AoE + Leech utterly buggered in 1.1

Path of building-around-reflect stronger than ever.

Yes, there is this...

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Spell Totem and Ranged Attack totem now have multiplicative cast and attack speed penalties.

Ho-hum. Big deal. This is something totem users can overcome.

There is also this...

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Vaal Pact no longer suppresses life recovery from flasks. It still prevents life regeneration and now also reduces your leech by 60%.

60% less leech sounds like a huge, huge nerf. But the very weird part is, it's actually a hell of a lot more than most players are getting.

Pretty much, if you aren't using totems or minions or traps, and you aren't using Vaal Pact, and you're trying to do anything even remotely resembling decent damage, the new patch completely fucks you.

Why? Here's why.

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The way leech applies to the player has changed. If you leech additional life while currently leeching, it no longer queues after the current leech. Technically, where multiple leeches are stacked, the largest one is used.

So, just in case the implications aren't obvious to you, this means if you fire a Chain LMP Arrow into a group of reflect monsters in 1.1, you are still going to take damage 9 times, but instead of leeching 9 times, you will leech once. Hell, even if the monsters don't reflect damage, you are still only going to leech once.

So any hope you had of getting significant leech from your AoE attack? Well, actually VP's 60% nerf is as good as you're gonna get.

I don't get the design reasoning for these leech changes. It seems to me GGG is taking a problematic game mechanic — reflected damage — and just making things worse. An explanation would be nice, because the way I'm looking at it now, it's just arbitrary and punishing.

Don't hit a reflect monster surrounded by 20 other monsters. Such difficulty much wow.

Don't worry, Voltaxic still doesn't care about reflect.

How does an AOE attack like rain of arrow function in this patch?

The way i see it it hits only once but in that one hit a multiple of targets are hit.

Prepare your anus, peeps.

Crit trapper build masterrace reporting in ;p

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pneuma wrote:

Don't worry, Voltaxic still doesn't care about reflect.

Spoiler

Corrupted Area mods:

- All monster have lightning thorn.
- Enemies reflect 15% chaos damage you deal as damage over time.

(wild guess, but who know)

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friction28 wrote:

Don't hit a reflect monster surrounded by 20 other monsters. Such difficulty much wow.

gl on a reflect map with packsize mod.... do you even play this game?

ive been playing with my ci crit ranger since last september. constantly refining, tweaking and testing different items and tree options. best char i had. i realy like playing with it.
looks like every 4 month a couple of working builds are getting squished, with me being hit fully in the face this time.
i dont enjoy grinding all the basic stuff back again and again. infact, i tried to get a dom char going last season, but i found it horribly boring. i will try to like ambush realy realy hard, but i have my doubts.

"

surVfate wrote:

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pneuma wrote:

Don't worry, Voltaxic still doesn't care about reflect.

Spoiler

Corrupted Area mods:

- All monster have lightning thorn.
- Enemies reflect 15% chaos damage you deal as damage over time.

(wild guess, but who know)

Na they won't do that (not yet atleast), no changes to VS or PA in patch notes.