24 replies to this topic

[Loroese]

I just submitted a bug report on the official forums but figured the wizards around here might want to know about it. Bug report: http://us.battle.net...ic/7416066959#1

The gist is that life steal DOES work with Storm Armor. However, there is also some strange things going on, listed below, which is copied directly from my bug report.


First, you gain no life from Storm Armor with the Blood Magic rune.

Second, if you have no life steal on your weapon, activate Storm Armor, then switch to a life steal weapon, you gain no life.

Third, if you have a life steal weapon equipped, activate Storm Armor, then switch to a non life steal weapon, you still gain life.

[Pew]

Loroese, on 04 January 2013 - 03:04 AM, said:

First, you gain no life from Storm Armor with the Blood Magic rune.

Second, if you have no life steal on your weapon, activate Storm Armor, then switch to a life steal weapon, you gain no life.

Third, if you have a life steal weapon equipped, activate Storm Armor, then switch to a non life steal weapon, you still gain life.

I can't speak to the first one (are you applying it before storm armor?), but it's possible the second two might be more of an undocumented feature rather a bug (although they might be a bug!) This is essentially life steal snapshotting. A popular example would be with Demon Hunters who activate Shadow Power - Blood Moon for 25% life steal and then just keep strafe going. Even after SP ends, the snapshotted 25% life steal is still active the entire duration of strafe.

[Loroese]

I tested the first one both before and after activating Storm Armor, and in no cases did I ever gain any life, unless my weapon had LS on it. I'm not sure how many of those are bugs, but I assume that between the 3 of them, at least one should be a bug, even if it's just the first one. I wouldn't be surprised if #2 and 3 are bugs, but aren't planned to be fixed. It seems a lot easier to just snapshot the LS rather than checking LS for every shock.

[Pew]

Out of curiosity, have you tested any other snapshotting? Like maybe even something as drastic as removing your weapon or changing the amount of int you have after you cast Storm Armor and seeing if it keeps your DPS from cast? I haven't heard of anybody testing that kind of snapshotting before (although they probably have).

[agadabagada]

blood magic has always been wierd. it used to not work on archon so it could be another thing that blizard hasnt noticed
the next one about non lifesteal+casted then switching to lifesteal wep is probably intended as that is how sweeping wind works for a couple reasons. The basics to this mechanic is that skills that are casted as a buff over time take a "snapshot" of ur character in terms of damage/lifesteal/loh/ect and it is like that until the skill wears off. this is so that you dont put a 5 damage wep on with 0 lifesteal then swap to a 1 damage wep with 5 lifesteal.

[Loroese]

Pew, on 04 January 2013 - 03:22 AM, said:

Out of curiosity, have you tested any other snapshotting? Like maybe even something as drastic as removing your weapon or changing the amount of int you have after you cast Storm Armor and seeing if it keeps your DPS from cast? I haven't heard of anybody testing that kind of snapshotting before (although they probably have).

Yes, I tested the dps snapshotting. I just removed my weapon, and the damage per strike reduced significantly, so it definitely checks weapon damage before every strike.

[rudroth]

Have you tested to see if this affects LOH at all?

[Loroese]

rudroth, on 04 January 2013 - 12:34 PM, said:

Have you tested to see if this affects LOH at all?

The LoH coefficient for the shock is 0, so you never gain life from LoH.

[SeravokX]

Nice work Loroese.

I agree with the trend I this thread that case 1 of your findings is the bug, and that cases 2 and 3 are working as Blizzard had originally designed the skill to work. Considering how many skills can be creatively "buffed" (abused?) by weapon-swapping before casting them though, we may end up seeing an internal mechanic change that does away with the "snapshot" effect. I imagine such a change would require a lot of work though and only come in a patch (much like 1.0.6 was created in part to fix a large bug that couldn't be hot-fixed). Who knows though.

I have a question about your findings though. It seems like you are referring to the damage dealt by the lightning strikes created by the skill Storm Armor. Have you tested any of the secondary damage effects created by the runes (specifically "Shocking Aspect" but also the rune that acts as a thorns effect) to see if the damage done by the effect(s) triggers lifesteal in any of the 3 cases?

I'd check this myself but I just began my workweek. I wouldn't be able to get to it for days.

