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

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Jamezuh wrote:

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puviel wrote:

This is not how I understand the change. The patch notes says that life leech no longer que and that only the highest leech at any given time applies.

This literally means that if you hit 10 targets in one attack with no time passing between the hits (such as lightning arrow or rain of arrow) only the highest damage instance among those 10 targets is leeched back as life. This is in total only a tenth of what it is now prior to the change.

This is an incorrect way of thinking about life leech. You can ONLY heal for 20% hp per second. They more damage done before with the queue system meant you were constantly healing for 20% hp per second. Now, you do not heal for 20% hp/s for as long with AoE.

If you attack fast enough, you will still be healing for 20% hp/s just like before the patch.

I do understand that life leech operates at a constant rate. The point I am making is regarding on what damage the total life leech (ie 20% of max life * life leech duration) is based on. If only the highest application of life leech is in effect at any given time, then with rain of arrows (which hits several monsters at the same time) only one of the hits is used to calculate the total life leech. In comparison with ice nova, which might not hit all monsters at the same time you are able to get life leech from more than one target as the life leech timers can expire before the next damaging hit happens.

The assumption here is that damage is calculated per Hit rather than per Attack.

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puviel wrote:

I do understand that life leech operates at a constant rate. The point I am making is regarding on what damage the total life leech (ie 20% of max life * life leech duration) is based on. If only the highest application of life leech is in effect at any given time, then with rain of arrows (which hits several monsters at the same time) only one of the hits is used to calculate the total life leech. In comparison with ice nova, which might not hit all monsters at the same time you are able to get life leech from more than one target as the life leech timers can expire before the next damaging hit happens.

The assumption here is that damage is calculated per Hit rather than per Attack.

The per-attack discussion has been made already as well.

This can also all be implied from my several statements about shotgunning skills.

Skills that attack several targets in perfect sync will potentially lose out on this change unless they can keep up a good rate of leech duration.

Ignore: Darn forums, double posted!

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Jamezuh wrote:

Skills that attack several targets in perfect sync will potentially lose out on this change unless they can keep up a good rate of leech duration.

This, but note that it is the dps to life ratio that affects this, not the delay between attacks/casts.

For example, lets say a hit results in 0.1 seconds of life leech, and you hit every 0.5 seconds - beforehand you could have got 5 stacks in between. Now, lets say we double the cast/attack speed so that the delay between hits is halved to only 0.25. As long as the dps does not change, the duration of life leech from these hits will also be halved, to 0.05 seconds. So you would have still got 5 stacks between. If all of those stacks hit at the same time (shotgun for example), you have lost 4 stacks worth of life leech because only one of them will now run between your attack/cast delay.

However, if the hits from an attack/cast are evenly spread out between attacks/casts (say Spectral Throw for example), there may be a pseudo queue effect, where the stacks run after each other because the hits are occurring after each other throughout the attack/cast delay.

If your life is X, you regenerate at 0.2X per second.

If you have Y life leech, then in order to maintain constant regeneration you'll need DPS of 0.2X/Y. So if you only do elemental damage you get a maximum of 8.8% life leech and need a skill gem to support it. So you need to do 2.27 x your health in DPS.

At my level with my build, melee splash won't leech from multiple targets anymore, so I've tried it with melee physical damage and I'm still not even halfway there. I just die a lot now. It's pretty disappointing that we got boned because of the multispectralthrow leechers but what can you do.

Although I can't confirm, theoretically attacks like Spectral Throw suffer the least from this change, as by their nature they will spread out their hits (forming a pseudo queue). It is stuff like Storm Call that really suffer.

Lgoh has always been the superior choice for faster attackers. Now its more obvious that's all.

I'm more worried about mana leech...

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narbays wrote:

Lgoh has always been the superior choice for faster attackers. Now its more obvious that's all.

I'm more worried about mana leech...

I can confirm mana leech has gone to crap .... my reaver build didn't have much mana regen but I had about 6% mana leech and that used to sustain me without issue .... now it's much slower
:( And I've died twice now cause I've gotten stuck without mana for Reave in the middle of packs I was attacking.

I started a post on this but it got moved to gameplay for some reason - mana leech is indeed completely broken now for those of us already using fast attacks to make LOH viable.

My main double-multi strike duelist used to get by without ever really having to worry about mana. Now he can't kill 2 enemies without running out (and not just throwing the odd single hit every now and then, I mean really running out).

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narbays wrote:

Lgoh has always been the superior choice for faster attackers. Now its more obvious that's all.

I'm more worried about mana leech...

True about attackers but spells don't have the same option. I guess we could expect all spell users that were using life leech to now use Cybil's Paw but... yay for variety... (and it may not even be an option for those who use build-enabling uniques in their weapon slot).