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# Essence Drain
[[Essence Drain]] is a chaos spell that fires a projectile that hits for a small amount of chaos damage and applies a heavy chaos damage over time effect. The spell also causes the player to regenerate a portion of the damage over time as life. Essence Drain interacts favourably with [[Contagion]], a skill that can spread the damage over time component of Essence Drain to nearby enemies.

## Skill functions and interactions

- <span class="text-mod">Modifiers to Spell Damage apply to this skill's Damage Over Time Effect</span>: Modifiers to spell damage only affect the damage over time effect of Essence Drain granted by the gem and do not affect other sources of damage over time which may be applied by the skill, such as poison or [[Decay Support]].

- [[Contagion]]: When an enemy affected by both Contagion and Essence Drain dies, Contagion will proc and spread the remaining duration of both effects to nearby enemies.

- **Regeneration**: The amount of life regenerated from the damage over time caused by Essence Drain is dependent solely on the tooltip damage over time, and not on the actual damage dealt to the enemy. Essence drain will increase the players life regeneration by 0.005 * tooltip DoT per enemy affected. This means that increasing the damage an enemy receives through effects such as [[Despair]], [[Wither]], or the Occultist [[Void Beacon]] notable will not change the amount of regeneration provided by [[Essence Drain]].

- **Traps and Mines**: Essence Drain can not be supported by [[Trap Support]] and [[Blastchain Mine Support]].

- **Explosion**: The explosion added to Essence Drain in 3.6 only occurs on projectile destruction, similar to [[Fireball]]'s explosion mechanic. Since the Essence Drain damage over time debuff is applied through this explosion any sort of subprojectile effect will cause the debuff to not affect a given target unless it is in range of the projectile itself being destroyed.