[Loroese]

I've tried testing Shocking Aspect to see if it triggers Life Steal, but didn't have much luck. Also, I was using Blood Magic to test, and if the results above indicate anything it's that BM isn't a good way to test if life steal works with something. My inclination is it does work with life steal but my results were not conclusive. I haven't tested any other runes though. I also don't have the time to test it myself, nor the desire at the moment.

[SeravokX]

Decided to lose a bit of sleep and check out Shocking Aspect myself.

As expected, the lightning damage from the Shocking Aspect rune will still provide life if you cast Storm Armor with a life steal weapon equipped and then weapon swap to another weapon without life steal.

This opens weapon-swapping for a snapshot of LS to CM wizards, and may let some people run SNS who previously had trouble with it due to low resistances or life gain (LoH or LS). Not quite as useful as say a Monk swapping for SW or a DH swapping for Strafe, as these abilities usually would need to be refreshed much less often, but an interesting option nonetheless.

[Loroese]

How were you able to test it? I figure the easiest way is to just equip a LS weapon and record a WW duration with high crit and high APS. At 2.73 APS you should get at least a couple SA procs. I was going to try that method before, but since I didn't think Storm Armor worked with Life Steal, I didn't carry it out.

[SeravokX]

I removed all LoH and regen gear I had on. I intentionally took some hits to get down to ~15% life. I equipped a life steal weapon and cast Storm Armor with Shocking Aspect, then swapped my weapon back to a non-life steal weapon.

(* Edited out my first attempt to test this as it was invalid. Thanks BSF2000.)

The method I used to check was by casting Storm Armor with a LS weapon equipped and weapon-swapping to a non-LS weapon, and stun-locking a bunch of mobs while spamming WW (no EB, and of course no regen or LoH). As you know, the lightning strikes from Storm Armor hit only about 1/sec and I knew from doing this experiment for some time how much life I'd gain per crit strike, and as I spammed WW my life gain per second was easily and consistently 2-3 times my highest return from a crit lightning strike. Again, since I had no LS, regen or LoH equipped the difference in life gain could not be attributed to WW and so it must come from the damage dealt by Shocking Aspect.

Edited by SeravokX, 08 January 2013 - 04:44 PM.

[BDF2000]

I'm a bit confused by your test seravok, becuase in order for shocking aspect to deal damage at all to anything you need to be within melee range of a target.  For instance, when you teleport off screen to prevent lightning strikes, if you were to happen come close to another mob you'd start seeing all of your shocking aspect procs tick on him...even though the attack cuasing it to proc (the twisters) are off screen hitting other targets.

So I'm not sure what was giving you life once no mobs were in melee range, but it doesn't sound like shocking aspect.

[SeravokX]

You're right. I'm redoing the first testing now and cannot reproduce my results I thought I had seen yesterday. I shouldn't have tried this while also forcing sleep deprivation upon myself... I think what I was seeing was just the last couple ticks of life gain from the Shocking Aspect procs while I was standing still casting the 3-4 WW's, before I teleported. They can take a second to show up as a tick on your screen. In any case, I'm going to edit out my first scenario entirely as it is false information. Thanks for pointing that out.

What I CAN reproduce is the remaining scenario (the "less scientific one"), where I cast Storm Armor/Shocking Aspect with a LS weapon equipped and then swap to a non-LS, spam WW into a group of mobs, and see very high life gain with no LS, regen or LoH equipped. I'm doing this on MP8 so things live long enough to see a constant gain in life.

This is actually pretty simple to test, and I want to explain it more right now as I'm doing it instead of as a false recollection later on as I did last time.
- I first kite/circle mobs as my lightning strikes hit them, and jot down the life gain numbers I see. The highest I saw of 20 or so crits was a hit for ~97k that healed me for 505, while most non-crits healed for 120-170 and most crits healed for 360-500. I had used a weapon with 2.6% LS when I cast Storm Armor.
- Then, still within the duration of the Storm Armor, I froze the group of mobs I was circling and spammed WW/Frost Nova into them.
I was seeing life gain numbers at the lowest of just over 800 and up to 1900-2100 steadily ticking until I was at full life. Note that I was now seeing life gain ticks twice a second, whereas most of the time the lightning strikes (and subsequent life gain) had been hitting 1/sec.This was all done with 2.51APS, 40% crit chance and 150K dps.

