Will Life Leech make a return as stat in D3? Or any other health regenerating stat for that matter.
Of course they should limit it so you wouldn't fully heal with 1 hit. I always thought it makes interesting gameplay when you are able to hit your enemy more then they hit you and thus regenerating a bit from it.
Opinions?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t...
lifesteal is in SMALL percentage stealing (if not already removed) or/and in minimal health return on enemy deaths or striking.
numbers in d3 aren't nearly as intensive as a damage/health ratio in d2. i dont think lifesteal will be something you can rely on purely for survival. d2 endgame is like 700-3000hp and 60% reduction (not taking ac and hit rating in to account since its not in d3) 3000 dps. the damage/health is 1 to 1!
D= d3 pvp is more like 10 to 1; versing monsters (which is not nearly as skill focused) is a little less shakey too, relying on tactical skill for those globes rather than brute potion and pregearing strength.
its much more skill based and a little slower since you arent like a "i have more lifesteal so i hold down my right click and win" character.
Jay Wilson commented on this directly, he said what we're saying here: it won't be as important a stat as it was in D2. It makes sense, since vitality isn't going to be the one, go-to stat for increasing survivability.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions."
-Thomas Jefferson
Life Leech? Probably not except in maybe in really small amounts (1% ish) on certain unique weapons.
Life on hit? No since that would favor fast weapons (and dual wield) over slower weapons.
Leech -up to- X life on hit. That would factor in weapon speeds, and still easy to balance.
I for one really liked life leeching in D2, when it was not gamebreaking..
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t...
I don't think it's that easy to balance, personally. Life leech tends to be either game-breaking, or completely ignorable as a stat.
Scenario 1: D2 style: You have to have leech to live because your health drops so fast.
Scenario 2: Defense stats actually work and your health doesn't drain super-fast. Health globes give exponentially more health per unit time than leech, and there are generally enough of them, so leech becomes a wasted stat.
I don't see a middle ground, but maybe I'm not looking hard enough.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions."
-Thomas Jefferson
Nice spot with the Sapphire. I don't however think it can possibly be final. 3% in a low quality (flawed) gem sounds way overpowered. Maybe they've since ditched life leech as a percentage altogether. BlizzCon 2010 build is more than a year old now.
Well that really depends though on the average health:dmg ratio we will have. If I use the example given before as 10:1(HP/DMG) for D3, then lets say 1000 HP and 100 DMG per hit. That would be giving back 3 HP out of 1000 HP. Who knows though, tough to say until beta.
Even with such simple, preliminary discussions about life-leech, we can see how complicated it is to balance the stat. That's why I predict Bliz will err to the side of caution, having stated they don't want leech to be out of control. You heard it here. Life Leech is gonna be a "meh" stat.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions."
-Thomas Jefferson
My point exactly. I believe the only way to implement the stat is black or white, must-have or meh. Given the evidence Blizzard has shared about their desire to attenuate leech, I'm guessing meh. And I'm 100% fine with that. I'm an ex prot-warrior, I'm all about mitigation and avoidance.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions."
-Thomas Jefferson
There is already the life globe system. Having life leech become a powerful stat will pull the rug below the entire combat system that the health globes bring.
I don't think it's that easy to balance, personally. Life leech tends to be either game-breaking, or completely ignorable as a stat.
Games like LoL disagree with you.
There's nothing particularly difficult to balance about life leech. Not any more than any other stat, really.
It's most probably going to be in the game in some way, it's a pretty standard stat for RPG's.
That's a good point.. I guess I should spell out my theory a bit better.
Case 1: You're melee. You get hit a LOT. You kill stuff FAST. Since Blizzard has decreed that it's all about mitigation (i.e. slowing down the hit points lost per unit time), health globes are going to vastly overshadow the utility of life leech. Why? The sheer quantity of kills, and the very few swings it takes to cause said kills. At least, this is what I get from the gameplay footage.
Case 2: You're ranged. You don't get hit often, and you have lots of defensive abilities to avoid dmg. Life leech is not useful cause if you get below 75-50%, just grab a globe.
Case 3: You vs. single strong targets, aka bosses and rares. And it's this case I think Blizzard would be wise to tune leech for.
There is already the life globe system. Having life leech become a powerful stat will pull the rug below the entire combat system that the health globes bring.
Please.
You ran out of globes.
What now?
Run. Fast.
This is one thing I LOVED about the original Diablo that just wasn't re-captured in D2. I loved walking into a crazy room only to get almost killed, my only option left being to get the hell outta there.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions."
