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+--- Thread: Ranged Life Drain (/showthread.php?tid=7796)
Ranged Life Drain - Perdition - 03-11-2021
Right now Life Drain is a shadow of its former self, and Vampire, one of the users of it, is in a similar state. Currently, to use Lunar Lunatism, you need Sanguine Crest to be active--which is fine! It's very flavorful, and this is actually a good thing. However, to activate Sanguine Crest you need to either land Banquet successfully or use life drain. This is where the problems start. Banquet is fine... if you're already focusing on basic attacks. However, if you're someone that can make good use of life drain, it's unlikely you will also be able to utilize banquet well. You'll either downright miss it against anyone with decent evade due to it being a basic attack, or it will do pitiful damage because you need high amounts of str and ski for its fixed scaling. That leaves Life Drain, which in this hypothetical is what our vampire is using and better with anyway.
The problem here is Life Drain has an incredibly short range. Life Drain also lends itself better to mage-like characters, and mages typically do not want to be melee range. Life Drain hardly saw use before it got nerfed so that it has dark damage type and can hit mitigation (even if the heal amount is unchanged). That's because while it did what it did, it could end up being useless due to the heal:damage ratio you have to consider in battle. While you could heal 70+ hp and damage the enemy for that same amount flat, you might not actually be getting anywhere in doing that if your opponent had enough damage, and typically they do. This is made even worse by them taking less damage from life drain making it worse in the damage race focused metagame.
Life Drain could easily see an increase in range of up to 4 in a diamond imo. I think it should also regenerate Essence as well, as currently you can ONLY do this using banquet. If you want to maintain Lunar Lunatism's essence cost as a mage, you're kind of shit out of luck as things are now, which is another point of contention when it comes to Life Drain.
RE: Ranged Life Drain - Snake - 03-15-2021
I'd make that a trait with pros and cons. Something about Hemomancy and Vampires who dislike biting as a means to obtain blood.