The Retch mechanics

OK so one of my favourite things about this game is finding uniques that are that in so much that they have some kind of mechanic to them that does in fact make them unique, this time lost belt being one of them, now i understand it may be viewed as a useless or long since forgotten one but I'm wondering if anyone is still savvy enough on it's unique mechanic to offer some insight or make it viable again, I'll try and list what i think i know about it and hopefully get some spitballs going...

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- the restrictions?
* the damage dealt is considered secondary so only global modifiers(other than leech based modifiers) will effect it.
* the damage is based on your leech ability so the usual limitations and caps apply there.
* mods which allow life leech to persist past full health will ensure you continue to deal damage.
* effects which increase the damage a target takes eg curses will help
* in the case of another entity leeching life to you, is the chaos damage based on their life and as such their maximum leech potential, or yours?

please do correct me if I'm wrong but here's what i think i know to be true about the potential damage or the very basics of the mechanics
* the default number of instances of life leech is 10 and 2% of life per instance, meaning maximum leech amount is 20% of your lifepool...
* if i had 5k life and was applying the damage from retch (assuming i'm at full leech amount) the additional damage i'm causing would be 1000 chaos over 5 seconds...
* we can increase this amount if we can increase either the leech cap or the leech rate? or do we just increase the speed in which we achieve this cap?

shenanigans to take possibly advantage of
* "Noxious Catalysts" can raise this damage reflect to 240%
* "Bloodseeker" fist weapon that allows instant leech with direct attacks/hits by that weapon, meaning a direct and instant application of the chaos damage, could blade trap be an option?(would this damage even be performed if the trap is dead so can't gain a leech?)
* "Machina Mitts" cause damage dealt by mines to be leeched to you as life, does this type of leech count or must it be directly done by yourself, if it does then who does the damage, you the leecher or the entity applying the damage that produces the leech?(apply this logic to following options also)
* "The Baron" similar to above, would this damage be applied from the leech carried out by zombies to you?
* The Chieftain Talent "Tukohama, War's Herald" if you were to take the keystone "Ancestral Bond" you would still get the life leech so would you in turn still apply the chaos damage or would that chaos damage count as you and not the totem and so be prevented?(similar to the question with traps/mines, is the chaos damage based on your maximum leech amount or the entity)
* Trolltimber Spire opening up other class options in the same vein as the chieftain source or in additon as a chieftain.
* "Crown of the Pale King" reflects melee damage taken back to attackers and then leeches that damage as life, do we essentially double dip and then also inflict that life leeched as chaos? can we throw "Bramblejack" into the mix and will this give the reflected damage from the helm a 1000% leech also or the helm's standard leech amount but additional sources? if that's the case can we keep stacking additional sources of melee reflect eg Kaltenhalt ?

The Ideas I've triggered so far
* Miner Leeches to player through gloves gaining additional Chaos damage towards the main skill.
* Trapper Leeches via weapon (to the entity?)gaining additional Chaos damage towards the main skill.
* Totem Build/s dealing chaos damage via the totem's leech towards the player.
* Zombies Leech to player through Helm gaining additional Chaos damage procs towards their attacks.
* "Ultimate Thorns" build uses reflected damage to stack leeches through helm to apply this damage when hit by melee

I know to most people this is a dead item but that's kinda the point in why i like it and want to see how/if it still has any viability left to be squeeked out of it, or perhaps even a hidden potential interaction that has been overlooked and will give us a build of the week until that get's the nerfbat

This used to be a niche build that could get pretty good damage. The retch was quite rare back then. It was gutted by the last leech rework. Even bloodseeker is now capped in how much it can leech from a single hit so your dps from it is limited to a fraction of your life pool. Given that it's hard to get life over 10k and dps requirements are in the millions, you end up with a bit of a problem.

yeah i think the restrictions on leech numbers is what is holding it from making a return, i did read a conflicting thing stating that the damage was sort of a separate equation from your leech after/once the hit has landed so is not limited to you being able to leech or reaching your leech cap but i think it is still restricted by the max amount you can leech, it's all a bit screwy layered maths that i don't big brain to work out lol

it's one of those strange ones where i don't think it shows up in game tool-tip or for the life of me i couldn't find it on PoB either so there's no solid way of nailing down what the mechanics are doing and how much other than blind faith.

probably why i gave it the hail mary of asking the community for input but i doubt there's enough interest in it as like you say the numbers got gutted. :'(

- the restrictions?
* the damage dealt is considered secondary so only global modifiers(other than leech based modifiers) will effect it.
It is actually considered reflected damage, so nothing can increase it other than curses and wither and other 'take increased damage' sources.

* the damage is based on your leech ability so the usual limitations and caps apply there.
increasing "Maximum Recovery per Life Leech" increases the damage per hit. Nothing else matters. Divergent life leech increases this by 5% for each quality. Put this in atziri's or dialla and you get 250% increase

* mods which allow life leech to persist past full health will ensure you continue to deal damage.
Yup. This is required. considering the previous part, you'll want the slayer scendency to increase the "Maximum Recovery per Life Leech".

* effects which increase the damage a target takes eg curses will help
yup.

* in the case of another entity leeching life to you, is the chaos damage based on their life and as such their maximum leech potential, or yours?
it is purely based on how much you are leaching from a specific target.

please do correct me if I'm wrong but here's what i think i know to be true about the potential damage or the very basics of the mechanics
* the default number of instances of life leech is 10 and 2% of life per instance, meaning maximum leech amount is 20% of your lifepool...
Much like other mechanics, you can have an infinite number of leeches on you, but only the highest leech rates apply to your hp. If it ignored all these additional leech stacks, it would do nothing to a lot of mobs in a pack.

