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There are two ways Vaal Pact helps a characters survivability.
One is against reflect. In this case you'd need to leech equal or more life/es back than you lose to reflect and you need to not get oneshot by a single instance of reflect damage. Since reflected physical damage is mitigated by armour the exact amount leech and life/es you'd need is a bit complicated to calculate but if you have no armour and hit for 42k phys damage then:
- map reflect is 18%: You'd need 18% effective leech and 7560 life/es to be guaranteed to survive hitting one or more targets
- aura reflect is 14%: You'd need 14% effective leech and 5880 life/es to be guaranteed to survive hitting one or more targets
- both together stack to 32%: You'd need 32% effective leech and 13440 life/es to be guaranteed to survive hitting one or more targets
- Being shocked or cursed with vulnerability will further increase the needed amount of effective leech and life/es, well beyond what's actually possible to surive.
Multistrike and accuracy doesn't mean much here. When you hit multiple targets you start with one of them, leech from that one target, then take damage from that one target, then move to the next one and repeat. Accuracy can make it harder to evade your own reflect but the formula is exponential so if you have enough accuracy to hit monsters in a reliable fashion chances are you will hit yourself quite a lot as well. In my opinion, only ranged characters with ondar's guile has the option of effectively utilizing evasion to mitigate reflect.
tl;dr if you die to reflect with vaal pact sacrifice some dps to get more leech and more life/es
The other way Vaal Pact helps survivability is by letting you man up and face tank strong bosses. In this case you need to be able to survive getting hit and then be able to leech back the life/es you lost before getting hit again. What kind of stats you need to pull that off is obviously something that is going to differ a lot from situation to situation but my experience is that a vaal pact character would rather leech 1k life/es back 8 times a second than 4k life/es 2 times a second. In other words, you want attack speed more than dps. Multistrike is great in that regard but you also need all the accuracy you can get because missing means not leeching which means you might die. Reliable leech rate is the key.
tl;dr if you die to strong enemies with vaal pact get more atk speed, unless you're getting oneshot; then get more life/es
Thanks for your extensive reply.
Basically Im not gonna one shot myself unless its reflect map and reflect mob inside. But generally I can deal with only reflect mobs (auras), that's not so problematic. I just need to take care.
On the other hand Im thinking if I can survive Atziri, if I can deal dmg constantly and therefore leech constantly ?
About att speed, I thought I have enough att speed to sustain it, I think 8.2 -8.9 I think. Ought to be enough ?
