burst potential.

So we won't have accurate numbers until MG gets fixed.

There are some dot clipping issues with MG at the moment.