-Thomas Jefferson
Since Blizzard has decreed that it's all about mitigation (i.e. slowing down the hit points lost per unit time)
Life leech is a part of mitigation IMO, so I don't really get what your point is. It's pretty much the same as life regen except it only occurs when you hit stuff. In games where life leech is actively used, it serves to keep melee alive because they take the most damage, while other classes can just plain avoid it. It's a form of balancing it for the melee.
Health globes are a positional problem so they really aren't the same thing as life steal or regen. They are not part of your mitigation, they're unguaranteed unstable source of HP. We don't even know how they're going to be balanced or if they are going to be useful for anything but between figths, especially on boses or anything with lack of adds.
Case 2: You're ranged. You don't get hit often, and you have lots of defensive abilities to avoid dmg. Life leech is not useful cause if you get below 75-50%, just grab a globe.
Ranged typically do not use life leech. At least, I wouldn't.
As with everything, it should be up to the player whether they want to use leech or not. I see no reason to limit choices.
This is one thing I LOVED about the original Diablo that just wasn't re-captured in D2. I loved walking into a crazy room only to get almost killed, my only option left being to get the hell outta there.
By "get the hell outta" there you mean cheat-tp, fill your bar with cheat-potions, and come back? Repeat x300 times?
Diablo was only difficult at hte beginning when you were poor and when enemies dealt insane damage (e.g., dogs).
In fact, the reasons Diablo was hard are both absent from DII, and will be absent from DIII:
1. You couldn't mf your way through everything.
2. You couldn't re-run areas for xp or whatever (this only applies to SP anyway).
Remove those two and Diablo became the same stat-limited cakewalk as DII.
So I dunno what you're talking about or what life leech has to do with anything. I also don't see why DII is a good example of, well, anything. DII is a very clunky, horribly balanced game, so pretty much every attribute there is going to be broken to one degree or another.
Since Blizzard has decreed that it's all about mitigation (i.e. slowing down the hit points lost per unit time)
Life leech is a part of mitigation IMO, so I don't really get what your point is. It's pretty much the same as life regen except it only occurs when you hit stuff. In games where life leech is actively used, it serves to keep melee alive because they take the most damage, while other classes can just plain avoid it. It's a form of balancing it for the melee.
Overall you make a good case for leech. But this is our specific point of disagreement, and (of course) it's definitions. Disclaimer: I was a prot-warrior in WoW so I have a very specific definition for defense-related mechanisms. Not saying I know more than you, just that you need to know my definitions to understand my initial argument.
Mitigation is (and only is) the reduction of raw incoming damage by a certain percentage.
I know you can do this math, but for other readers, an example: Enemy swings for 100 damage. Hits you. Your armor, traits, etc mitigates all physical damage by 20%. You lose 80 HP. Another excellent example would be resistance to fire damage by 25%.
Mitigation is distinct from Avoidance (dodge, parry, etc) wherein any single attack is avoided completely, no matter what amount. Ex: Enemy swings for 9001 damage, you dodge, you take 0 damage.
Mitigation is also distinct from life leech. Life leech increases your hit point pool by X% per damage done by you (not to you). It has absolutely no direct correlation to incoming damage whatsoever, which is why it is distinct from mitigation. You're not mitigating anything, you're adding hit points. An enemy could conceivably swing and miss you 4 times in a row, while you hit the enemy and gain HP, ultimately killing it while taking no damage.
Mitigation and Life Leech are only similar in one way: They help you live longer.
Edit: Blizzard has said they are making damage mitigation much more important in D3, and they are using my definition for mitigation.
Edit 2: You revealed a flaw in what I said, i.e. calling mitigation : "slowing down the hit points lost per unit time." And you were right to. You could sum damage taken by hit points gained and the more you swing the slower you die. But in my definition, that's a different thing, which I call "survivability." If you consider life leech a part of mitigation, then your "mitigation" is my "survivability."
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions."
-Thomas Jefferson
Well, I believe you skipped the first page with the quote from Bashiok (or whoever uses twitter). There are a number of skills across the classes, which will provide an alternate source of health regeneration, such Revenge for the Barbarian and a runed Cluster Arrow for the Demon Hunter.
We don't know the specifics, and honestly I don't see how this is any different from lifesteal.
Disclaimer: I was a prot-warrior in WoW so I have a very specific definition for defense-related mechanisms.
World of Warcraft is a pseudo-turn-based, trinity-based MMORPG where the prot warrior you described is a dedicated tank class whose SOLE purpose for an instance is to attract as many damaging elements as possible and devote ALL resources to surviving and surviving only.
Since prot warriors survive and survive only they do not deal damage therefore they would never use lifesteal because that makes no sense since lifesteal traditionally scales off damage.
Since prot warriors survive and survive only they do not heal themselves at any point therefore they would never have lifesteal to heal themselves since they always have a healer, and if the healer fails the prot warrior will die very very fast.
