Upcoming changes to Leech

I am not playing beta but wonder how this change will effect "sponge" builds?

Meaning CIs with like 10,000+ ES or lifers with 6000+ HP who dont have much in the way of mitigation e.g. only 75% res and little in the way of physical mitigation and instead rely on massive leech to heal the massive damage taken to their HP pool.

IMO this was one exciting play-style and required high end gear for enough DPS to even make work at 8.9% instant leech to overcome significant incoming damage. Also had to have high end HP/ES gear to take shots and survive with little mitigation.

Hope we are not pigeon holed into mitigation builds for less diversity.

WOW Blood Rage 17% more aps for 1.2% ll and 8% degen, this is completely OP - please nerf !

wp GGG

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Lachesys wrote:

What does this mean for CI and Ghost Reaver? I understand why you want to buff Ranger/Duelist/Marauder leech rates and I agree but the survivability and sustain for CI characters is already a large issue with stun weakness.

There are some times when you just can't "exit" a fight to recharge your ES, as the mechanics dictate and you likely get stun locked if you try to warp/run away. The only real option in these scenarios is to try and kite while leeching, sort of like suppressing fire. I feel like changing leech, as well as changing just about everything else for casters, while not providing any alternatives or changes to the tree is personally very frustrating. I feel like I am jumping through rings of fire just to be able to play a caster and when I get something up to work averagely, it gets nerfed on the caster end.

I hate to sound impatient but its sort of like I'm being told to play anything else but a caster, and I don't like that at all. Are we getting, you know, like anything any time soon?

Your post made absolutely no sense.

This change is a buff to leaching.

This change is a buff to leaching with Ghost Reaver; This change is a buff to leaching with Ghost Reaver and Chaos Inoc.

And you can always use the mana flask that recharges your ES.

Bottom line - wth are you smoking ? Can I get some ?

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b15h09 wrote:

Well, I, for one, am grateful that I will be able to more easily kill those insanely difficult trash mobs, and the piss easy map bosses will now present a real challenge. This is a brilliant move. Might I suggest doubling all boss damage output, as well? And tripling for party play! Also, I highly recommend 50% of damage should penetrate shield block if you make the other changes.

Thanks GGG.

Right now, playing in a party has 0 drawbacks, and a long list of advantages, your pointless sarcastic remark on monster damage in a party would be a flat improvement to the game.

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SaiyanZ wrote:

Life gain on hit doesn't work with spells.

This is obviously false, think really hard. *queue elevator music*

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0nin wrote:

Why is there no system to fix the fact that Leech is an absolutely useless mechanic until you reach ~level 60 and your DPS actually starts to outweigh your mana and life usage?

Leech should be a percentage of your health and mana, not your damage.

20% / second IF you can deal enough DAMAGE( it already is a % ) , with nodes that relax this cap and one that removes the cap , while also removing life regen to compensate , still , you can convert the life regen to energy shield regen only 1 skill point lost, should you wish to keep your regen.

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idiocyincarnate wrote:

You wanted us to be more diverse in builds with the aura/reduced mana changes, but you're forcing us to use Mana Leech gem to sustain ourselves on almost everything? I'm not sure I understand your logic anymore.. You're simply making the Mana Leech gem mandatory, instead of Reduced Mana. Good job. So much for those words about diversity, huh?

People who save Oak, instead of Alira, always say this. Most of my builds are mana efficient with no mana leech and several points into mana regen and a mana keystone, only reason being is that I save Alira. My net gain being that I don't have to settle for trash items only cause they have mana leech. Sounds like poor math / l2p issue

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mlangwor wrote:

Too many new clusters in the tree, not enough points to spend on them. Increase Life node values to 5% per point spent.

Trash nodes are the vast majority of nodes in the skill wheel, a big sea of bland, uninteresting filler. Allowing players to skip 100% fodder trash nodes like "10 dex", would be enough. For example, by allowing players to get three of them, without receiving the benefit of either.

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Darkaleb wrote:

Excuse a noob question: is there any difference with instant leech between old and new mechanic?

Yes , you now have a 150% more efficient life leech, trough Vaal Pact. If you had 18% of damage leached as life before and were doing 10000 damage per second , you would have leeched 720 life per second , with this change and the same base numbers , you would leach 1800 life per second.

By comparison, life on hit remains the same, so if you attack ten times per second, and your attack hits the target on average three times , one life on hit support gem would still give 1200 life per second times enemies hit , regardless of what damage you do NOW or in/after the beta.

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thepmrc wrote:

Changes seem either poorly implemented, poorly thought through, or a combination of both.

Leach is basically useless now for characters throughout leveling and still next to worthless for characters putting out very high physical damage. Leach rates do not seem to be stacking as you suggest they would. In general leach was simply nerfed into the ground, which is a poor choice imo.

On live, if you go out with your fresh baby marauder and static strike 20 zombies, some skellies, crabs, roas and the like , with your random 1% life leech , you get like 0.5% of your life per second , 0.7% if you crit , at best, no more.

