More forms of health mastery for Lich

[BOWCASTER]

Hello,

I’m a relatively new player of Last Epoch, only starting my journey about a month ago.

I’ve leveled all of the primary classes to around 40 but have primarily stuck to my first character, my Lich, because I love nearly everything about it.

The thing that I enjoy about it is all of the mechanics built around health. But, what confuses me then is that there are little benefits to scaling Vitality.

Of course you could argue that a class that is going to be spending lots of their own health to dish out damage should increase their vitality, that way they can comfortably do damage while surviving hits from enemies. But with the Ward mechanic, there’s really nothing stopping you from just going all in on Intelligence and doing much much better than you would have otherwise.

Even if we removed the Ward mechanic, I personally don’t think it’s very exciting to grab Vitality. Weirdly enough, the only instance of Vitality->Damage scaling I know of in the game is under the Void Knight passive tree. What a weird place for it. The Lich or maybe even the Acolyte as a whole deserves to have some sort of unlockable passive where they can benefit from either Vitality stacking or direct health conversions somehow. It would open up an interesting avenue of build design. As an example figure (the numbers should not be taken seriously), there could be an unlock in the passive tree that gives you 1 Spell Power for every point of Vitality. Or, if you’d rather, it could be for every 250 health you gain 1 Spell Power.

While we’re on the topic of Acolyte additions, I love that all of the classes have access to some sort of team healing but there was a missed opportunity for Acolyte. The only form of team healing is a very weak HoT from Aura of Decay. Why on earth didn’t they give you some sort of ability to transfer some of your own health to allies or minions. That would have been so freaking cool. It’s another way to expand on the idea of your health is a resource. You expend health, to leech health from enemies, to transfer your health to your summons or allies. Instead we just got a basic, passive, area HoT.

There are countless angles for mechanics based around health and while the game has explored a few of them, there are many more unique options that are left to be desired.

[Macknum]

Vit offers HP poinson and necro resi. It’s quite nice to have but nothing to write home about. From my point of view Vk is the worst offender of the bunch and the mechanic that made made vit a dmg stat for VK is completely strange to me even after i played the class for a lot of hours.

I think Lich is in a good place given EHG stick to their guns and balance the game arround 300C as they mentioned again and again.

[Heavy]

Vitality was way stronger in the past (10 health 2% HP reg)

They nerfed it to 6 health and 1q poison and necrotic resistance.
Which is still very strong.

I agree that Lich could have some Vitality scaling things. I could see this very easily added with a Passive Tree overhaul, when Lich gets some threshold passives.

[BOWCASTER]

Yeah, I’m by no means complaining that Lich isn’t balanced. I breezed through the campaign on my first go around on Lich and have been stomping Monoliths as well, all on a self made build, that is pretty unorthodox.

And Vitality is a really good stat, I was just surprised to see that the class about health had no vitality conversions. I completely understand it though, it’s a bit of work to introduce something like that and then fine tune it.

[Macknum]

Lich was once a new and awesome tree but now it’s old with little interactions. As soon as all the masteries are on Warlock and Facloner and Runemaster levels of polish and interaction things will be most likely very different and awesome.

From my point of view Lich is in no greate shape. it get’s stuff done but I feel like half the bonuses of my int are wasted because Ward and Lich Form are somewhat counterproductive. Not to speak of Death Seal.