What does new life leech mean for you? Analysis and Discussion

It makes evasion based defense for melee builds even scarier, since a spike of hits can't be dealt with by backing off to let leech ticks top you back up.

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RedsManRick wrote:

It makes evasion based defense for melee builds even scarier, since a spike of hits can't be dealt with by backing off to let leech ticks top you back up.

I understand what you mean, but it is still dependent on what kind of build you are running.

Hard hitting builds will still have long durations of leech while small and fast hitting specs will be the ones to suffer.

Those specs may benefit more from Vaal Pact or life gain on hit instead.

Good thing my planned build has a shit ton of life regen.

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Nycro wrote:

Good thing my planned build has a shit ton of life regen.

Awesome that you mentioned that, as I just put that in the conclusion section a few seconds ago.

Wait... So I've been wrong all along about how Life Leech works?

I thought any Leech below 20% of your Life, was applied instantly. That isn't the case? o_0

If that is the case, I should commit honorable Sudoku for the shame that I have caused my family... >_<

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Sheriff_K wrote:

Wait... So I've been wrong all along about how Life Leech works?

I thought any Leech below 20% of your Life, was applied instantly. That isn't the case? o_0

No it isn't the case.

Any leech below 20% of your life is taken as a percentage of 20% of your life and then that percentage is applied to one second. So if you leech in one strike for 15% of your life, you will recover 20% of your life per second for 0.75 seconds.

This is the reason the changes are so hard to comprehend. This mechanic of life leech in not the most intuitive and requires a lot of thinking when analyzing it's interaction with various skill combos.

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RedsManRick wrote:

It makes evasion based defense for melee builds even scarier, since a spike of hits can't be dealt with by backing off to let leech ticks top you back up.

Evasion based melee builds do not experience a spike of hits. Ever. In fact, Evasion out-performs Armor as a method of dealing with damage spikes, while Armor out-performs Evasion when it comes to relatively small hits over time or Physical Reflect.

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Jamezuh wrote:

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RedsManRick wrote:

It makes evasion based defense for melee builds even scarier, since a spike of hits can't be dealt with by backing off to let leech ticks top you back up.

I understand what you mean, but it is still dependent on what kind of build you are running.

Hard hitting builds will still have long durations of leech while small and fast hitting specs will be the ones to suffer.

Those specs may benefit more from Vaal Pact or life gain on hit instead.

True, but I've always thought of life steal as part of the rogue/necro type classes in fantasy -- low life pool, low armor, steal life to stay alive. The idea of using life steal with a slow, high life, heavily armored, bit hitting brute just feels OP to me. I'm sure it works great, but it breaks the RP element of it a bit for me.

In any event, I was thinking primarily about my claw-wielding, dual-strike, evasion-oriented claw Shadow. I didn't like the idea of "having" to go either IR, which felt very anti-Shadow in concept, or CI/GR/VP which seemed OP. It feels very odd to me that there aren't any reliable melee Dex builds that are anchored in Dex keystones.

If I had the choice, I'd at least switch over to claws wiith LSoH, but there aren't any base claw types with LSoH above ilvl 42 for some reason.

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XCodes wrote:

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RedsManRick wrote:

It makes evasion based defense for melee builds even scarier, since a spike of hits can't be dealt with by backing off to let leech ticks top you back up.

Evasion based melee builds do not experience a spike of hits. Ever. In fact, Evasion out-performs Armor as a method of dealing with damage spikes, while Armor out-performs Evasion when it comes to relatively small hits over time or Physical Reflect.

Huh. I knew that evasion was not random and that armor had diminishing returns vis-a-vis large spikes, but that's definitely counter-intuitive. Perhaps I've been conflating that with the superior availability of health on the left and bottom sides of the tree.

A more limited life pool would still hurt given the percentage cap, no?

I've read the three pages and I am not sure if anyone has touched upon the effect of multiple stacks at the same time from multiple hits.

Before the patch each stack would queue, doing 20% of your life per second for the duration of each stack (which could be less than one second, thus multiple stacks being consumed per second).

Now, all stacks effectively run at the same time, but you only get the effects of one stack. This has a major implication (which I will break down into two parts):

1. AoE/Multi-target hits occuring at the same time (or near enough) will no longer result in queued stacks, thus you are only getting the same leech as you would have got from hitting one target.

2. If the duration between hits is longer than the duration of the highest stack then you are not gaining life leech during the difference (before hand, the difference would be filled by one of the other stacks that was queued).

Combining the two means that attacks/spells that only deal high damage per second (compared to your maximum life) because they are AoE/Multi-target will be nerfed by this - possibly quite strongly. It will probably have no effect on single-target stuff though.

To me, this implies that GGG want you to use LGoH for aoe and LL for single-target. AoE/Multi-target spells will probably have to use Cybil's Paw if they want to rely on regaining life by hitting things, or use Vaal Pact to instantly leech the multiple hits (with 60% reduced leech).

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RedsManRick wrote:

I'm sure it works great, but it breaks the RP element of it a bit for me.

If your life leech % is high enough (which I would assume it would be with claws + claw passives), you should still be doing alright post-patch.

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RedsManRick wrote:

Huh. I knew that evasion was not random and that armor had diminishing returns vis-a-vis large spikes, but that's definitely counter-intuitive.

Evasion has a very cool "entropy" system where avoiding attacks increases your chance to be hit and being hit increases your chance of dodging.

With several small attacks, you bounce back and forth in the entropy system.

With big hits, you tend to stay to either extreme more. So if you have high dodge, you avoid a bunch, get hit by one hard hit and begin dodging again. You shouldn't take several big shots in a row.