spiderella

Agreed, and it leads to some bizarre conclusions - in a mirrored 2v2 arena match, all other things being equal, a warlock with less stamina has a mathematical advantage over the other one.

In terms of PvE impact: essentially life tap nerfs will hurt other mana users as well as it changes the shadowpriest math for stacking groups (certainly for our average raid and I'm sure a lot of others), and this basically represents net raid DPS loss larger than a warlock's personal DPS loss from life tap downtime.

 

Akj

It is not about the impact but can you not see the conceptual flaw in this change? Would you not complain if stamina reduced your energy regeneration rate?

 

Tyrana

That would be something entirely different, it would lower my DPS. The scaling of Life Tap with sta does not.

 

thorin5

Having to Life Tap more frequently does lower your DPS though.

 

Gumibear

It does hurt our DPS because the mana return on test is so much lower than it is on live. Solo, my life taps return 1730 mana on live. They return 1404 mana on test. The gap remains once raid buffs are introduced, and we cannot feasibly increase our maximum mana to combat this change.

 

Chirality

Now just imagine rebalancing the entire game *again* for WotLK. A few more abilities per class, ten more talents? Trivial to balance, right. I'm actually constantly impressed with how close to balance arena is considering each class has some 10-20 abilities they can use. When a nerf to a single ability of a single class (Warlock Lifetap) causes this much of a shitstorm (have you seen the Test Realm Forum?) it really makes me fear for the future of this game.

 

Rouncer

except that its really not a PvE nerf, if you look at it the right way.

You need a certain minimum amount of health to survive encounters, which is actually pretty damn low (I've run with 9k hps buffed through every encounter in the game besides the mage-tanking ones), and then you have to take into account the need to lifetap. Then you look for pieces with more intellect on them and suddenly you are getting back more mana with every tap.

The 2 things have been completely separated by the change. Bigger mana pool equals less need to tap, less need to tap means your health pool can be a lot lower without sacrificing your ability to tap more often. Lower health pool equals less healing necessary to top you off. Sure you will want to keep a tanking set available with a lot of stamina but if you are tanking then they will be focus healing you and the additional damage from life tapping with all that health is nothing compared to what the boss will be smacking you for anyway.

Basically, welcome to the land of PvE cloth where everyone is squishy, please equip enough stamina to survive the encounter and then stack the rest in intellect to maximize your dps potential. Since once you have enough hps to survive the encounter any additional stamina is a complete waste of ibudget.

I'm wondering if this change will actually be enough to cause intellect to be valued over other traditional caster dps stats, since the more intellect you will have the more mana you will get with every tap and the less often you will have to tap to maintain your dps which means more time actually spent dpsing.

I bet a really good lock could use this change to boost their personal dps significantly, since 1 less tap every 30 seconds is an additional 100dps for a lock that is doing 2000 dps.

 

Tyrana

I didn't say the Life Tap change overall does not hurt your DPS, I said the Life Tap uses a percentage of your Health part of the change does not have an impact on your DPS.

 

Pyros

Yeah I think that was the issue with the change, that locks have to tap more for the same mana. At this point I don't think any lock would care if life tap wasted more health, but gave the same mana returns per GCD than currently, but it seems not to be the case.

Clearly confirms what I thought though, they nerfed lifetap and lifebloom in pve, based on pvp changes.

 

• Suggestive

What theoretical intellect gear are you talking about, because i'm sure not seeing it anywhere right now?

 

Tacitus

They should just do two things, in my opinion:

1) Make different rulesets for PVP and PVE
2) State that sorry, 1VS1 World PVP will never be balanced and we'll be using PVE rulesets for normal (or contested) zones.

Ahh... but what about our talents, such as Demonic Embrace, Fel Stamina or our favourite pet, the Imp and his Blood Pact buff (maybe even improved?). This is just a backwards change (I cooled down now, had to rant a bit).

Edit: oh and Fortitude, great.

Brotherhood, Peace, Unity

Welcome back, Comrade

 

Malan

Well if they just make any new ability in WoLK on a timer exceeding the arena cooldowns they solve the problem easily.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

Akj

Fixed.

 

Furio

An additional byproduct of the Life Tap nerf that I haven't seen discussed is the removal of the various ranks. Currently on Live, if I only need 400 mana, I can use Rank 1 and trade 400 life for that 400 mana. But, on PTR with the Nerf, there is only one rank. It is always 16% health for 16% mana. This has far reaching impacts in Arena because now a warlock whose current health is below 16% can not Life Tap for even a meager amount of mana return. Said warlock, unless healed, is effectively out of the match. While the same can be said of mages, realize that mages (and all other mana users) have superior passive mana regen options and greater mana efficiency.

I can learn to live with Life Tap scaling based on max hp and mp, but the removal of my ability to balance health loss, mana gain, and GCDs leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. "Balancing" an ability through removal of decision making further reduces "skill" required to excel.

 

◊ Praetorian

Less than 10k hp buffed when you can help it is a terrible idea for all Sunwell fights seen thus far.

A full-t6 warlock ends up at around 10k mana buffed. That leaves them strictly worse off than they were before this change. A tailoring-geared warlock ends up much, much worse off since they have barely less +dam than a t6 warlock, but much less +int.

Can you give examples of these amazing high-int alternative gear choices that are out there that don't involve a massive sacrifice of DPS?