Furthermore, since ANY DPS class in WoW odes not worry about surviving, they'll never ever use lifesteal, either.
You should never compare a trinity MMORPG to a Hack&Slash. Ultra-specialized classes just do not go well with half-specialized classes of all other games.
Mitigation is (and only is) the reduction of raw incoming damage by a certain percentage.
This term has no value.
In video games (any of them), mitigation or survival rating (or w/e you want to call it) refers to the total sum of all negative health effects and all positive health effects that are consistent and continual. Which is, basically, damage after defense and damage enhancement vs healing after negation and healing enhancement.
This definition is important because it is a variable that can be directly used for the purposes of game balance. Any definition that doesn't include lifesteal is useless unless we are indeed talking about a game where lifesteal doesn't exist is useless from the standpoint of game balance.
From the standpoint of game balance, lifesteal is very easy to insert in the calculation.
The distinctions you discuss are irrelevant to the structure of the video game. They're just semantic distinctions and nothing else. Dodges and the like get added in like anything else by statistical value.
You say lifesteal has nothing to do with incoming damage but that is incorrect. It has to do with incoming damage after calculation. If incoming damage (after all calc) is 300 and you heal yourself for 250 (after all calc) you are losing 50 HP and that becomes a variable in how much time you have to kill the enemy.
This value is pretty pointless in WoW since your healer will heal you to oblivion.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Will Life Leech make a return as stat in D3? Or any other health regenerating stat for that matter.
Of course they should limit it so you wouldn't fully heal with 1 hit. I always thought it makes interesting gameplay when you are able to hit your enemy more then they hit you and thus regenerating a bit from it.
Opinions?
numbers in d3 aren't nearly as intensive as a damage/health ratio in d2. i dont think lifesteal will be something you can rely on purely for survival. d2 endgame is like 700-3000hp and 60% reduction (not taking ac and hit rating in to account since its not in d3) 3000 dps. the damage/health is 1 to 1!
D= d3 pvp is more like 10 to 1; versing monsters (which is not nearly as skill focused) is a little less shakey too, relying on tactical skill for those globes rather than brute potion and pregearing strength.
its much more skill based and a little slower since you arent like a "i have more lifesteal so i hold down my right click and win" character.
-Thomas Jefferson
Overpowered things can be balanced. If the stat is fun it should return?
Easy balance= Leech X life from your enemy on hit.
Leech -up to- X life on hit. That would factor in weapon speeds, and still easy to balance.
I for one really liked life leeching in D2, when it was not gamebreaking..
Scenario 1: D2 style: You have to have leech to live because your health drops so fast.
Scenario 2: Defense stats actually work and your health doesn't drain super-fast. Health globes give exponentially more health per unit time than leech, and there are generally enough of them, so leech becomes a wasted stat.
I don't see a middle ground, but maybe I'm not looking hard enough.
-Thomas Jefferson
Well that really depends though on the average health:dmg ratio we will have. If I use the example given before as 10:1(HP/DMG) for D3, then lets say 1000 HP and 100 DMG per hit. That would be giving back 3 HP out of 1000 HP. Who knows though, tough to say until beta.
A cap on the overal life leech precentage which will scale by your level. Makes sense?
-Thomas Jefferson
-Thomas Jefferson
There's nothing particularly difficult to balance about life leech. Not any more than any other stat, really.
It's most probably going to be in the game in some way, it's a pretty standard stat for RPG's. Please.
You ran out of globes.
What now?
Case 1: You're melee. You get hit a LOT. You kill stuff FAST. Since Blizzard has decreed that it's all about mitigation (i.e. slowing down the hit points lost per unit time), health globes are going to vastly overshadow the utility of life leech. Why? The sheer quantity of kills, and the very few swings it takes to cause said kills. At least, this is what I get from the gameplay footage.
Case 2: You're ranged. You don't get hit often, and you have lots of defensive abilities to avoid dmg. Life leech is not useful cause if you get below 75-50%, just grab a globe.
Case 3: You vs. single strong targets, aka bosses and rares. And it's this case I think Blizzard would be wise to tune leech for.
Run. Fast.
This is one thing I LOVED about the original Diablo that just wasn't re-captured in D2. I loved walking into a crazy room only to get almost killed, my only option left being to get the hell outta there.
-Thomas Jefferson
Life leech is a part of mitigation IMO, so I don't really get what your point is. It's pretty much the same as life regen except it only occurs when you hit stuff. In games where life leech is actively used, it serves to keep melee alive because they take the most damage, while other classes can just plain avoid it. It's a form of balancing it for the melee.
