Hi, love the game but want to talk about this particular mechanic. Melee. Necromancer crit minions and Primalist melee companions suffer from this mechanic. You’re fighting the boss doing big dmg and you suddenly go from 30,000 hits to 200 meaning sustain from leech becomes a non-factor and you’re stuck pretty much waiting to die as you try to dodge everything as your minions die. Is this intended? If the devs wanted boss fights to last long enough for the mechanics to play out why didn’t they just have the boss gain life instead? Like the fallout 4 legendary enemies that mutate. I would much rather have the boss gain a 100x life multiplier than lose out on my main sustain mechanic for a duration. Bosses gaining life would also affect all builds equally and not just shut out builds that rely on life leech.
It would also help us get away from the ward is best meta. Because all life has going for it is life leech, life regen and endurance. Life leech is already unreliable for bosses. Life regen is imo weak and endurance is great but all the defense in the world doesn’t matter if you can’t sustain life.
Iirc from an old dev stream; Besides organically scaling fight length without punishing defensive builds too hard, it’s exactly because of what you’re referring to in the ward meta paragraph.
If leech can heal my 2k pool to full in 0.5, every hit needs to do (almost) 2k to be a danger to me. That means it needs to hit a ward build for 2k as well, or god forbid, 4k health regen just to be able to survive the next hit. They’ld rather have you try and avoid boss attacks and recuperate from failure, then stand there and bounce your health around like a professional jojo player.
It is the same thing you see come back each time in games like WoW, where towards the end of an expansion (gear cycle, if you will) tanks are running 70-80% dodge/parry and bosses need to hit you for 80%+ HP or they aren’t threatening, but 2 hits without full healing and you’re dead.
The issue is that only life leech builds have to avoid boss attacks and recuperate from failure. Ward builds are perfectly fine generating thousands of ward a second for sustain. Ward generation isn’t based on damage done. Life leeched is. Currently the best builds for bosses will all be ward based because the boss DR mechanic doesn’t punish ward generation only life leech.
No, the ward builds are best for everything because they generate way too much ward per hit to the point of OP absurdity. The ward generation needs to be toned down significantly, that doesn’t mean the leech needs to be increased.
The devs have said in the past that the boss active DR system isn’t working as desired so they’ll change it in some way at some point.
Ironically I’m heartened to hear that leech doesn’t work well vs bosses; right now my Sorc is getting kinda messed up by the passives that provide 15% penetration and 1.5% life leech for the element in question. Since he’s playing low life ward, it hurts the ward generation when he is dealing 100k+ damage to enemies and his health maxes out instantly even with the constant life drain from items. I’d been considering moving off that passive but if for the hardest content the adverse impact of leech is a non-issue seems maybe I can safely leave it.