* if i had 5k life and was applying the damage from retch (assuming i'm at full leech amount) the additional damage i'm causing would be 1000 chaos over 5 seconds...
See previous. It would be adding your "Maximum Recovery per Life Leech" per hit to your dps. So if you have everything maxed out that's 35% of your hp pool, which the retch deals as 70% of your hp pool per hit.
5k hp pool would be 3k extra damage per hit.

* we can increase this amount if we can increase either the leech cap or the leech rate? or do we just increase the speed in which we achieve this cap?
increase "Maximum Recovery per Life Leech" and hits per second.

You would need a really high leech% of your hit to make it worthwhile.
I really wish I knew the answer to crown of the pale king, because that's the one I'm most curious about... Because you need a lot of leech per hit to make Retch worthwhile.

It's likely just a pvp belt.

I agree with your last statement though, it's very vague in its mechanics.

Damage from other sources leeching to you is the most curious and I do wonder if it would effectively double dip when using totems. If your overleech applies to totems and they benefit from the belt, they leech and start the retch. But you also gain leech stacks from them and apply even more leech effects. While they're attacking, you could also be attacking and gaining even more leech stacks. Might need to do lightning damage to get the big leech% from Vessel of Vinktar otherwise we run into the same issue where we're trying to scale a tiny portion of our damage.
shrapnel balista is likely most hits per second.

You can also convert the life leech to es leech with ghost reaver and not lose on the damage since the "Maximum Recovery per Life Leech" is the same.

someone else did a test with thousand teeth temu and the reflect is just bad late game due to armor.. 10x the biggest hit in the game is also pretty awful. To make these work we would need a way to force more hits from enemies. Though it is an interesting idea to double dip on the effect I don't know if it would be enough.

Edit: pale king doesn't seem to work.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3310598
likely because of this: reflected damage isn't considered by you.
So because of this you never targeted the enemy and none of your stats add effects to the reflected hit.
A shame, would have been an interesting interaction.

Reading through the below, and not being able to test it due to a dead PC we might get more damage out of it than we think.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/10h6dvh/on_the_use_of_wurms_molt_and_damage_taken_leeched/

The additional increases to effects of leech might act as multipliers. Initially I though the "increased total Recovery per second from Life Leech" only affected the rate at which you leech. This was incorrect. It increases the amount an instance of leech recovers over the period of time that the leech would normally occur.

Vaal pact then doubles this amount.

The "Maximum total Life Recovery per second from Leech" is just a cap that is placed on the effectiveness without actually preventing you from having a leech that is effectively more than the cap.

So the only stat that acts as a cap to the Retch is still "Maximum Recovery per Life Leech", with the recovery per second acting as a multiplier to it.

Let's assume you take every leech effect node on the tree. (40 points)

you get a hysteria mod on your amu (150%) and add catalyst (180%)
double crusader rings with cata (60%)

you end up with 870% increased leech. With vaal pact that 1740%

That's actually not bad for a dot.

Let's take the max of 45% of your hp pool per leech

17.4x.35=7.83 your life per leech

now let's multiply that by 2.4 from the belt
7.83x2.4=18.792

Assuming you're doing enough damage to get max leech on each hit, you'll be doing 18.79x your health pool (5k) in damage from the Retch.

5x18.792=93.96k

93k additional damage per hit.

how much damage would it take to get that?
5000x.45=2250
assuming 30% leech (lightning flask+other leeches)
2250/.3=7500
7500 damage to do 93k damage.

toss in the wither and punishment and alt despair
280k

Still not amazing, but at least we're heading in the right direction. Maybe with some cheeky belt swapping you can use wyrm's molt to stack the leech, then apply it with the Retch for more than double the damage.

Just need to pick the right attacks or spells that maximize hits.
cast while channeling storm burst+ blade vortex? 5M dps or more?
multi-totems+attack? Each extra totem is like a 50% more multiplier if they apply Retch for 6x shrapnel ballista > 10x4 40x280=11.2M Maybe more with extra projectiles. Definitely more with iron commander if you wanna commit to strength stacking.
You could use blast rain for even more leeches per second while your totems do work.

Or go full degenerate and figure out a ward loop setup.

Maybe drop the rings for a self reverse chill setup so you get max attack speed... Too many other mechanics to look into without having PoB or ability to test.


TL;DR Life leech mechanics are weird and "increased total Recovery per second from Life Leech" allows you to leech several times your health per instance of leech. "increased total Recovery per second from Life Leech" is the only multiplier for the retch and allows you to deal several times your life pool as damage from comparatively small hits.

there's definitely some big brain involved to get it to go anywhere nowadays, inconsistency on available information relating to how it exactly mechanically works also makes it more trial and error which is also unfortunately difficult to test as PoB generally can't accommodate the numbers or application and to test in game you literally only have a visual proof of concept which without combat logs/training dummies is only as accurate as you can surmise on screen.

i would love to see a true thorns build and the closest i ever got was the krangled mod bodybombers that reflected %of hp as fire when hit, that was kinda the same concept but simplified, heck i don't even know if the retch even works properly any more as it's so difficult to test.

your input is definitely more enlightened than what i was aware of though so maybe yourself and others can get that needle moving the right way :D

it's also probably safe to assume whatever math is behind the heals on Wurm's Molt is likely the same as the damage application for retch, assuming you 20% catalyst the belt to get the 240% returned as damage then i'd say whatever numbers are achievable with Wurm's(working on the 1000% perfect roll) as a heal you'd be able to get roughly 1/4 of that as an applicable damage output for Retch?

again i could be totally wrong, i think the most defining and limiting thing is the effect of the leech cap and where that rough hard ceiling ends up being and what you can do to raise/circumvent it.