Life Drain

Side note: Back when DM's SL was altered, I asked Castle if the Warshade clone of it, Essence Drain, was also going to be altered considering the WS's rather anemic single target damage. "No" was the answer.

So while my dark/rad corruptor would absolutely love life drain to get a damage buff, especially considering that it's part of her attack chain, I don't think that using DM-SL as a reasoning tool is going to go very far.

Well, if I recall correctly the siphon life change was from 20s recharge to 10s, and some smaller amount of damage to scale 1.96 - in other words, it now has the damage that a normal 10s recharge attack does, and effectively gets the heal effect for free. I could definitely understand being a little hesitant about buffing life drain/tesla cage so much.

At the moment, life drain does scale 1 damage (equivalent to a 4s recharge attack) with a 15s recharge and a 10% heal. Tesla cage does a trivial scale 0.15 damage with a 10s recharge and a scale 8 hold (which, strangely enough, is on the 'ranged ones' table instead of the usual mez table, giving it a fixed 8s duration instead of scaling up to ~11s at higher levels).

If life drain were to directly follow the siphon life pattern, it would get scale 1.96 damage with a 10s recharge. If tesla cage were just to get its recharge in damage, it would also end up at scale 1.96. Those are probably a bit too good. Personally, I would lower life drain's recharge to 10s, and set both powers at scale 1.32 damage (appropriate to a 6s recharge attack, in between the damage of dark blast/charged bolts and lightning bolt/gloom).

Dark needs some single target love somewhere it is just agonizing trying to play the set on hard targets and you cant get their hitpoints into scourge range quickly enough to avoid face planting. The obvious spot would be life drain so I can see it getting a damage boost. The other spots are dark blast (which would rock but throw the tier I out of wack with other tier I's, come on Dev's do this, the rules were meant to be broken!), gloom or get rid of the stupid snipe (personal bias, I cant stand the hideous 4 second animation) for a useful blast.

The electric blast argument is flawed they get a hold with relatively high magnitude and we get dark pit (hahahaha throw that at a boss and see what happens) and some tohitdebuffs that really dont begin to become useful without heavy IO slotting.

Another thing that kind of bugs me about dark blast all the cones are on different sizes and angles, boy is that frustrating during game play. I hate being asked why I am rubber banding so much. I then get to explain that since the cones are all screwed up I have to play this way...you know I am going to rename my toon the rubber band man.

The set is fun to play and different than the other blast sets which is part of the allure for me but it needs a little stream lining. Nothing to exotic but a couple little bumps to make it smoother to play would do wonders.

1. More single target damage
2. Fix the cones to match or at least be closer in dimensions
3. Higher tohitdebuffs on blasts (this may break it at high levels with IO's so not sure about this one)

Sorry I phrased that very poorly between the parenthesis and my run on sentence it didnt come out how I intended it to sound. I meant to say there are only three spots you can buff the single target damage on dark those being dark blast, gloom, and life drain.

I know gloom is already pretty awesome and it would probably be silly to add more damage to it but it appears to be one of three single target damage powers in the set that would increase the overall single target damage. The devs also seem to have this weird thing about balancing powers among tiers heavens forbid there was too much variety in a video game. So dark blast seems unlikely to be changed which just leaves life drain. Or a change to another power in the set, which is why I wanted to mention my hatred of the snipe in a round about way of setting up that that power could also be altered.

Just a quick quiz but does anyone else work in nightfall in their single target chains like I do? I know it isnt endurance efficient but a lot of time it seems like the only way I can take down a boss.

Dark Blast is already a top-tier set. If it gained better single target damage it would be icing. The cake already tastes great.