Health globes are a positional problem so they really aren't the same thing as life steal or regen. They are not part of your mitigation, they're unguaranteed unstable source of HP. We don't even know how they're going to be balanced or if they are going to be useful for anything but between figths, especially on boses or anything with lack of adds.
Ranged typically do not use life leech. At least, I wouldn't.
As with everything, it should be up to the player whether they want to use leech or not. I see no reason to limit choices.
That's a bad idea in a game where it's nearly impossible to avoid damage.
By "get the hell outta" there you mean cheat-tp, fill your bar with cheat-potions, and come back? Repeat x300 times?
Diablo was only difficult at hte beginning when you were poor and when enemies dealt insane damage (e.g., dogs).
In fact, the reasons Diablo was hard are both absent from DII, and will be absent from DIII:
1. You couldn't mf your way through everything.
2. You couldn't re-run areas for xp or whatever (this only applies to SP anyway).
Remove those two and Diablo became the same stat-limited cakewalk as DII.
So I dunno what you're talking about or what life leech has to do with anything. I also don't see why DII is a good example of, well, anything. DII is a very clunky, horribly balanced game, so pretty much every attribute there is going to be broken to one degree or another.
Find any Diablo news? Contact me or anyone else on the news team.
DiabloFans: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Live Chat
Overall you make a good case for leech. But this is our specific point of disagreement, and (of course) it's definitions. Disclaimer: I was a prot-warrior in WoW so I have a very specific definition for defense-related mechanisms. Not saying I know more than you, just that you need to know my definitions to understand my initial argument.
Mitigation is (and only is) the reduction of raw incoming damage by a certain percentage.
I know you can do this math, but for other readers, an example: Enemy swings for 100 damage. Hits you. Your armor, traits, etc mitigates all physical damage by 20%. You lose 80 HP. Another excellent example would be resistance to fire damage by 25%.
Mitigation is distinct from Avoidance (dodge, parry, etc) wherein any single attack is avoided completely, no matter what amount. Ex: Enemy swings for 9001 damage, you dodge, you take 0 damage.
Mitigation is also distinct from life leech. Life leech increases your hit point pool by X% per damage done by you (not to you). It has absolutely no direct correlation to incoming damage whatsoever, which is why it is distinct from mitigation. You're not mitigating anything, you're adding hit points. An enemy could conceivably swing and miss you 4 times in a row, while you hit the enemy and gain HP, ultimately killing it while taking no damage.
Mitigation and Life Leech are only similar in one way: They help you live longer.
Edit: Blizzard has said they are making damage mitigation much more important in D3, and they are using my definition for mitigation.
Edit 2: You revealed a flaw in what I said, i.e. calling mitigation : "slowing down the hit points lost per unit time." And you were right to. You could sum damage taken by hit points gained and the more you swing the slower you die. But in my definition, that's a different thing, which I call "survivability." If you consider life leech a part of mitigation, then your "mitigation" is my "survivability."
-Thomas Jefferson
World of Warcraft is a pseudo-turn-based, trinity-based MMORPG where the prot warrior you described is a dedicated tank class whose SOLE purpose for an instance is to attract as many damaging elements as possible and devote ALL resources to surviving and surviving only.
Since prot warriors survive and survive only they do not deal damage therefore they would never use lifesteal because that makes no sense since lifesteal traditionally scales off damage.
Since prot warriors survive and survive only they do not heal themselves at any point therefore they would never have lifesteal to heal themselves since they always have a healer, and if the healer fails the prot warrior will die very very fast.
Furthermore, since ANY DPS class in WoW odes not worry about surviving, they'll never ever use lifesteal, either.
You should never compare a trinity MMORPG to a Hack&Slash. Ultra-specialized classes just do not go well with half-specialized classes of all other games.
This term has no value.
In video games (any of them), mitigation or survival rating (or w/e you want to call it) refers to the total sum of all negative health effects and all positive health effects that are consistent and continual. Which is, basically, damage after defense and damage enhancement vs healing after negation and healing enhancement.
This definition is important because it is a variable that can be directly used for the purposes of game balance. Any definition that doesn't include lifesteal is useless unless we are indeed talking about a game where lifesteal doesn't exist is useless from the standpoint of game balance.
From the standpoint of game balance, lifesteal is very easy to insert in the calculation.
The distinctions you discuss are irrelevant to the structure of the video game. They're just semantic distinctions and nothing else. Dodges and the like get added in like anything else by statistical value.
You say lifesteal has nothing to do with incoming damage but that is incorrect. It has to do with incoming damage after calculation. If incoming damage (after all calc) is 300 and you heal yourself for 250 (after all calc) you are losing 50 HP and that becomes a variable in how much time you have to kill the enemy.
This value is pretty pointless in WoW since your healer will heal you to oblivion.