Upcoming changes to Leech

Man, there's some beta changes where I'm unsure if it's even worth doing good or bad.

Long live life gain on hit + kill.

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exsea wrote:

"outlast the enemy battle" for boss fights (especially for melee, especially for the map boss which shoots a persistant lazer beam - how the F is a melee user gonna avoid that?).

Do you mean the lvl 72 Torture Chamber map with Shock and Horror as the boss? It's easy once you know what the mechanics are. Sit near a pillar dodging the stupid totems until she fires the lazor, run behind pillar, breaking the laser. Laser has 20s cooldown, so run in, bash face for ~15 seconds, retreat to pillar. Repeat.

What about availabliy of mana/life leech for casters ? Will it be improved? Eb changes have hammered the ability to sustain casts making leech a better option but its hard to get for spells.

Also any update on weap leech being local? That's also a big hit to all casters and make crafted wand/septer and dori cat much less useful

It feels like you want to break as many builds as possible with act 4!

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GGG_Neon wrote:

All existing values of leech will be substantially reduced, including values on existing items.

I hope this doesn't mean, breaking the ability to use mana leech from gear to sustain the mana pool

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GGG_Neon wrote:

We want the Duelist to receive the most love from these leech passive tree changes, in order to add some flavour, power and more choice to his tree. They will also benefit anyone travelling to that part of the tree.

I am curious, was it Rory who suggested this? :D

Not sure how I feel about this yet, and I guess it will depend on what the other changes are in PoE 2.0.

I feel that leech tends to be overpowered in RPGs in general, and it's something that needs to be addressed. I think that facetanking the hardest bosses in the game through leech alone is definitely problematic.

I have two concerns with what GGG seems to be doing with leech, however. If it's ridiculously strong against packs then it can make them somewhat trivial, meaning that bosses will be the only real challenge. This is already somewhat true, but I personally feel that bosses shouldn't be hard to the extent that every other aspect of the game feels trivial (I got this vibe in invasion, personally, as one had to be so strong to survive some of the bosses that "trash mobs" became exactly that - trash, trivial.

My second concern is that builds currently exist which use leech as their exclusive mechanism of survivability (certain low-life or CI builds, for example). I just hope that these varieties of builds don’t become completely unplayable in hardcore leagues. Buffing vaal pact might mean that characters built around this can survive against bosses. In the same breath I can see why having huge leech efficacy makes for poor build diversity (specifically in standard) as you can almost exclusively focus on maximising damage potential and just leeching to close the huge gap which exists in the character's defensive ability.

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GGG_Neon wrote:

[li]Base leech rate will be substantially reduced for both life and mana, with less of a reduction to mana leech rate, bringing it in-line with life leech rate.[/li]

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GGG_Neon wrote:

While most of these changes are focused towards life leech, mana leech is also being altered. The base maximum mana leech rate will be higher than the current rate on the live server, and opportunities to invest and increase the leech rate further will be available.

These two statements seem to conflict each other, or am I misinterpreting this?

I'm not honestly sure how to feel about changes to leech mechanics. I think that raising the effective cap on mana leech would be good, because sustaining mana is already pretty hard and led me to run blood magic instead, which I am actually quite happy with. I'm also one of the few people that run blood magic on a keystone, so I use life leech extensively. My effective cap under the current system is much higher though than the average player, because I'm a full life build, (8.4k life) with a 20Q life leech, which means I leech quite substantially without any investment into such nodes.

If you're making it more useful against packs I don't think I'll honestly see much difference from the way it is now. It is making it less effective against bosses I am unsure about. I do have armor and resistances, but I still heavily feel that life leech is one of the strongest defenses that keeps my character able to go in these boss fights. Some of which are impossible to facetank anyway (like shock and horror's laser, and palace dominus' light of divinity) without blocking them.

Vaal pact on the surface seems like a possible solution, but one of the things that kept me from going vaal pact is just how strong life regeneration is on such a high life character. With a meager 6% life regeneration or so I'm regenerating over 500 life per second. This is about half a q20 seething divine life flask, and it completely offsets my casting costs, even in half regen maps.

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Darkblitz9 wrote:

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GGG_Neon wrote:

[li]Base leech rate will be substantially reduced for both life and mana, with less of a reduction to mana leech rate, bringing it in-line with life leech rate.[/li]

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GGG_Neon wrote:

While most of these changes are focused towards life leech, mana leech is also being altered. The base maximum mana leech rate will be higher than the current rate on the live server, and opportunities to invest and increase the leech rate further will be available.

These two statements seem to conflict each other, or am I misinterpreting this?

Yes, you are.

Base leech for mana will go down. Max leech rate will go up.

You can leech less, but faster. One of the primary drawbacks to mana leech on melee chars is hitting that rate cap with their 60 int chars and 210 mana pool.

Does this balance the leech from Herald of Thunder + Curse on Hit + Warlords Mark? The amount of life and mana leech on my static striker is absurd.

I really really really like it!

I think giving more love to that part of the tree(Duelist) is a good move for melee characters. This will balance characters that go melee full crits in the Shadow section and those that doesn't have that possibility(Staying in the lower part of the tree). They would have to choose between Claws or Dagger + LL gems or getting life leech somewhere else.

This way it should be easier for GGG to balance every type of weapons and melee build, crits or not.

Well, I hope so.