Relate to Vaal pact Thoughts

I have heard that vaal pact could be potentially changed in next patch. I don't really want to directly talk about my opinion about the change, but some other thoughts related to that.

To be clear, all of these are just my personal thoughts!

For recent game, there are couple of different type of defenses, which could be used by different play style. I divide them into two big parts, mitigation and sustainability. And vaal pact should under the category of sustainability. It improves the effectiveness by using leech significantly, and disable the regen style of sustaining.

However, there are still two main types of sustainable method other than "leech", in my opinion.

1> regen
2> gain on hit

(Recharge is another way but it is restrict to energy shield. so I see it as a bonus to regen.)

So my thought is, the two additional sustainable method could have similar key stone for them to make other "sustaining" style more viable. For example:

1> 100% increase recovery rate after taking savage hit in past 3 sec, Life leech has no effect. (Should be conditional because the only not so comfortable stuff about regen is after taking a big hit. Sometime player with a mid gear will even don't have time to reach to press the life flask. And it is more painful to es regen. However, it should not be 100% reliable on.)

2> 50 life gain on hit, 50% less life regen rate, 50% less leech rate (According to life gain not relative to damage, the total amount gain could be much lesser than leech. So sometime regen and leech are still needed for extra sustaining.And it may work for spell, reasons are below.)(plus someone could have insane cast or attack speed, so the gain amount should be balanced.)


the location for new vaal pact could be the near the duelist starting point (between berserk and ranger). I don't actually think this place has ant problem. Duelist is one of the class special of the leech, it should be fine to make the class focus on that.(However should balance the value though.). And berserk is one of the class could take use of leech as well as regen.

So it will be amazing to have a new keystone between berserk and witch (which at templer location.), so that, if starting from berserk location, it can be choose to play as leech(goes down) or regen(goes up), and at same time, templer is one of the best class to play regen(guardian and inquisitor's consecrate ground) and he can chooses to focus on regen.

And for gain on hit, could have it between witch and ranger (assassin location), so witch could have two choice as well (that is why it should work for spell), and same as ranger. Assassin could choice to have more life gain on hit.

However, those are just my personal thought about some the mechanic can I think could be possible to put into the game. Of course, it is still player's freedom to choice the style they play and this is just my personal opinions. Welcome to discussion and point out something that is not possible in my opinions.

Finally, have a nice day!

Not every mechanic needs a Keystone.

Recall that every Keystone added to the game removes the ability to add one later, as there's only so much room on the tree for Keystones. As well, Keystones are generally supposed to twist the game rules in some way, not just add numerical buffs/debuffs. Vaal Pact is specifically being made into an exception (in that it acts as a very significant source of additional Leech cap/rate, but does not otherwise break or alter game rules) specifically because instantaneous leech was and is horrifyingly broken and was doing bad things to the game's balance and encounter design.

Regeneration is already quite strong if you can gain sufficient levels of it. It doesn't need a Keystone to be good, it needs to stop being compared to Vaal Pact and arbitrarily found wanting. Straight health regeneration is an extremely useful ability to have, which people have forgotten because they got used to being able to Facederp The World with Vaal Pact and thus never having regen. Being able to constantly recover health passively, without any duration or resource limits, is an extremely prized ability in virtually every other game of this type.

Gain on Hit is in a weird place because it's sort of a half-forgotten game mechanic that is actually quite difficult to obtain. Players who have it (generally claw users) often discover that it can in fact be very nice with a sufficient hit rate. The actual Life Gain On Hit support gem is badly out of date and needs to be reworked, much the same way the Leech gems do, especially in an era intensely dominated by 'MOAR DAMAJ' supports - but the mechanic itself is fine. it's simply not well integrated into the game.

I use claws with Multistrike Frost Blades, in conjunction with (normal) leech and regeneration from some health nodes and my Blood Dance boots; between all three mechanics I restore my health extremely quickly and have significantly greater freedom to deal with map mods. 'No Leech' is not an instant dealbreaker for me the way it is for everyone else (though it does do awful things to my mana sustain so I try not to run it if I can).

All that really needs to happen for regen and Gain on Hit to 'make a comeback' (did they ever really leave?) is for Vaal Picnic to stop being a thing, which is happening, and for Gain on Hit to be made more available in general.

EDIT: That's not to say that unique items can't do what you're asking. Uniques can be added near-infinitely, unlike Keystones, and a unique item and/or unique jewel (the latter would be especially good) that stated "100% Increased Health Regeneration if You've Taken a Savage Hit Recently" would be an excellent booster to the game. It doesn't need to be a keystone, but that's not saying it's a bad idea.

Seems I made a mistake that savage hit never works for ES, so the example should be like, 100% increase recovery rate if receiving a hit removes at least 15% life or energy shield, life leech has no effect.

"

Not every mechanic needs a Keystone.

