Life Leech too powerful

Feedback and Suggestions
1

TL;DR: Leech should be an investment choice for the player and it’s current implementation is too powerful for too little investment.

This was discussed some in this thread but Life Leech is way way too powerful compared to it’s investment.

Getting a measly 2-5% life leech provides a massive amount of recovery the really limits gameplay and monsters. Eventually the devs are going to run into the same issue a lot of other games have where because leech is so powerful everyone takes it and monsters are designed around one-shots because it’s the only way to kill your character.

My main issues with leech are how little investment it takes, investing more has no tangible benefit, and how powerful that small investment is. Now as far as I can tell we have no details on how leech actually works in Last Epoch so take my suggestion with a grain of salt! Also the actual numbers used are not really very important, more the underlying concept. Numbers can always be tweaked.

My suggestion is to tie leech rate with leech % and drop the base leech rate way down. I don’t know what the current base leech % is (how quickly your character leeches life) but I think a base of around 10%/second would be reasonable. Then have each % of leech count as a % increased leech rate.

Examples:

100 life and 1% life leech. You hit a monster for 100 damage and start recovering life at a rate of 10.1% (10.1 life) per second. 9.9 seconds to hit full life.

100 life and 10% life leech. You hit a monster for 100 damage and start recovering life at a rate of 11% (11 life) per second. 9.1 seconds to hit full life.

100 life and 100% life leech. You hit a monster for 100 damage and start recovering life at a rate of 20% (20 life) per second. 5 seconds to hit full life.

As you can see this rewards a high investment into your leech % which I think makes a lot of sense in Last Epoch because you can easily get upwards of 50-100% life leech through passives, gear, and skills.

Other changes that could be made with this would be to update the way the crafted leech works so instead of providing INCREASED leech rate (because this is the same as leech %) it should provide a much smaller amount of MORE leech rate. Something like 10% per tier for example.

100 life and 100% life leech + 50% more leech rate. You hit a monster for 100 damage and start recovering life at a rate of 30% (30 life) per second. 3.3 seconds to hit full life.

2

I’m pretty sure you can at most leech 15% of your max health per second.

3

I believe this is an issue that just cannot be fixed. Its the entire idea behind infinitely scaling mobs. Eventually you get to a point where your defenses don’t matter anymore because if anything hits you it is a fatal blow. Whether that is wave 100 or wave 1000 you will eventually hit that cap. So for those crazy high levels you build your character 100% more damage because it becomes about one-shotting the enemies before they one-shot you. There isn’t really a way around it at least for infinite scaling waves.

4

I agree that leech affixes have too high values for melee. And a lot of that leech will be wasted, since you’re most likely gonna deal thousands of damage per hit and not have thousands of health, so the 15% leech of max health per second cap is hit too easily.

5

I’m pretty sure you can at most leech 15% of your max health per second.

Thanks, knowing the actual numbers would definitely help a lot! For now I just picked numbers out of thin air since I don’t have any real data to base it on. Honestly I think even 10% base might be a bit too high depending on how it scales.

@shaelreth For an infinite arena sure, but normal gameplay outside of that is the main issue. Leech currently makes it so you can essentially ignore everything outside of 1-shots so you just end up trivializing everything by taking a single node or a single T1 affix on gear.

6

I think the 15% leech of max health per second is fine, as long as the base values for leech affixes go down, at least for melee. That would mean more investment needed, to hit the same leech numbers.

1 Like
7

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.

8

@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.

2 Likes
9

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.

2 Likes
10

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)

1 Like
11

I totally agree!

12

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.,

3 Likes
13

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 :smiley:

14

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.

15

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.

16

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.

17

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.

18

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…

19

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.

20

Oh I agree! I’m just currently making suggestions which can be implemented with the snap of a finger.