confused about life leech cap

Hi Folks,

I understand that life leech cap is 20% but how do you know if you reach that?
How do I figure out from my character sheet if I have reached the cap or not so that I can figure out if more life leech nodes will help or not.

Also, is there a life regen cap as well?

Press the "C" key, select the skill youre using for your attacks or spell and you will see there is a line in your "Offence" section telling to you your leech rate per second on this "attack" or "spell".

I dont know what is the actual cap for regen but of course there is a regen cap too because you cant wear endless gear and cant take endless passive points. So there must be an end for it too with Tier 1 regen mod items and perfect regen passives.

Okay. Every time you hit with damage that can leech, you get a leech effect that gives you the appropriate amount of life at a rate of 2% of your max life per second. This effect can last any amount of time, based on the damage dealt and the percentage of damage leeched (though it will end if you reach full life). For example, if you have 1000 life, 100% life leech and hit for 1000, then you'll leech back 1000 life at a rate of 20 life per second, so will last 50 seconds. If you only hit for 100 damage then you'll leech 100 life at the same 20/second rate, lasting 5 seconds.

You can have multiple leech effects active at once, and all will apply up to that overall 20% cap you mentioned. So by default you need ten active leech effects to cap. Of course, increased leech per second modifiers reduce this number, while + maximum leech rate modifiers increase your cap. But for a given combination of those two stats, the number of active leech effects you need is fixed. e.g. if you have 100% increased leech per second you need five active leech effects to cap, and if you also use Slayer to increase your max leech rate by 10% then you'd need eight.

So basically, can you hit fast and hard enough to keep that many leech effects up?

(Life regen has no cap or weird mechanics like this, it does exactly what it says.)

Errr...

Hopefully you know that 20% is not a hard cap by any means as there are plenty of passives that add onto the maximum Life Leech Rate and can turn the 20 into 25 or 30 or 35.

Anyways, it's actually really easy to figure out one theoretical form of reaching the cap which I call "top speed." Rounding aside, your sustained Leech in ideal conditions will be:
Real DPS (net of # of targets) × Leech % amount × Leech rate modifier.
Then you just compare with 20% of your maximum Life or ES as appropriate.
So, for example, if your real DPS per target is 50000, there are 2 targets, you have "2% of damage Leeched as Life" and 50% increased Life Leech Rate, you get:

50000 × 2 × 0.02 × 1.5 = 3000 Life per Second

Suppose you have 6000 maximum Life. 3000 is 50%, so your top speed against 2 targets hits the default "cap" of 20%, which would be 1200.

Now what if you had 0.2% of damage Leeched as life instead? 0.02 becomes 0.002 up above, and your Top Speed becomes 300 Life per Second, which means you aren't hitting the cap in that case.

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However as viperesque mentioned, there's a lot of mess regarding the exact mechanics. The easiest way to think about it is that hits per second and increased Leech rate help you ramp up faster, while damage and Leech amount help you have longer Leech duration. Both categories (acceleration, duration) contribute to your top speed due to the stacking effect.

Need Leech duration? Hit harder or get "more leech."

Need to cut down ramp up time? Hit faster or get increased Leech rate.

Need a better top speed? Any of above help.

Top speed is hitting cap? Get +x% to maximum life Leech rate.

Plus, as a rule, the more targets you hit, the better your ramp up time (and top speed).

Also?

All of this goes immediately out the window the instant you take Vaal Pact. Leik no srsly. All of these complex calculations and intricate shenanery and Leech Math? Take Vaal Pact and throw it away, because VP turns all leech into "heal for [X]% of damage dealt when damage is dealt."

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