Recall that every Keystone added to the game removes the ability to add one later, as there's only so much room on the tree for Keystones. As well, Keystones are generally supposed to twist the game rules in some way, not just add numerical buffs/debuffs. Vaal Pact is specifically being made into an exception (in that it acts as a very significant source of additional Leech cap/rate, but does not otherwise break or alter game rules) specifically because instantaneous leech was and is horrifyingly broken and was doing bad things to the game's balance and encounter design.

Regeneration is already quite strong if you can gain sufficient levels of it. It doesn't need a Keystone to be good, it needs to stop being compared to Vaal Pact and arbitrarily found wanting. Straight health regeneration is an extremely useful ability to have, which people have forgotten because they got used to being able to Facederp The World with Vaal Pact and thus never having regen. Being able to constantly recover health passively, without any duration or resource limits, is an extremely prized ability in virtually every other game of this type.

Gain on Hit is in a weird place because it's sort of a half-forgotten game mechanic that is actually quite difficult to obtain. Players who have it (generally claw users) often discover that it can in fact be very nice with a sufficient hit rate. The actual Life Gain On Hit support gem is badly out of date and needs to be reworked, much the same way the Leech gems do, especially in an era intensely dominated by 'MOAR DAMAJ' supports - but the mechanic itself is fine. it's simply not well integrated into the game.

I use claws with Multistrike Frost Blades, in conjunction with (normal) leech and regeneration from some health nodes and my Blood Dance boots; between all three mechanics I restore my health extremely quickly and have significantly greater freedom to deal with map mods. 'No Leech' is not an instant dealbreaker for me the way it is for everyone else (though it does do awful things to my mana sustain so I try not to run it if I can).

All that really needs to happen for regen and Gain on Hit to 'make a comeback' (did they ever really leave?) is for Vaal Picnic to stop being a thing, which is happening, and for Gain on Hit to be made more available in general.

EDIT: That's not to say that unique items can't do what you're asking. Uniques can be added near-infinitely, unlike Keystones, and a unique item and/or unique jewel (the latter would be especially good) that stated "100% Increased Health Regeneration if You've Taken a Savage Hit Recently" would be an excellent booster to the game. It doesn't need to be a keystone, but that's not saying it's a bad idea.

Yeah, it needs to think twice to add a new keystone for sure, they always impact game mechanics significantly. Some uniques are definitely a safer choice. However, I am more like to seem every styles to play the game are on the same start level,that available to someone just start the game. Uniques are definitely some stuff that will be find out after spending some time into the game. For a player just get into the game or for a new character without any resource, the passive tree is the first thing that every players can count on.
Thanks for the reply!

I don't think keystones is the solution to improve LGOH/Regen. Just like 1453R said, keystones exist in order to add unique mechanics to the game that alters a build significantly. CI, EB, MoM, BM, IR etc. all do this in some way. Vaal Pact is the first one that's being turned in to a numerical buff since I don't think there's a good way to balance the game when instant leech exists in it's current state.

The regeneration mechanic is already pretty strong. Moderate investment and a Stone Golem can easily push regen to ~8-10% and can rather easily be scaled further. The only thing I believe that needs changing is Vitality. Vitality is a terrible aura and it only becomes mediocre if you stack a ton of aura effectiveness, and even then it's only like 2-3% regen. I think Vitality needs to be changed similair to how Discipline was changed. Give Vitaltiy increased regeneration rate which will act as a multiplicative modifier to your current regeneration rate. 21% at level 1, 40% at level 20. So if you actually invest and manage to stack 10% life regen, with Vitality you would have 14%. The more you stack the stronger it becomes.

LGOH on the other hand has always felt like a pretty archaic mechanic. Just like instant leech, it's a hard mechanic to balance. It's either going to be underpowered or overpowered. How would you exactly balance a mechanic like this so it works on both a build that hits 100 times a second and a build that hits 3 times a second? Leech just seems like a significantly easier mechanic to balance. I think MGOH could work as a pretty niche but useful mechanic for certain builds. Though GGG has been pushing pretty hard to make mana more and more redundant when it comes to attacks and spells.

50 LGOH? rly? with this vaal pact i take 2 claws, molten strike, LGOH support gem and something else with LGOH, 2 threshold jewels for molten strike and NO any attack damage with very huge as. I will have a tons of DPS and about 150 LGOH. With lab enchantment i will have 10 projectiles that means 1650 (10 projectiles + 1 initial attack) life recovery from ONE attack against one fat target (because balls hits earth randomly but big targets hits by all projectiles). If i have 10 aps (that reaches easy) i will have 16500 recovery per second without any lifeleech modes. And this without any expensive investments and without trickster's or ascendant's increasing recovery. Its too strong, not strong as previous version but whatever imbalance.

Increasing recovery with ascendant's or trickster's increasing will be great, and i think it will be very strong for zealot's path builds and rf builds that have tons of recovery.