How much mana and/or mana steal does one need to make this your primary attack? Does the dmg of the weapon matter? Does a higher int boost this dmg? Can this be used with a ranged weapon?

related question, if a weapon lists + X divine dmg per second to weapon atk, will that dmg be enhanced by the self buff devine ascendancy?

doesnt i have at leasta 6 second cooldown??? hard to make it your primary attack if you can only use it every 6 seconds or less.

also the amount of mana it uses/damage it does goes up with every level you raise it.

Nah it's a 1 sec cooldown. It chews through much mana as a primary attack, so unless you're tweaked for mana(pool, regen or steal)or constantly quaffing not a good option for your standard primary attack imo.

I only use soul rend when i'm fighting bosses. Other than that it's pretty worthless to me.

I use SR on left-click a lot, and I generally don't run out of mana except when fighting very large mobs. Some +int jewelry and some points to int here and there, no mana steal.

using soul rend as your primary with +5% mana steal you'll never run out of mana....even using other skills with 2% mana steal i've been told you'll rarely run out of mana...but i haven't tested that yet.

I had around 2% mana steal with SR and never even noticed a difference. Same with 6% healthsteal - never noticed a difference in my HP at all.

i found abook like at lvl 3 for soulrend so i read it, being unable to sell ti for anythign worthwhile and was immediately told by my fellow beta testers, that soulrend was crap and to not bother. has the majority concensus of the warriors now changed?

also mana steal may not be the way to go. as you level up the skill, you may not get enough mana in. so perhaps look at how many mana points you need instead. i also presume weapon speed must affect it's use?

I use SR a lot, so I pay attention to discussions on it. Opinion seems to be mixed. A lot of people prefer butcher on LMB, but I find I waste a lot of butchers that way; SR has the shortest cooldown in the game, so it seems made for RMB. It does burn a lot of mana, but as long as I have my buffs on before the fight, it's not like I need the mana for anything else beyond on occasional cleave and/or butcher. Back when I still had member gear, I needed maybe 1 mana pot per regular mob, and that rarely.

Mana steal is fine, as it scales with your damage. The higher level/gear you get, the higher your damage output, the more mana you steal. This offsets any increase in mana cost for the skills.

Pre-patch I fought with 3% mana-steal and used soul-rend as my main attack all of the time. It was great.

Now the cooldown and 50% reduction in duration have made it far less costly to use as a main attack. I could get by with 1% mana steal now, but I still have 3%.

It's still definitely worth using, it's just not nearly as good as it used to be. The damage is the same, but the frequency you can apply it is less and the duration is less. It got double-nerfed.

-Leiknir-

well some bosses it wont work but some of the bosses it does work.

JesusFreak- LvL 26 Fighter

I think thats right if not blame me

I use SR as my primary attack and I haven't had any problems with running out of mana, even without mana stealing. Generally, I lay on my buffs just before the battle then wade into the horde a-swingin'. The only times I run out of mana are when I'm fighting bosses, and that doesn't happen every time.

I don't remember exactly what all my stats are but I've been focusing on +int for my jewelry while leaving +agil, end and str for my weapon and armor. So, I've got a pretty good mana pool, as I recall.