Improved Drain Life

[amcminn]

Hi, I currently have 4 ranks into the talent "Improved drain life" which equates to 8% or x1.08 extra health. I also have the second rank of drain life (18-19 health drained each second for five seconds). Since the minimum life drained is 18, it should get multiplied by 1.08 for the 8 percent increase. 18x1.08=19.44. That means that the minimum life I should gain is 19 and the maximum is 19x1.08=20.52 so 20/21. However, I consistently only gain 18 health each tick. What's going on?

[Youfie]

Long story short, Blizzard / Mangos rounding sucks, we don't really know how it's done, but the Talent works, your Drain Life is just too low level yet.

I know according to basic maths you should see a little difference, like you said, but it happens to be computed differently, for some reason. When it comes to very small values & shit, the way the game rounds number is weird.

Maybe the game just calculates 1%, rounds it, and then multiplies it by the Rank of the talent (in your case 4). So 18x1% = 0,18, and since it seems the game rounds numbers by truncating them (this is what you can see elsewhere in the game at least, from what I read), it comes down to 0,18 -> 0, 0*4 = 0.

This is just a shaky theory, I have no idea if this is how it really works, but what you need to remember is that the Talent works, but for some unknown reason it doesn't apply to values of Drain Life that are too low. I don't know either if this precise behavior of the talent existed on retail, I wouldn't be surprised since the game always tended to be a bit capricious regarding rounding & shit.

[Drain]

This is an all around junk talent in Classic. Even after you get SP to apply it to, it's not a worthwhile use of your points. Naturally, it was completely overhauled in BC, making it a great use of 2 points, the exact opposite of what it is here. More junk talents that got full revamps are Drain Soul and Curse of Exhaustion. Warlocks as a whole probably got more buffs to their talent trees with BC than anyone else... and it was well deserved.