I’m ok with leech being powerful, but you should have to give up either damage or other defences to invest in it to make it powerful. Another option would be to have a leech rate cap (say 15% for this example) and have an affix/passives that can marginally increase this number. This would give them even more flexibility which helps keep things balanced.
@Dmillz I do agree that there should be more investment. I prefer the idea of choices for defense types. If I want to forgo elemental/vitality/armor for life leech I should be able to go that route.
- Like if I have 500 life maybe someone who invests in typical defenses (elemental protection/vitality) might take 100 damage per hit but can only leech maybe 20-25 health at most per hit since they have reached the amount of stats they can attribute.
- On the other hand, if I decided to invest my defense attributes into life leech maybe I take 200 damage per hit, but I am able to leech 75 life per hit.
Obviously, this requires a lot more play testing and balancing but it gives the player more options to play the way they want to. So I think the player’s investment on return is what actually needs to be looked at versus the actual amount that can be leeched.
BTW I appreciate this conversation I believe it is a very good discussion on the direction the game can take.
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So I think the player’s investment on return is what actually needs to be looked at versus the actual amount that can be leeched.
Well said. This is exactly what I’m advocating for.
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The problem is… yes life leech is fairly powerfull at the moment,
but life regen and potions are way too weak aswell.
Everyone is forced to go lifeleach due to the fact that no other option is remotely viable (besides ward stacking)
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I totally agree!
It is too powerful.
It used to have a cap at 50% of your maximum health per second, but we removed it in the leech rework. Now all leech instances have a fixed duration of three seconds instead. The reason we made this change is because we don’t want health to become a single most important stat for defenses, and an important part of that is avoiding sources of recovery that scale with health.
We stand by the reason for this change, but it looks like it has generally resulted in health leech being more powerful point for point, meaning that the values we were using for sources of health leech are now too high. We will be reducing these values in upcoming patches, and may also increase the base leech duration.
Another thing we’re looking at is how to make leech require more non-damage stat investment at end game to counter the problem of it being a defence which is improved by just stacking damage. The “Increased health leech” hybrid affix is part of this, but at the moment the maximum investment into this stat is just a couple of affix slots, which isn’t enough.,
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Thanks for the clarifications and the ideas behind leech.
It’s good to hear you’re also working on changing it in the near future 
Hopefully, any changes made will not greatly impugn the skills of the Lich that chooses to spec heavily into ‘Ageless Ascetic’ and ‘Soul Maw’ as those skill require quite an investment to reach.
Take away LL from items and the passive tree and sprinkle the nodes in the skill tress. Problem solved. If anyone want to LL at all she needs to reach the nodes in the tree and that’s that.
That doesn’t solve the problem at all. It’s still way too powerful for too little investment. A single node is enough to cap out your leech and become all but unkillable except to one-shots.
It is too powerful indeed!
I’d offer something such as halving the effectiveness of the nodes, capping health leech per second at ~25% and decreasing the duration to one second or so. This would make the players take more risks and have them be engaged in the combat in order for their health bar to get filled up.
I’m sure short duration and high leech is what players like seeing more - if the leech is too slow, it feels like health regen and not impactful enough.
This would potentially also reinforce the need for multiple skills, since long cooldown and large AoE skills won’t be able to leech as consistently as fast cooldown and small AoE.
One of the issues with leech is that it seems based on your damage numbers instead of the actually health the hits remove… if you got 1k health, and you go low for whatever reason against a mob that just dodges everything… you can easily and safely go over to that one little mob that just WILL die from 1 hit, and just massively dumb a 10k crit on it and be just fully healed instantly, regardless of you having just 10% leech, and the mob having like 500hp at most…
Not saying the leech numbers arent too high currently, because they are, but the way leech is calculated currently makes it seem a lot worse…
This will help fix the issues of it being too powerful but it’s still completely pointless to invest more than a very minimal amount in leech. It would be in a way better spot but I think it would be way more interesting if there were ways you could invest into leech to make it powerful.
Oh I agree! I’m just currently making suggestions which can be implemented with the snap of a finger.
Just check how D3 did it. Fixed numbers of leeched/hit and % the max life leeched/hit are much easier to manage than the leech based on dmg.
The affixes can be changed to increased leech effectiveness/added leech etc. So the leech can be scaled as you gear up.
Among all those ARPGs I haven’t seen one who succeeded on the leech based on dmg. They are either too powerful in the late game(shitty early game), or simply don’t play a roll at all.
It’s very hard to do the balance…
There still could be some leech based on dmg in the game but not for every character and every skill, but only for several builds. My suggestion would be remove the leech based nodes and move them to individual skill nodes, only applying these to dot based dmg would be a good idea.
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I agree. Even on low levels the sustain of life leech feels just ridiculously strong.
Sounds like a heavy hit to Primalist shocking. They rely on it to help them and the pet(s) survive as little as they can. You do this and will be horrible. Yet Ward is still out of control and I don’t see anything about bringing it under control. It is already hard enough trying to balance the stats on the Primalist or any of the classes with it as it has to many at once. This to me just compounds the problems and I have not seen any idea of what you are going to do for Primalist if anything.
I say make alternative life gain sources viable before nerfing leech, especially for Primalist.
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Add sources of base health regen in the passive trees, especially to the early skill points. Percent increases of nothing is still nothing.
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Increase base potion heals to make “chance to find potions” a viable sustain. 150 base health at level 100 does nothing when I have 1500 health. This may be as simple as doubling the bonus to potions from character levels and/or add passives that significantly increase the bonus of potions but instead of instant heals they turn into heal over time.
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Create uniques that give healing on situational effects. Health on dodge, health on crit (already ward on crit), health on stun, etc.
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Remove some of the abundant Health on Kill passives or change them to something else. Circle of Life in Beastmaster seems like one of the worst ways to spend passive points. It seems like something that should be an option for your first 20 points in Primalist base class.
*(edit) Skill trees for healing skills also open up sustain options that allow for toning down leech.
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Health regen or buffed up pet specific leech nodes would fix this issue. The best part of LE is most of the balancing can be done at a very specific level because of how the skills and passives work. If Primalist pets are weak that’s an entirely different discussion.
The pets are a different discussion very much and already going on. I meant more the leech is one of the only ways for Primalist to stay alive. This would hurt then much more then the others. Sentinels are just unkillable becuase reasons and Acolyte and Mage can stack so much Ward they maybas we’ll be immortal. Primalist can’t do any of that and have to use fast attack speed and leech to stay up compacted.