Guide to HP and Mana leech in PoE (at last until 9.3)

From what I've seen, the way life and mana leech are balanced, they are 99% useless early and mid game, because you just don't do enough damage relative to your health and damage taken.
Same with mana. My level 30 ranger has 130 base dps, which scales up to about 200 with Double Strike, multiplied by # of targets (soon to be 3 targets).

And burns almost 15 mana per double-shot, firing about 3 shots (1.5 double shots) per second.

Life Leech, it is definitely possible to reach 8-10% (mostly thanks to Iron Rings being easy to buy).
If you get 10%, that means you can not get more than 60 health/second Leeched. Which sounds pretty good, but that requires REALLY good life leech, constant 3 targets, always hitting, and not being constantly stunned (like will happen if you let monsters get into melee).

End result is that the numbers look impressive in a highly optimized build + situation, but if you look at another scenario:

Boss fight, 20 health/second * 10% miss rate = 18 health/second. Bosses often hit for 200-300 dps. Flasks heal for 50-100 health/second.
Life leech becomes useless.

Mana Leech is even harder to itemize, and similarly can't keep up with mana usage until you start reaching the 10-20% range.

At 2-4%, it never really even saves you flask usage.

I got only 2% (passives) of ml on my ranger but it helps a lot.

I got 250 mana plus around 40% of mana regeneration (8% from passive around 30% from items) so my replenish cap is 250 x 0.125 x 1.4 ~ 44 mana.
My split eats around 22-24 mana and I got 2.2 AS so I need around 50 mana replenish per sec to not run out of it when spamming split.
Mana leech provides me 44.

If I wound boost my mana pool to 300 I'd get about 52 mana replenish rate per sec. More than I need for sustained split spam.

That 40% of mana regeneration helps a lot.

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wyldmage написал:

End result is that the numbers look impressive in a highly optimized build + situation, but if you look at another scenario:

Your dps goes way up as you level however. A ranger over lvl 60 with a solid bow will do at least 2000 dps on double+multi. So even with only 6% from Bloodrage you'd possibly get an effective leech of 120 HP/s (which would require a HP pool of at least 600, which is very achievable). Hit more than 1 target and you're capping out on your effective* leech rate.

I think 20% of your HP/s is fairly significant. A 20% godly vial is 340 HP/s, so a melee character with 1100 HP could get another 220 HP/s from leech. That's a 65% increase in HP/s!

A duelist can easily get 15% leech (5% bloodrage, 4% support gem, 2% Iron Ring, 3% gluttony flask) which requires them to do ~1470 dps to hit their effective* cap of 220 HP/s. This is a very achievable number if you are hitting multiple targets.



*see 3rd post in thread for elaboration of what the "effective" cap means.

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aimlessgun написал:

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wyldmage написал:

End result is that the numbers look impressive in a highly optimized build + situation, but if you look at another scenario:

Your dps goes way up as you level however. A ranger over lvl 60 with a solid bow will do at least 2000 dps on double+multi. So even with only 6% from Bloodrage you'd possibly get an effective leech of 120 HP/s (which would require a HP pool of at least 600, which is very achievable). Hit more than 1 target and you're capping out on your effective* leech rate.

I think 20% of your HP/s is fairly significant. A 20% godly vial is 340 HP/s, so a melee character with 1100 HP could get another 220 HP/s from leech. That's a 65% increase in HP/s!

A duelist can easily get 15% leech (5% bloodrage, 4% support gem, 2% Iron Ring, 3% gluttony flask) which requires them to do ~1470 dps to hit their effective* cap of 220 HP/s. This is a very achievable number if you are hitting multiple targets.



*see 3rd post in thread for elaboration of what the "effective" cap means.

Please note, that I was stating that "the leeches are good late game where they are balanced around, but useless or nearly so in the early/mid game".

I never liked leech as a passive ability on gear. It would work much better and be much much easier to balance at all levels if the mechanic was used only in active skills. Siphon, aura, and curse spells for example can all have interesting and impactful leech effects that scale properly with level. It also turns the leech effects into a much more interesting tactical option while in battle rather than just some passive mod that can only ever be worthless or absurdly overpowered.

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tpapp157 написал:

I never liked leech as a passive ability on gear. It would work much better and be much much easier to balance at all levels if the mechanic was used only in active skills. Siphon, aura, and curse spells for example can all have interesting and impactful leech effects that scale properly with level. It also turns the leech effects into a much more interesting tactical option while in battle rather than just some passive mod that can only ever be worthless or absurdly overpowered.

No. Currently the whole problem is that leech on skills/supports DO scale/increase with level.
THAT part is really the problem, because as characters level, they deal more and more damage relative to their health; increasing the leech at the same time would make things even worse.

That is the reason why leech is rather useless at low levels, but pretty decent, if not "really damn strong" at high levels.

That said, I was only referring to the scaling part. Anything else you were talking about (such as more colorful/active combat and more strategy and stuff) is —at worst— not an issue to me, and —at best— a great idea.
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With regards to increased regen:
1. Life regen should work the same as mana regen. I don't know why in the world both this game and Diablo 2 both have absolute regen for life but relative regen for mana. Having absolute life regen is stupid and makes it completely undesirable to players.

2. Increased [mana] regen needs to be buffed a bit.

3. I like the regen 'bug' with leech. However, if regen was buffed, this bug may then make regeneration too strong, since it then becomes useful in two ways. To ensure it stays fair, one can just buff the regen a bit (not much), or they could increase it more, but reduce (but not eliminate) the impact it has on leeching rate.

BTW sorry to shift this general discussion thread (or guide to be more accurate) into beta feedback, lol.