I decided I wanted to see more telling results, so I equipped a few more pieces and tested again, at 2.80APS, 55.5%CC and 167K dps. I also gained 362hp/sec regen from this gear, but no LoH or LS. My lightning strikes were rarely breaking 130K on crits with this new setup and hit about once a second. I used a 6% LS 2hand weapon for the casting of Storm Armor, then switched back to my non-LS weapon.

While using this setup, I was able to get life gain ticks of over 5k/tick while spamming WW. This is equivalent life gain to how much I would receive from a single hit for around 400k (400k x (6% / 5) = 4800), plus my life regen. Since again the damage from the WW's cannot proc life gain, the additional life gain seen in my two tests must be from Shocking Aspect procs.

While I am certain Life Steal will work with Storm Armor's lightning strikes AND Shocking Aspect's additional damage when cast with a Life Steal weapon equipped and then weapon-swapping to non-LS, I would appreciate someone else trying this out as well or sharing another method that could work better. The main problem I was trying to overcome was that as Loroese has already proven, the lightning strikes from Storm Armor return life through Life Steal, and this means you have to know relatively how much life gain you're getting from the lightning strikes and then subtract that from whatever life gain you get while trying to proc Shocking Aspect to see how much Shocking Aspect is actually producing. This consideration is in addition to having no LoH and swapping LS out after casting Storm Armor of course, so that no other sources of damage can be considered for life gain procs.

I hope this is more accurate, and helpful.

Edited by SeravokX, 08 January 2013 - 05:18 PM.

[Loroese]

I see, the weapon swap is pretty clever since that will result in life gain only from the storm armor and presumably shocking aspect. If you were seeing life gains that high, I can only assume shocking aspect (SA) works with life steal in the same manner as storm armor. With 6% LS, a 130k crit would only heal for 1560, so getting 5k per tic means SA procs.

Thanks for the info.

[BDF2000]

I can see myself swapping to my skorn before buffing storm armor on mp10 magdah...in fact I may do just that tonight.   Or perhaps do it anytime I see a reflect dmg electrfy mob on mp10

[RasAlgethi24]

Interesting so life steal would be vastly superior to life on hit then?  Although that would mean sacrificing a socket or crit damage on a weapon for life steal if you didn't want to weapon swap.

[Loroese]

RasAlgethi24, on 11 January 2013 - 03:42 AM, said:

Interesting so life steal would be vastly superior to life on hit then?  Although that would mean sacrificing a socket or crit damage on a weapon for life steal if you didn't want to weapon swap.

For Archon, LS >> LoH. For CMWW LoH is still better by a bit until you get to 150-200k dps.

[SeravokX]

Loroese is right in that when comparing LS to LoH, LS gains value while LoH loses value as dps increases. But for CMWW, it would take an incredible amount of dps for LS to out-perform LoH. This is where itemization can determine the clear winner, as LS can only be found on a Wizard's weapon.

On my wizard in my current "testing" gear with 170K dps, I do around 175k damage per full duration of one WW on one target. 3% LS would return about 1050 life (175K * .03 * .2 = 1050). To know what this is equivalent to in LoH, I have to know how many ticks I get per cast of WW. Referencing Loroese's CMWW guide, my 2.64 APS would produce 33 ticks for one full-duration cast. WW has a proc rate of 12.5% (1.0.5 patch notes) or maybe 10% (quoted from Loroese's DPS/EHP spreadsheet, which he references to player testers posting results on the forums), and this equals only 250-323 LoH to get the same return per cast of WW.

So even if I wanted to sacrifice CD/socket/IAS on my weapon for LS, I'd still lose to the potential of getting a LoH weapon instead. If my WW did three times the damage it does now (if that's even possible) it would only break even between max LS (3%) return and max LoH return (959). Another way LS could catch up to LoH would be to maintain dps but have a less APS, but this is counter-productive to CMWW, and to increasing dps in general.

The real value in the discovery that Storm Armor snap-shots your weapon's LS when cast is showing you can swap to LS for the cast and then back to your real weapon to add some life return from Storm Armor's damage. I seriously doubt that the LS return from Storm Armor with Shocking Aspect (which provides no life via LoH) in addition to the LS from all your other sources would out-perform LoH, if you had to choose between the two.