Using Shadowburn with Improved drain SoulFollow

I dont wanna spend the 30 gold to find out if this works or not, but I was wondering if you can get the mana return from Improved drain Soul, when casting Shadowburn. I am thinking you will only get the mana return if you cast drain soul, but I would really like to know for sure.

(edit, above poster is right - you can't get the benefit if you SBurn cuz you stop draining soul - what follows is my experiences using imp drain soul - I suppose you could Sburn as target is dying, but time it so Sburn doesn't kill - and quickly hit drain soul and stop pet from attacking (have at least one or two other dots still running, drain soul doesn't kill fast)).

I tried out imp drain soul on one of my alt locks. I like it.

But it's inconvenient to use.

I found I had to time fights just right and make sure enough dot-power was on the target (and that target was hurt enough) when I started drain soul. I had to turn pet off - even the VW - before target died. If pet gets killing blow, you get no imp ds bonus!

Good for soloing. The affliction agro-lowering is nice, too.

But also, doing this tons, you're playing the constantly destroying soul shard game. Gets tedious. Just want you to know this before you try it (in the opinion of a lot of locks, there are better ways to keep your mana up, like drain tanking (doing tap and drain health) - drain hunting (ditto) - or using Dark Pact. Imp drain soul is good, btw - but for long grinding sessions - well, if you can handle the routine (time when to ds, turn off pet, destroy shard so you can loot) - it might be worth it.

Edited, Apr 12th 2007 6:11pm by IponemaGirl

By the way... If your not using the Level 1 Drain Soul, your wasting mana.
Just fire it off right before the mob goes down.

I use drain soul with 2 points in improving it and I think it's great for grinding. I haven't found a problem with timing it very much either. For myself I found that if you:

Set VW at the target.
Cast Immolate so that your VW has made it's first melee hit and cast it's first torment spell.
CoA.
Corruption.
Life Tap.
Drain Health.

I found that with this As you get to the last 2 seconds of drain health, the mob then heads towards you, but by the time Drain Health has finished you are looking at a mob with about 5% health left and you still have CoA and Corruption on it, then you just Drain Soul, let the VW hit the mob once more and the 2 DoT's finish it off. You might take one ormaybe 2 melee hits but it works great for me. This is why non-elite mobs that are between your level and 3 levels lower. Any lower on level and you have to cut into drain health, which is still pretty easy to do. Just means you not getting quite so much.

I probably should point out I am a full afflic build so Immolate doesn't generate that much threat simply because I haven't improved it in any way other than the +spell dmg gear which adds to the other DoT's anyway.

Yer kidding? I assumed the Sburn would break drain! Oh well, live and learn.

In grps if you want it to proc for ur mana return stand at make distance cast a shadow bolt with the mob at 10ish % just where the mob will die from the bolt as soon as the bolt leaves click on your drain soul most of the the time the shadowbolts travel time is just enough for the drain soul to proc and kill the mob. anyway u get mana back.

God i love Imp Drain soul, nothing like spending 55 mana on rank 1 and getting back 1200 mana. . .

This is a great post. I use Drain Soul all the time.. but not lvl 1. I am gonna start doing that. Thanks for that info!

i tried to recreate the few times that i managed to do a Sburn that instant killed a mob AND get the drain soul proc but i couldn't, would seem that last time was mainly due to the server lagging that day. so yeah, if you're on a good server you can't drainsoul >> Sburn to get drainsoul proc, but if it's laggy you can ^^

Not sure why I never thought of using the rank 1 drain soul thing....BRILLIANT!!!

I also do the same thing with Curse of Recklessness since I only use it to stop those runners from getting help. Which makes me feel even more stupid for not seeing the same benefit from drain soul. Oh well, such is life.