On beta, under the same circumstances , with your random 1% life leech , you hit 10% of the cap , that like 30 hp / second , then you get to the next pack of trash , you hit the cap , your Marauder now mows down everything all the way to Brutus till his adds die.

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lightofeast wrote:

Nerf to leech reminds me of d3.

Dreadful to know that it's heading towards that direction. Oh well..don't fix what isn't broken I hope.

Like someone mentioned in this thread earlier..godly characters that facetank bosses with leech in standard league shouldn't taken as a Reference for balancing.

I suspect they have a dedicated genius sitting there to random nerf established game mechanics, to about -80% of it was before. It's like GGGs Golden Rule to do so if they want something to go away. Last time they nerfed/destroyed that Kamikaze-Clone Build they went similar way - reduced the life of the clones to 20%... the build is now dead. This "balancing" means only one thing - break the game, make it harder to enjoy, grind longer.

Current summary, if im not mistaken:

You can leech max. 20% life (HP) per second , when you havnt invested any skillpoints in leech nodes.
Multiple leech effects now stack.
Each leech effect (Mana/Life) is 2% (unmodified from skilltree).
You can get your 20% leech per second when you either hit 10 enemies at once or hit one big enemy 10 times with a fast weapon.

If you want to leech more then the max 20% life per second you need to invent in
"+ maximum life per second as leech rate"
-Maximun from tree: + 13% ( for total 33% max life per second)

if you want cap the 20 % faster you need to invest in
"increased life leech per second"

Vaal Pact negates booth limits:
Leech per second & max life leeach per second
Leech instantly
-> With VP you can only grap the LL or ML amount nodes and get rid of LL/ML-rate & max life /max mana per second

"

1)
http://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/3a0818/cb_vitality_void_leech_cluster/cs99982
2)
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1274806
3)
http://cb.poedb.tw/us/fullscreen-passive-skill-tree/

Titan Quest actually aproached this in a interesting way. They had Leech resistance.

Bleeding / Life Leech / Energy Leech / Stun / Skill Disruption. Thees were mods you could all resist.. and if you wanted to specialize in either area it took some effort.. i am not a big fan of life leech in this game because it is simply to easy to obtain.

Life leech, and bleeding damage which were directly hitting life, was considered vitality damage and could be resisted through that. Not saying it was the correct solution, just that it offered diversity and maybe a probable solution with some tweaking.

A small comment i saw on the vitality mechanic to.

"Life Leech counts as vitality damage but not all vitality damage is Life Leech. Kinda like Squares are Rectangles, but Rectangles aren't all necessarily Squares."

I think the fact was that they had so many mods.. and items were limited to 8 mods like in path of exile. So Building a char that was capped in all areas was simply impossible or was at least a must to be build around if that is what you wanted.

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Anubis2108 wrote:

Titan Quest actually aproached this in a interesting way. They had Leech resistance.

It wasnt a really interesting approach. All leech-dependant builds used some kind of resistance reduction on enemy, to overcome leech resistance, that's all. Usually - Spirit tree, with its super-potent aura, that reduced leech resistance of all nearby enemies by up to 120.

GGG were first to introduce REALLY interesting leech mechanics - non-instant leech. All other ARPGs had instant life leech, that was always imbalanced. Sadly, GGG allowed players to get instant leech through some keystones or gear, and? of course, that caused imbalance in PoE too.

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Anubis2108 wrote:

Titan Quest actually aproached this in a interesting way. They had Leech resistance.

It wasnt a really interesting approach. All leech-dependant builds used some kind of resistance reduction on enemy, to overcome leech resistance, that's all. Usually - Spirit tree, with its super-potent aura, that reduced leech resistance of all nearby enemies by up to 120.

GGG were first to introduce REALLY interesting leech mechanics - non-instant leech. All other ARPGs had instant life leech, that was always imbalanced. Sadly, GGG allowed players to get instant leech through some keystones or gear, and? of course, that caused imbalance in PoE too.

"

Qarl wrote:

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vangrandson wrote:

If that means nerfed and I know that it means nerfed than rip my beloved windripper char, reflect will take care of me. And my physical crit charcters only god knows how I will not oneshotmyself to the new higher reflect rares.

We are aiming to make it better. This likely means a buff.

From the veryfirst moment on after Iread this manifesto I knew that vaal packt will be nerfed regardless of what Qarl wrote and here we are, nerfed by 50%.

This is how I imagine GGG atm and I am not happy about that:

So literally you destroyed leech and dps based melee characters. congrats. Cheap builds like dualclaw and such are no longer viable against bosses. no more cheapgear atziri facetank, no more endgame map boss facetank.

"this is intended as a buff" How the freaking hell is having 1/5 leech inteded as a buff?? For gods sake if you nerf something to oblivion at least don't try to tell us it's a buff. I dislike when devs think people are stupid.