Bloodcaller: who is it actually good for?

[Atarlost]

Bloodcaller gives 0.45% of your damage output back as heals. Now that it isn't useful for fungus exploits what classes is it actually good for?

[HousePet]

All of them.

Its even better for Necromancer.

[cttw]

Deal 1000 damage, you get a heal of 4.5

I must not be understanding it right.

[EatThisShoe]

I'm confused, blood caller says +15% life leech chance, +30% life leech. That would average to 4.5% and if you hit for 1k it should heal for 300. Are you guys saying it doesn't do that?

[Doctornull]

0.45% healing is the expected amortized heal value over all attacks, rather than the specific healing provided by any single attack, so it's a bit misleading as a metric.

What that metric says is that you can't rely on Bloodcaller alone to keep you healed. That's not exactly a surprising result. The other way of looking at healing, which is that it's up to 30% of any attack you make, indicates that Bloodcaller is good for two kinds of characters:

Lots of attacks (more reliable as healing since the chance that it won't trigger at all goes down with more attacks)
- Pugilists & Flurry Rogues seem to fit

Big attacks from range (heal seldom but when you do it's a big deal, and you have a distance buffer so you have the opportunity to use other healing if Bloodcaller lets you down, as it will 70% of the time)
- Corruptors are the poster child here


For whom is it bad? People who don't deal damage with direct attacks.
- Summoners
- Trap & Poison Rogues
- Wildfire Archmagi
- Minion Necromancers

[tiger_eye]

Expected heal value is 4.5% as others have said (0.3 * 0.15 * 100 = 4.5). Hence, if you do 1000 damage over multiple attacks (like an AoE effect), then the expected return is 45 life gained. Not too bad for classes that can dish out a lot of damage quickly, which is most of them. IIRC, heal modifier also affects it. If the rate of return were increased, it wouldn't take much to make it borderline broken.

I agree with your characteristics of when Bloodcaller is most useful: (1) lots of little attacks, and (2) big, safe attacks.

[SageAcrin]

Yeah, 4.5%, not 0.45%. Thankfully; It'd be terrible the other way.

Generally speaking, outside of what was mentioned(that it's good for large burst attacks and very safe DoT spam-and in the latter case, you probably don't need healing, in many cases...), the best use for it is for frailer physical fighters that will take a lot of damage, and that are vulnerable to on-hit enemy damage effects-it can heal those up pretty easily.

So, in short, it's really good for Rogues, mainly.

It's also disproportionately good early. Sure, healing 10-20 HP isn't a lot, but there's not many rings that have that much impact early on. Of course, the Mind Save is a bigger impact then, too, so it's good to remember to not leave it on all the time...

I like Bloodcaller. I've never gotten why people call it broken-probably because it's flashy? But it's a cool equip.

[Atarlost]

I like Bloodcaller. I've never gotten why people call it broken-probably because it's flashy? But it's a cool equip.

People call it broken because it used to be in conjunction with Ancestral Life and there had been no forum discussions of it since the Ancestral Life nerf.

[SageAcrin]

Nah, I've heard it called broken before that talent existed.

[Faeryan]

The math above sounds a bit skewed to me though I understand the equation.
It makes more sense to think of it this way: Approximately every 6th hit will heal you for 1/3 of your hit.

My usual melee chars kill stuff in about two hits. Saying this every other kill will heal me approximately 20% of my total HP.

[SageAcrin]

Still misleading, as it can proc on anything. Constant damage over time effects or multiple strikes will all check separately.

It largely varies on the class how often it procs and for how much. That's actually part of why Rogue metaclass is good with it, as they tend to do a lot of moderate damage hits due to dualwielding...

[Atarlost]

So it sounds like it's mostly good for classes that do lots of damage across lots of hits and bad for classes that already have good regen?

It sounds like it should make something like flameshock against a large number of targets as good as a heal.

[Robsoie]

Huh ?
From the description i always thought it meant that you have 15% of triggering the healing power by hit, and the healing power if triggered will give you 30% of your damage back in heal.

If the reality is that it brings you a ridiculous 0.45% , the description should be changed to reflect that it's useless then.

edit : oh misunderstood the thread, the 0.45% is more about some averaged chance that actual gameplay happening.

edit 2 : looks like it's 4.5% too

[Sirrocco]

Worth noting that both of those numbers are tracked independently, and stack with other sources of same. Necromancers, for example, have a skill (Vampiric Gift) that gives them a percentage chance to recover a percent of damage done. Wearing Bloodcaller as a necromancer with that skill in play essentially adds 15% to the chance to heal and 30% to the result - leading to some really quite strong synergies there. I think at one point there were also modifications to leech chance and quantity on some weapons, though I can't recall seeing them around lately.