 

swills

So we're all on the same page, and so we don't have people claiming it isn't a DPS nerf, can a Warlock who knows please confirm how much of a DPS loss a current T6 geared Warlock will take over say 5 min, 10 min & 15 min fights (I assume the longer the fight the worse the effect)? I'm sure there must be a spreadsheet somewhere that you plug numbers into and figure it out?

How much a nerf is this? 20 DPS? 50? 100?

 

• Playered

Why would you waste a GCD on a non-max rank LT when you dont need to? for Locs it seems to be "only use LT GCD when I have to as it lowers my DPS" thus downranking has no role in a PvE situation.

You can understand the reasoning on PvP with downranking, and having a higher hit to HP is perfectly 'fine', but including a much lower return on mana at the same time is... not that great, especially as in PvE you have a 2:1 ratio of sta/int on Warlock gear.

In PvE theres no real 'reason' to provide any significant boost to DPS, aside from potentially Affliction - thus making it give more mana than now (at a 1:1 conversion) would not be wise, unless there are other changes in the works.

 

Krazen

For me, Leulier shows about a 10-15 dps loss over a 6 minute stand and nuke fight.

I have openoffice, and the spreadsheet tends to bug out a bit for me, but that's probably a good ballpark figure.'

My current gearset has about 11k mana with Int and Kings.

Because warlocks have ice block, blink, and other survival talents/spells?

 

Cohren

The outcry about life tap comes from two sources. The first being the group of people who will always be there, those that cry just because a negative change to their class is occurring. This group has no real knowledge as to how this affects their class and they can not comprehend as to why this change was even introduced. The other group is educated player who spends his time actively taking part on these forums and other theorycrafting sites and tries to learn as much as possible about their class. Talking strictly about the second group of people I described, our main problems as Warlocks is that in its current state using stamina negatively effects the returns from life tap which to my knowledge is the only skill/spell in the game that as your gear improves, it gets worse. I keep seeing some people say "just stack intellect instead of stamina like all of us other casters" I just laugh when I see this because they say it as if it was an easy thing to do. Without Blizzard going back and re-itemizing basically everything including our T6 we have no real choices that will not greatly affect our DPS. These people want us to drop our 4 pieces of T6 while we try to farm up the 3 new pieces from Sunwell? This does not make any sense as the DPS loss would be too big and might even be detrimental to Raid DPS in Sunwell. Also there is a fundamental flaw in our talent tree's with this change and I think people especially of other classes overlook this. The flaws are that we have no talents that grant a Clearcasting state, return mana on crits or hits. There is only 1 talent that affects mana and that is a measly 5% reduce in mana cost to spells.

If the change had been 26% maximum hp converted to mana(1:1 ratio), hell even 30%, I am sure a majority of the community wouldn't even know there was a change to life tap. In fact I am sure there is a fraction of the Warlock community that would like to see the % even higher as that means less life tapping. What irks me is that there have been well thought out posts made by other Warlocks and non-Warlocks alike which clearly address the issues that a change of this nature cause and even have proposed great ideas such as making resilience increase the % amount of health taken and reducing the % mana received by life tap yet be it for bureaucratic reasons or others, Blizzard has kept the word mum and a lot of us are stuck in limbo so to speak as to the state of our class.

 

Tacitus

A warlock in my guild claims a loss of 20 DPS, but we're nowhere near the "perfect" gear since we have about a month of Illidan kills under our belt.

Brotherhood, Peace, Unity

Welcome back, Comrade

 

tedv

I don't think we should worry so much about this nerf, because it's far too ludicrous to go live. Remember, this is just the test server. How many other abilities are there in the game that scale NEGATIVELY with your stats? That is, they get worse as your gear improves. The whole concept is so blindingly, obviously bad that I'm certain it will never get pushed to a real server.

If they want to nerf life tap in PvP, they should just increase the spell damage coefficient and lower the base mana returned. Since PvE gear has much more spell damage than PvP gear, this means in a PvP setting a warlock will have to life tap more often than in PvE. Rather than pegging a PvP nerf to something PvP players have a lot of (resulting in negative scaling), they could just peg the nerf to something PvP players are relatively low on (for positive scaling).

 

Tacitus

If you are tapping while running, or usually in PVP to avoid getting gibbed by a DPS train. I personally always use max rank in raid PVE, but I've sometimes plucked a few downranked LTs after a pull or when doing BGs.

Brotherhood, Peace, Unity

Welcome back, Comrade

 

Trouble

The dps loss is very different depending on whether you have a shadow priest or not. It'd be wise to include this fact along with your numbers.

 

Kasi

Well I'm not sure if your idea would be taken any better Hope. Less mana returned on life tap for sure would be a nerf in both pve and in pvp. The idea here is that you'd get the same mana back, but have a bigger cost in health lost. Thus as long as you're getting heals in pve it would not be a nerf, it would just mean you'd have to heal more. Not really that big a deal considering how much extra mana druids and priests will have to play with in 2.4. What I wonder is why didn't they just change lifetap and all its current ranks to just drain 10 or 20% more health on each tap and leave it at that?

 

Natrozim

Honestly I don't think it will affect the dps of warlocks in high end guilds provided most guilds put them with shadow priests now. With 1 shadow priest and mana pots you usually barely lifetap anyway. Though this is probably not the case for every guild and its seriously stupid that as your health goes up due to gear/buffs you hurt yourself more for the same mana return... They should have simply upped the amount of health burned for the mana given back instead of a % scaling return.