Mana Leech - overnerfed?

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Vipermagi написал:

It's not even a factor two.

Right, the slowest weapons in beta is a karui maul with 1,1, we also got two staves and an axe at 1,15 and everything else is at 1,2 or above. The fastest weapon has 1,6 which is not even 50% faster than the slowest one.

The damage/attack speed tradeoff is at base values only, so the difference wouldn't go higher than that if not for the crap scaling of flat damage which makes fast weapons outright better.

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raics написал:

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Vipermagi написал:

It's not even a factor two.

Right, the slowest weapons in beta is a karui maul with 1,1, we also got two staves and an axe at 1,15 and everything else is at 1,2 or above. The fastest weapon has 1,6 which is not even 50% faster than the slowest one.

The damage/attack speed tradeoff is at base values only, so the difference wouldn't go higher than that if not for the crap scaling of flat damage which makes fast weapons outright better.

yeah, but it's not just about weapons' base speed. There's much more generic attack speed to the right side of the tree than the left, not to mention there's some weapon types (maces in particular) that have extremely few attack speed nodes compared to the multitude of attack speed nodes available to others (like swords, bows, claws)

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Shppy написал:

There's much more generic attack speed to the right side of the tree than the left, not to mention there's some weapon types

Yeah, I said it doesn't really matter, when you increase attack speed by by passives it improves leeching by the same percentage regardless if the weapon was fast or slow and also increases mana consumption over time by the same percentage. As for the weapon types, well, the difference isn't as huge as it used to be once. The tradeoff aps/damage at base level is where the difference is.

I don't think there's anything they can do to even it out perfectly except making all weapons the same. The difference shouldn't really be as striking as it seems at first glance, I'm sure mace users will be able to leech just fine compared to swords.

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raics написал:

I don't think there's anything they can do to even it out perfectly except making all weapons the same. The difference shouldn't really be as striking as it seems at first glance, I'm sure mace users will be able to leech just fine compared to swords.

Well, to be fair, the Live version of life leech evens it out perfectly, at least until Vaal Pact comes into play (at which point leech operates like LGoH which favors attack speed, of course). Same leech/sec for any given dps. It's this whole concept of allowing multiple instances of leech to stack that mucks it all up and biases the combined rate in favor of attack speed.

I don't think all weapons should be the same or anything, but the problem is more and more upsides are being given to high attack speed while the upsides to slower, heavier-hitting attacks are dwindling... at this point, all slow weapons really have going for them is higher stunning and one-shotting capability and lower costs-per-time (I would say status ailment strength too, but with crits being the primary source of status ailments there's no shortage of raw damage for fueling those regardless of weapon speed). Meanwhile high attack speed weapons have about the same white base dps as slower ones, get a lot better base dps when local flat damage affixes are rolled in, benefit more from global flat damage sources, offer better defense (via being able to attack-and-kite), hit more reliably (since enemies can't move out of range as easily when the attacks complete faster), apply various on-hit effects more easily including on-crit effects, and now, in addition to using life/mana gain on hit and Vaal Pact more effectively, will also be able to ramp up their life/mana leech more rapidly.

It all adds up; I'm not saying high attack speed weapons shouldn't have advantages, but it'd be nice if slower ones had anywhere near as much going for them to incentivize their use. Instead, GGG is just raising the speed of slower weapons and homogenizing them... like I've said before, sure sounds great for diversity, doesn't it?

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Shppy написал:

Well, to be fair, the Live version of life leech evens it out perfectly, at least until Vaal Pact comes into play (at which point leech operates like LGoH which favors attack speed, of course). Same leech/sec for any given dps. It's this whole concept of allowing multiple instances of leech to stack that mucks it all up and biases the combined rate in favor of attack speed.

Unfortunately, if we talk about lower amounts of leech, current system is also biased in favor of skills that spread hits over time, usually by having some sort of delay between hits because of travel time, like ground slam does when compared to cleave.

Granted, it's probably a better place to put the bias because I do agree fast weapons have more advantages compared to slow ones so it's still another advantage no matter how small it is. However, there's no helping it, I guess, because current system can't stand if they want to make leech scale with crowds, and the difference really isn't a dealbreaker by itself.

Well, maybe there is a way, they could really make it 'per target' as Zed kindly suggested :)
But, that would make single target leech suck way, way too much and if they raise base leech rate there would be no difference between having a big crowd or just a few enemies and you would have something like 5% max leech rate versus a lone boss, I'd take regen over that.

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Vipermagi написал:

However, it should be noted that the above example is extreme to say the least - fast weapons are fast, but they are not four times faster than slower weapons. It's not even a factor two.

It's not just weapon attack speed. This holds the risk of making some supports almost mandatory (Multistrike, Spell Echo) and heavy hitting skills undesirable (Ice Crash, Flameblast vs Cyclone, Barrage, Lightning Tendrils) for anyone who wants to rely on leech.

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raics написал:

Well, maybe there is a way, they could really make it 'per target' as Zed kindly suggested :)
But, that would make single target leech suck way, way too much and if they raise base leech rate there would be no difference between having a big crowd or just a few enemies and you would have something like 5% max leech rate versus a lone boss, I'd take regen over that.

I didn't suggest that, I was simply misinformed. :) But it would make sense to me in light of their stated goal that bosses shouldn't be trivialized by leech. Maybe they wanted to achieve that by the 80% cut in leech values, I'm not sure (and it's only really a 50% cut in the case of Vaal Pact).
Regarding lone bosses and low leech, I was under the impression that leech rate builds are supposed to complement with life regen% in their area, and top/right side builds are supposed to complement with ES recharge or take VP.

If I can cap my leech rate sub 0.5s with Incinerate with no leech rate and take 2.5 seconds to do the same with Ice Crash with significant leech rate, and all leech stacks are lost at full resource, then we're running the risk of a significant skew in skills and supports used, especially for mana leech users as mana income needs to be reliable.