Sunday, February 24, 2008

PTR: Regarding the Life Tap Nerf

Currently on the PTR, Life Tap is removing 16% of a Warlock's max health and returning 16% of the Warlock's max mana. Anyone familiar with the Warlock class should immediately recognize a major problem with this class-defining mechanic -- it reinforces the stacking of Intelligence over Stamina, which is contradictory to the Warlock's history and design (which encompasses talents, spells, and especially gear).

I'm saving my thoughts, and tears, until the Life Tap nerf becomes official, but given the fact that the Emberstorm change isn't "official" and yet is accepted as true, this situation is definitely not looking good.

10 comments:

Zy said...

Honestly I think this is here to ultimately help. With the implementation of intelligence affecting the efficiency's of your spirit when regarding mana regeneration, they will of course try to push the change. Warlocks were originally designed to favor spirit over stam if you can believe that. The way lifetap is right now was part of a series of band-aids they did to fix a once laughable class.

Yes, it will mean that you will gimp yourself by having 12k hp and 6k mana. It should gimp any class in some way to have those stats if they are cloth. But with a higher mana pool and regeneration from stacking int, you will not need to rely on lifetap so much.

Fortunately for everyone crying, I doubt this will go live as it will hurt healers more than locks in raiding. At least until they conform and balance out their health and mana.

Jagoex said...

I hear ya, Zy. But the issue most are taking with this is that our class gear would have to be completely redesigned around this change, as would our socketing and resulting bonuses. The entire Demonology tree would need a good amount of tweaking as well.

If they do plan on implementing this change, they would need to rework other details of the class to make it work. Otherwise, they are just removing the band-aids and exposing new wounds.

Zy said...

Well lets hope they don't pull a "Suck it up till 3.0" on you guys like they are doing the priest class. With lich cling moving ever closer, you can expect more of that treatment around the table.

Jagoex said...

Yep. Unfortunately, history tells a very similar tale.

Anonymous said...

No big deal. l2adapt.

Jagoex said...

Lol, I'll do that.

And the next time you're riding your bike home from school, I hope someone steals your tires, and you enjoy your 10-mile "adaption" of a walk home. ;)

Anonymous said...

Personally, I just find the whole mess to be counter-intuitive to the game in its entirety. Someone pointed out that, should this change go live, warlocks would be the only class actively removing beneficial raid buffs because the increases to stamina actually reduce group efficiency. How that makes any sense I do not know.

If they really wanted to nerf lifetap, there are about a hundred other ways that make more sense. You could simply have it return 16% of mana at the same cost in life (e.g. at 7000 mana you would gain 1120 mana and lose 1120 life). Arena locks would be forced to Lifetap more often, wasting the GCD.

Heck, why not just make the spell a channeled effect, like some kind of bizzare Health Funnel? It would make it almost completely useless in pvp while not affecting pve nearly as much (apart from being unable to cast on the run, still a major nerf).

Sigh. I sure hope they do something, even if it's changing the effects of the Improved Lifetap talent to make it scale better. It could be worse I suppose. Blizzard could have made it cost a Soul Shard.

Logan said...

Wow, Blizzard... Just, wow.

I'm not so much upset about the potential nerf itself. I'm used to warlocks getting nerfed. I'm just baffled and how Blizzard can STILL think that the solution to PvP class imbalance is to nerf the more powerful class (with little to no regard for how the change will affect the PvE experience) rather than buff the class or classes that are at a disadvantage. Have we ever gotten any word from Blizzard blue stating why they think this practice is a good idea?

GG Bliz. Way to keep catering to the lowest common denominator, the unskilled player who would rather see other classes nerfed than improve his/her own game play.

drkliter said...

Eyonix finally got posted a little bit about tap. He notes that with talents we get 18% mp for 15% mp. I don't know if Blizzard has taken in consideration of our bonus from spell damage into their math. Lets say we have 10k hp 8k mp and 1k spell damage. Under current live servers we can tap for 1382 hp for 1658 mp. With the new 2.4 we tap for 2300 hp for 2240 mp. The formula I used was as follows (8000 * .15) + (1000 * .80) + (8000 + .03) for mana and (10000 * .15) + (1000 * .80) for hp. I added the last 3% at the end of the mana fomula, if you add it at the begining you lose ~40 mana. So now we are tapping for 23% of our health for 27.5% of our mana. Tapping for that much health is just a hard pill to swallow.

Anonymous said...

Ya and especially if they get rid of Life Tap ranks. We could of just used a lower one but if there is only one we are screwed.