lifesteal ego

[Miruko]

I'd like to see some weapons with lifesteal x, wich stands for "x% or the physical damage return to the wielder as healing effect". This will be good for example for rogue classes, wich lack of AoE effects and in large fights they run out quickly of resources and will give a bit of sustain while fighting, do you like it?

[bricks]

Was thinking about this yesterday. I think that, for starters, there should be more items with Bloodcaller's effect, to keep the system consistent, and a new "vampiric" damage type that deals, say, physical or blight damage, and is guaranteed to trigger the life-leech effect (for that damage dealt). Classes without many healing options would benefit greatly from this.

[edge2054]

Lifestealing is a very powerful ability and one I don't think should be overused.

The ring with the ability is very weak. It has a small chance to trigger and only heals for a percentage of the damage you deal. Over a long enough timeline it should heal you for a little less then 5% of all damage you deal. Now I'm not saying it's useless by any means (I've used it on a number of characters to great effect) just that it's unreliable and overall doesn't give you back that much life, especially for characters who rely on single target damage.

All of the above is something I consider a good thing. Lifestealing in other roguelikes I've played was practically mandatory for melee classes because of how it was done. If tome 4 lifestealing was overused and overdone it would require rebalancing all the end game fights around the player having lifeleech.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now all of that said, one way to introduce a small amount of lifestealing is through the DRAINLIFE damage type. Projecting drain life on weapon hit is an easy way to introduce controlled amounts of lifestealing rather then percentages (which get inflated the more damage the character does). Drain life heals you for 40% of the blight damage it causes. Putting this on an ego that deals 40 drain life would give the character 16 healing on every swing. Putting it on an artifact that gave 80 would give 32 a swing. In addition to the actual blight damage caused by the effect. Neither of those numbers sounds game breaking.

*For brawlers anyway I did put drainlife on one of the glove egos and it's available in b32 and 33*

[Miruko]

well, i was thinking about a cap to the max lifesteal, say about 20-30%, but i want to remember you that also the enemy damage scales up, so 20% of 100 physical damage (hardly achieved before level 10 for a rogue) is 20hp, damage received at that level is more than 20 i suppose, especially some areas with swarms of enemies.

[edge2054]

Right but 20-30% isn't really a cap. It's a cap on the percentage which just encourages you to push damage even higher to get more healing. In other words it lets you turn your offense into your defense which isn't good in my opinion.

To put it in perspective my level 50 rogue was doing 1k damage a turn easily with spikes going up to 3k or even higher.

200-300 healing every turn is a ton.

[Rectifier]

So then how about a percentage ego that has a maximum cap based on tier, i.e.:

10% drain w/ 30% chance
t1 10 hp max
t2 20 hp max
t3 30 hp max
t4 40 hp max

And then, perhaps, the special artifacts with life leech do not have a maximum cap, such as the blood ring, see what I'm getting at?

This would in effect eliminate the advantage super offensive classes would get over a more conservative build, but still be viable as a regeneration item.

[Canderel]

I'd cap it at a maximum HP (fixed) drain per item.

+20 life per blade (flurry for +120 HP), is pretty big.

Though obviously most of the time it would be doing gaining less than 20...

[bricks]

I haven't quite made it to level 50, but I suspect part of the problem is that max health scales more slowly toward the end than damage does. A cap would be the best way to go about it, but that is really hard to express in an item tooltip. Resource leech has the same problem in that multiple effects work very well, but just one resource leech item is more of a hassle than anything. With that in mind, a damage type dedicated to life leech, like edge mentioned, is easiest to balance and understand. Resource Leech could honestly use the same treatment for it to be more widely viable. The problem then becomes incorporating it for classes that don't use physical attacks. One easy solution is using the talent-on-spell mechanic.

[Miruko]

Right but 20-30% isn't really a cap. It's a cap on the percentage which just encourages you to push damage even higher to get more healing. In other words it lets you turn your offense into your defense which isn't good in my opinion.

To put it in perspective my level 50 rogue was doing 1k damage a turn easily with spikes going up to 3k or even higher.

200-300 healing every turn is a ton.

1k of only physical damage? O_O i still have to manage the first Pride so i don't know usual values at top level, but the idea of a lifesteal type of damage (vampiric or whatever) sounds good, as canderel mentioned 120 hp with a flurrry is a lot, considering that is about half the max hp of a rogue class. For the point of "lets you turn your offense into your defense" isn't that the base concept of our squishy rogues? i don't see anything wrong with it, remember that an archmage can make the hell rain upon about 30 enemies at once, a rogue at max can wirlwhind 8 enemies when surrounded, wich means the turn after is dead.

[edge2054]

On a flurry yes, easily 1k damage. Whirlwind, sweep, yes easily. I stacked damage on my rogue because I wanted to see how high it could go.

To really put things in perspective for you I built an archer that was 50 damage shy of dealing 600 damage on a crit at level 10! With a 60% crit rate to boot. All physical damage.

These are niche builds people can play for fun but the fact is that when you sacrifice that much for damage your defense tends to suffer. Lifesteal would change that.

It's not just rogues though as I just illustrated with the archer and really to go with your initial idea (physical only damage) the class the gets the most out of this is Berserkers who seriously, do not need a buff.

Ask anyone that's won with a berserker how much damage they can put out. It's a class that you quit thinking about damage because you hit a point where it's 'good enough' and it's time to start thinking about shoring up your healing and defenses. Percentage based life regen lets you just keep pumping damage because again your damage output becomes your defense. Yes, it's broken. Percentage based life steal will ruin the game unless handled very very carefully and putting it on random egos doesn't sound like a good idea to me at all.

There's a reason life steal is so rare in Tome and that's because it's a mechanic that will fundamentally change how the game is played and balanced. I won't say that a cap might not work, something like Rectifier suggested or a fixed amount like Canderel suggested (or I suggested with making the drain life damage type more available). But open ended percentage based life regen is not good.

And again keep in mind that the one artifact that's in the game that does what you're suggesting drains on average less then 5% of all damage you deal. That should give you some idea of what kind of life regen Darkgod feels is good for the game and how rare he wants it to be.

In the SVN right now Skullcleaver deals 10 drain life damage on hit, which puts it at 4 pretty much fixed life stealing. I can see other similar damage types working, a bleed effect for instance that heals the source of the damage by a percentage of the bleed tick would be interesting and thematic (and sounds like a good horror talent too ). There's also several items that can either cast or proc blood grasp some how (which is where the drain life damage type comes from). So there are other ways to go about this and already several sources of drain life in the game as far as items go. But there's only one that's a straight percentage and that percentage is very small and very unreliable, which I think is a good thing.

[bricks]

Damn, edge, great analysis. I have to think now that lifesteal would better be implemented on a per-class basis. Reavers seem like a natural choice, and they have a few skills that are currently rather dull.

[darkgod]

Yeah permanent lifestealing cant work, except for classes designed for it.

I plan to have some new taints, one should allow temporary lifesteal, as an alternative to heal/regen/shield

[edge2054]

Actually, speaking of Reavers and life stealing, a simple way to give them life stealing would be to change Ruin to DRAINLIFE.

[darkgod]

done

[Miruko]

Good analysis, you have really the whole view, maybe i should play deeper before proposing numbers