Drain Bolt
When I first heard of the spell Drain Bolt, I was really enthused. As a young hatchling, I thought that a spell that repeated and healed you was awesome! ....then I tested it out.
The idea is pretty awesome but the spell itself is.. poor, to say the least. On my TnC focused dragon in just power scales (they're crafting scales, but power nonetheless), the spell does 143 damage on an Elite Fiend Skeleton. That's around ~64 health given back from the hit. Mind, this bolt hits once a second. If you had 1 health and sat around and hit something that wasn't hitting back for an entire minute, you'd get back 3840 hp, which is a hefty amount. However, most mobs in Istaria will smack you back and rip your face off if you try and drain bolt their own faces off. Prime Bolt also finishes them off faster, with my TnC dragon doing 206 damage with it. A quick heal, some smacks, you're done - Drain Bolt sits in my hotbar, unused, unless I'm just trying to weaken lvl 20 or so mobs for a friend's quest or something.
(So you know, my TnC dragon with all the power scales on had around 1400 power.)
For comparison, my Helian caster-oriented dragon (fully buffed, my TnC one wasn't, now that I think of it), does 216 damage with her Drain Bolt, and 300 damage with her Prime Bolt (on a similar mob). That means around 97.2 health back (5832 health per minute). (These numbers are pretty similar to the TnC one, but TnC/Caster balance is another story.) Sh e has around 1600 power fully buffed.
While those numbers may seem reasonable, using them in a fight isn't the best - I tend to get murdered really quickly, especially if I'm only using that spell. Heck, my caster almost got murdered on the wall when I was getting those data points. She was murdered the instant she touched the ground initially to get the data points. (Whoo for primal rebirth and dual logging!)
What I would suggest for Drain Bolt is to give it a small, but noticeable, buff. I've only met 1 or 2 people who actively uses it in fights. I would say that DB would do around ~250-350 damage, rather than ~150-220 on a caster. This brings it into range and even a bit above prime bolt, and would give you 112-157 health per cast with the current 45% given back on the X. However, I'd suggest bumping that up to ~60% or even 70% to make it useful. That is 150-210 or 175-245 health back. However, to balance this 14,700-health-per-minute spell, I'd suggest making it fire a bit slower. Maybe once every 1.5 seconds, rather than 1 second, or every 2 seconds. (Please note once-per-second is a guess! I'm not sure what the 'casting delay' is in seconds. Either way, scale this data accordingly!) So the 14.7k health per minute would go down to around 9800-per-minute with a 1.5 second, or 7350 with 2-per-second.
Of course, this entire post may even be futile, considering how much the devs have on their plate. But I do want to suggest this, as lots of players I know are disappointed with Drain Bolt. Just wanted to throw this out there!
Thanks for reading! But if you're too lazy to read the entire thing...
TL;DR - Drain bolt needs more hp-drain or more damage or both to be usable in battle imo.
