Flicker Strike keeps randomly dying

Hmm I see. That's an aspect about the leech mechanic I didn't anticipate having problems with. I must thank you for doing the testing for me because I wanted to try a Red Trail Slayer too at some point ^^

I just assumed that with slayer overleech you're always going to leech for the full 5 seconds. I guess not.

Maybe you just have to go 2-hander then if you haven't already :/

Edit: Hmmm, what if you lower that 10% maximum? Would that help the leech instances to last longer? What happens if you take the Eternal Youth keystone? Would that fix the random dying? (This is probably a terrible idea to limit a Slayer's leech like this but it could help bring light into the subject)

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Magebanana wrote:

Hmm I see. That's an aspect about the leech mechanic I didn't anticipate having problems with. I must thank you for doing the testing for me because I wanted to try a Red Trail Slayer too at some point ^^

I just assumed that with slayer overleech you're always going to leech for the full 5 seconds. I guess not.

Maybe you just have to go 2-hander then if you haven't already :/

Edit: Hmmm, what if you lower that 10% maximum? Would that help the leech instances to last longer? What happens if you take the Eternal Youth keystone? Would that fix the random dying? (This is probably a terrible idea to limit a Slayer's leech like this but it could help bring light into the subject)

I'm using a 2-hander.

If you lower the 10% maximum by using the overleech unique gloves or the slayer ascendancy (both lower it to 5%) then by default your maximum default duration becomes 2.5 seconds so it would be even worse.

If you take Eternal Youth the maximum amount of health you can recover per second changes from the default 20% to 10% which has no effect on your leech rate or duration. It simply allows for less stacks of leech at one time and would be detrimental.

The only two choices you have are decrease bleed duration and increase minimum hit damage because of how the leech was poorly redone in 3.6.

Oh I see. I still don't fully understand how leech duration is calculated though. The wiki was a little bit unclear about that IMO.

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Magebanana wrote:

Oh I see. I still don't fully understand how leech duration is calculated though. The wiki was a little bit unclear about that IMO.

The mechanic itself is convoluted. Your leech duration is calculated by two things.

You have a default 10% maximum amount of health you can heal from a single hit.

You have a default 2% per second of your maximum life leeched per second when you hit something.

Any amount of damage you do that would heal you for more than 10% of your maximum life is ignored. With no sources of leeching at a faster rate, you will leech for 10% / 2% per second or 5 seconds if you do enough damage to heal for 10% of your maximum health or more.

There are many sources that increase how fast you leech. These do not increased the amount of life you recover. They only increased the 2% per second rate from a single hit. This means, you could have increased your rate of healing on a single hit from 2% per second to 5% per second.

However, there is no stat in the game that can increase how much you can heal in total from a single hit. This means, no matter how fast you are leeching a single hit will never heal for more than 10% of your total health.

This means, that if you heal at 5% per second instead of 2% per second that either way the leech from that 1 attack will stop when you have healed for 10% of your life. The conclusion is that you will leech for up to 5 seconds by default but with a 5% per second leech rate you can only leech for a maximum of 2 seconds.

I found out the hard way that I have to not take any sources that increase my leech rate because they shorten my leech duration. This includes Vaal Pact. However, what I'm currently struggling with is getting enough damage to leech for the full 10% of my hp so my leech does last 5 seconds (or even 3.75 seconds). I generally am getting sufficient damage to do so, but I have found this is not always the case.

One huge issue I have is some things in the game are programmed to take damage but to take essentially 0 damage. Another thing is programmed to not allow you to leech from it. Things like these will 100% kill me every time because they still can bleed. This means I have ~3+ seconds of self bleed that I can't even come close to out healing. I suspect there are other issues, such as changing areas causing bleeding to persist but leeching to stop.

Basically, the changes to leech in 3.6 were a train-wreck and were horrible for slayer in general. This was well known at the time and the community pushed back hard against the changes but GGG didn't care that leech became stupidly complicated and essentially removed overleech from the game. I was only vaguely aware of this until I tried overleech this league and saw what exactly happened.

The changes to leech only require so much work to understand because the ones who changed them did not understand what they were doing at all. Someone who actually knew what they were doing would have made the mechanics much more simple and would not have butchered a mechanic while doing it.

Nice info there!

So let me make sure I understood this correctly,

By default, a character with no leech rate modifiers will always leech for 2% oh his/her HP per second? And the leech ends when the recovered amount matches the amount of HP that the hit stole? And that determines the duration?

This sucks because I was going to go Sword & Shield, so I'd hit for even less and die a lot...

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DemigodParadox wrote:

One huge issue I have is some things in the game are programmed to take damage but to take essentially 0 damage. Another thing is programmed to not allow you to leech from it. Things like these will 100% kill me every time because they still can bleed.

What in the game does this?

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Magebanana wrote:

Nice info there!

So let me make sure I understood this correctly,

By default, a character with no leech rate modifiers will always leech for 2% oh his/her HP per second? And the leech ends when the recovered amount matches the amount of HP that the hit stole? And that determines the duration?

This sucks because I was going to go Sword & Shield, so I'd hit for even less and die a lot...

This is correct. However, keep in mind that I am requiring long leech duration so I cannot use any leech rate modifiers. If you are going to use leech and not use overleech then you don't care how long your leeches last. This means you should take sources of increased leech rate and probably also Vaal Pact. There is a huge amount of this stat and you can easily increase your rate to around 6% per second per hit with still having a 10% maximum per hit. A one handed weapon and a shield does not put out that much less damage than a two handed weapon. The largest reason I am struggling is because flicker strike scales heavily with attack speed and impale. If you are running another skill I can almost guarantee you are doing far more damage per hit (even if you are hitting far slower). Generally, if you are using Vaal Pact and your damage is decent you will heal pretty well while you are attacking. Just not enough to facetank everything. To put into perspective how viable leech is, consider my 2% leech rate and assume it only lasts for 2 seconds per hit (4% max health per hit). My flicker strike has a whopping ~10 attacks per second. After one second of attacking I will have 10 hits vs a single target (not even counting mapping vs mobs) so I will have 10 * 2% or 20% of my maximum health healing per second which lasts 2 seconds. The amount that I leech is my maximum allowed and I reach that rate in a second. The issue with leech is not the amount recovered, rather simply overleech is garbage.

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DemigodParadox wrote:

One huge issue I have is some things in the game are programmed to take damage but to take essentially 0 damage. Another thing is programmed to not allow you to leech from it. Things like these will 100% kill me every time because they still can bleed.

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Magebanana wrote:

What in the game does this?

Still testing. So far, Atziri and the Architect both take ??? damage and I suspect many phased bosses are similar. The totems in lab do not allow you to leech from them anymore.