Yet another Vaal Pact balance idea

I personally don't like instant leech much as a mechanic, but I had an idea how to balance the current Vaal Pact, basic concept is to scale down damage based on the amount of life you are healing via leech, so you can't just facetank all day, while also not introducing reflect issues, the other component I wanted to cover is rewarding investment into leech, which I think a leech keystone should do. Wording and numbers are just rough suggestions, something like



Vaal Pact

Gain Life from Leech instantly

Gain a stacking debuff Blood Bloat for every 20% of maximum life healed via leech recently.

Increases and reductions to Life Leeched per second also affect Blood Bloat recovery speed.

Increases and reductions maximum Life Leech rate also affect Blood Bloat trigger amount.



Bloat bloat could be something like 10% less damage and 8 second duration. You could also have a stack limit so its much less punishing.

So for some examples (no stack limit)



A berserker with no investment into leech could take his damage to zero by healing his whole life pool via leech twice in less then 8 seconds. A Slayer with 40% max life leech rate and Cherrubim's Maleficence (200% increased life leeched per second overall), could take his damage to zero by healing his whole life pool via leech 4 times in less then 2.66 seconds.



Note that it's a speed multiplier, not a time reduction. Using 100 as a base value (100% of base cooldown time), 200% increased cooldown recovery speed would be calculated as follows: 100 / (1 + (200/100)) = 100 / 3 = 33.33% of base cooldown time.

I've never posted on reedit before so please forgive the formatting.

Too complex. Less is more. Keep it simple. Just nerf the amount of leech you gain from VP (for instance leech reduced by 50% or 75%) + nerf Berserker leech.

I don't think that the numbers hold up for that when you have builds approaching 1000 times thier lifepool in dps i.e. you will still leech enough to just facetank indefinitely even with a large leech penalty.

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Frankenberry написал:

Too complex. Less is more. Keep it simple. Just nerf the amount of leech you gain from VP (for instance leech reduced by 50% or 75%) + nerf Berserker leech.

+ 1. Vaal Pact is trivial to balance. New Vaal Pact keystone:

- life leech applies instantly
- life leech amount is reduced by X %
- life regen is none


BTW I have a Vaal Pact build of viper strike 2h sword Scion build. I have a pantheon god that grants flask charges over time gain plus passives that improve flask healing amount. Lack of regen completely doesn't matter. So simply some life leech nerf should be present.

Can you guys explain to me how a berserker with 1mill+ dps will care in the slightest if you reduce the leech amount?

Even if you did a huge nerf on berserker down to 10% leech on savage hit (instead of 100%), and made vaal pact 50% reduced leech, the cases like above are still leeching 50,000+ life a second.

The core issue is vaal pact gives near infinite recovery, which requires the game to be balanced towards one shots, which most people dislike from what I've seen.

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TheSoulburner666 написал:

Can you guys explain to me how a berserker with 1mill+ dps will care in the slightest if you reduce the leech amount?

Even if you did a huge nerf on berserker down to 10% leech on savage hit (instead of 100%), and made vaal pact 50% reduced leech, the cases like above are still leeching 50,000+ life a second.

The core issue is vaal pact gives near infinite recovery, which requires the game to be balanced towards one shots, which most people dislike from what I've seen.

Leech effectiveness on Acuity was reduced to 60% for a while. You could reduce leech effectiveness by 75% or 80% on VP.

So let's say you hit deal 1 million dps (after mitigation) on a boss. With 2% leech and 20% leech effectiveness you would end up with 4000 life leeched per second. This would work for most builds out there. You could decrease leech effectiveness further if you felt this wasn't good enough.

As for Berserker: The leech on Berserker is silly in general.

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TheSoulburner666 написал:

Can you guys explain to me how a berserker with 1mill+ dps will care in the slightest if you reduce the leech amount?

Even if you did a huge nerf on berserker down to 10% leech on savage hit (instead of 100%), and made vaal pact 50% reduced leech, the cases like above are still leeching 50,000+ life a second.

The core issue is vaal pact gives near infinite recovery, which requires the game to be balanced towards one shots, which most people dislike from what I've seen.

Firstly I think your idea is pretty good and its something and new. but ill give an example how it will care.

Your idea itself is the exact example because it is the same thing. When you get 10 stacks of this debuff you got exactly that. Reduced leech by 100%.
Remember VP Leech is just = damage * leech percent.

If you reduced leech percent by 90%, or damage by 90%, its the exact same thing (except enemies live longer in one case)

Another thing to note is that nothing really changes with this idea, If you stack more damage, you'll still benefit more from leech and delay the moment you will start 'feeling' the debuff and being unable to sustain, if you grab this vaal pact, you still want to stack your life pool to raise that "20%" threshold to minimize your damage penalty occurrence.

Also simple is not better, less is only the reciprocal of more.

I think a % nerf is the wrong way to go with vp, ur million dps builds wont notice and ur 50k to 100k everyman players will get shit on. At the point vp leech barely has any effect for your average 50k dps guy its still every bit as broken as it was for the million dps guys. It just pushes players even more into a dps focused meta where they still use vp and go even more damage heavy because now damage = survivability factory is magnified which is a core problem with vp.


I think if youre gonna limit it they way to do it would be an "up to X life per hit" mechanic where X can be whatever is deemed balanced. Leech applies instantly up to 80 life per hit, whatever that number is. The rest of your leech is just treated as normal leech I think. Thats the only way to control it in a game where the devs have completely lost control of comparative player damage balance imo.


Or just replace it with a huge leech rate buff with the no regen downside, possibly melee tag it.


Or just remove it.

The question is what percentage of players have such DPSeS ? Probably < 1%. I play POE since 02.2017 and the most single expensive item I have ever bought costed me < 5ex. And the most expensive item I sold was 3ex. I made 6-link once.

Such DPSes require probably 100ex + weapons.

Then still the solution is not that difficult. Nerf Vaal Pact in a function to DPS amount. So for such high DPSes it could simply reach like 99% nerf. While up to some DPS it would have initial nerf e.g. 25%. Then at some threshold start to decrease with some function that is asymptoticaly capped at 100% in +infinity.

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Snorkle_uk написал:

I think a % nerf is the wrong way to go with vp, ur million dps builds wont notice and ur 50k to 100k everyman players will get shit on. At the point vp leech barely has any effect for your average 50k dps guy its still every bit as broken as it was for the million dps guys. It just pushes players even more into a dps focused meta where they still use vp and go even more damage heavy because now damage = survivability factory is magnified which is a core problem with vp.


I think if youre gonna limit it they way to do it would be an "up to X life per hit" mechanic where X can be whatever is deemed balanced. Leech applies instantly up to 80 life per hit, whatever that number is. The rest of your leech is just treated as normal leech I think. Thats the only way to control it in a game where the devs have completely lost control of comparative player damage balance imo.


Or just replace it with a huge leech rate buff with the no regen downside, possibly melee tag it.


Or just remove it.

I guess that makes sense :) Anyways... it really needs to change but I guess GGG is already aware of this.