I did a quick search but I didn’t find anything (maybe I simply missed it?) so I decided to open a thread to talk about all those nodes on skill trees giving flat HP on hit as I think they should maybe give a percentage of max HP instead.
A few examples:
Hammer Throw “Battle Rouse”: 10-50% to regain 12 health on hit
Bone Golem “Hunger”: your golems’ hits with melee attack heal you and the golem for 5-20 health
NB: Bone Golem minimal health is 700hp
Serpent Strike “Devour Prey”: you gain 10-20 health on kill with serpent strike
Serpent Strike “Confidence”: gain 5-15 health on crit
At low level, they can be OK. (Excepted for the healing of the Bone Golem.)
But the further you progress, the more HP you have, the less relevent they become.
And, as the game is now, HP is the most important defensive stat.
So you have to get it high as possible.
Hence there is no point investing in those healing nodes.
Maybe simply changing them to percentage is not the best solution as it needs to be strong enough with low max hp but not too strong with high max hp.
There may be other solutions:
replacing the healing by a temporary damage mitigation effect - granting ward, giving a boost to defenses…
replacing the healing by a boost of health regen (but there is the same balance issue as with the healing based on percentage)
increasing the flat healing effect depending on the level of the character, the level of the skill or another stat
I’m not sure what could be the best solution.
But I think the current flat healing nodes are not strong enough to stay/be relevant.
(I keep for another time the same discussion for the potion that do increase with the character progression, but not enough.)
I’ve had success with Rip Blood, but even that caps at what… 28 hp per hit (or 14 ward if you have that node) without the attunement node (which I think is a little undertuned… I don’t know if attunement is used anywhere else in a lich build? And 4% of 28 is 1.12 per attunement)–what worked for me was using minions to tank, and maxing cast speed.
My lich has 2x the life of my mage, but my mage facetanks content my lich couldn’t… just T5 melee leech and I’m good.
tl;dr I agree, there should be some other consistent way to scale things, even if it’s just converting it to ward. Melee leech is substantially better than any of those options. Potion needs options/mods/replacements/something, since it doesn’t scale well.
I think an interesting application to these flat life leech skill/passive nodes that could maintain the presently low life leech numbers was if you were over-leeching at any given time the amount of life that exceeded the characters life pool would be treated as replenishment to the user’s potions. Not in the same way that potion charges replenish from slain monsters at the moment. Rather the over-leech would replenish a charge once the cumulative amount of over-leeched life equaled the amount of life a potion charge would heal. The over-leech could maybe acquire benefits from increases to potion recovery rate. Either the increases in potion recovery rate would treat the amount of life required to be over-leeched to get a charge to be reduced, or increase the amount of life over-leeched to be increased.
This could allow players to acquire potion charges in situations where they are in prolonged combat.
I haven’t played around much with potion nodes, as they are too situational at the moment. When I do find myself using a potion it is when dealing with a big hard hitting monster that doesn’t go down quickly or those situations I get stuck in a mob and need to rescue myself from the barrage of little hits. Otherwise you can ignore potions for the most part, because from my limited experience I don’t have the charges available frequently enough when I want them if I’m using the potions for damage bonuses, and focusing equipment mods on potions seems to not be as much of a a benefit in aggregate to standard damage/defense mods.
The over-leech allowing potions to be more accessible would, I believe, make these flat life leech nodes with the low numbers more meaningful.
An alternative is to create item affixes, tree nodes, and skill nodes that scale healing, creating the option for a larger investment for healing.
The option to make those passives scale with attributes (like the recent change to skills), allowing the player to choose to get a larger return on investment with a particular stat would also work as well.
The other thing to consider is the pace of the game as you head toward the endgame. Currently, those nodes might feel underwhelming, but as the game progresses, if there are more enemies to hit/kill in a given timeframe, the value of some of those nodes increases as well. It’s one of those things that’s hard to gauge, since so much of the game is still in development.
I’m weary of overleech in LE, since Ward fills a similar role.
Well my suggestion wasn’t to implement over-leech like how it is in say POE. But to allow what would of been over-leech to act as a secondary means of refilling a characters potion, and only through these flat life sources that come from the skill nodes. The % leech that can be acquired from gear wouldn’t contribute to the over-leech mechanic suggestion.
I have used the leech node for the lunge skill on the Sentinel and it is also underwhelming. You need a lot of AOE points for the prerequisite of putting points into the life on hit node, and I can attest throwing yourself into a large mob in the arena with it doesn’t amount to much life gain. It may be that the skill isn’t registering the life of hit appropriately at the moment.
