Is Life steal broken, non existant, or just fine and working as intended?

alyrissa

Greetings,

Earlier this morning when downtime started I was reading a webpage bemoaning the lose (read nerf) of Life steal as a helpful stat to our characters longevity. Yet I read many new/er posts in here stating that life steal is still an important stat ie. for GWFs. Can someone clear up for me the current situation with Life steal? Sorry but for the life of me I can not find the url I was reading

rayrdan

lifesteal used to heal a percentual of your HP for every hit.
then it was reworked to heal 100% of the damage dealt for some hits according to your lifesteal chance.
at the beginning of mod 6, lifesteal stacking was not a trend so people were running around with 6-7% lifesteal and the procs were unlikely to occur hiding its true potential.
Boons, dark enchantments, feats allow to reach 25-30% lifesteal now, this means every 3-4 strikes which generally hit for 30k to say the least you are able to refill your HP bar.
what was broken, its now absolutely broken (it the sense that it performs too well).
Boons like endless consumption from the dread ring campaign make things even worst.
Right now lifesteal is the best defensive stat once you have HP high enough to not be 1-shotted.

wanderer0000

lifesteal is actually way more powerful than before, its just harder to stack on some classes than others.

plasticbat

As a GWF, I don't have any R10 and only have R8 dark in defense. That was good enough for me to survive back then to fight SH green dragon. It is pretty easy right now because of SH boon. Yes, it is more powerful than before. e.g. as a GWF, I don't mind to run back to the boss with a line of red in the health bar knowingly with a few strikes, I will be back to full health. Before mod 6, I would not dare because I would get some HP back but it would not be full health.

zibadawa

For PvE about 15% lifesteal has been all my TR has really needed, and you can get that with nothing more than r7's (and an augment with r7's). For PvP, or to give maximum amounts of no cares even when you nearly get 1-shot, you'll want more.

flehstiffer

Lifesteal is fantastic in my opinion. My CW has around 3k, with tyranny boon giving my 10% and that's enough for any pve content. My TR only has 2k with the boon, but feats and enchants put me at 20%, which makes me almost literally immortal.

The "nerf" as rarydan pointed out, is that you no longer heal a bit off of every damage tick, but is more RNG based.

putzboy78

Lifesteal is largely the same result between pre mod 6 and post mod 6

pre-mod 6 you received a % of lifesteal with each attack. So it was a dependable heal throughout combat. It was so great that it totally removed the need for damage mitigation and healers from PVE content

With Mod 6 lifesteal became a chance of receiving 100% of a heal (based on the lifesteal severity). What's the difference? When lifesteal procs post-mod 6 it procs for larger amounts; however, it is no longer reliable.

Since its now based on a chance of procing classes that deal lots of attacks quickly benefit from lifesteal benefit far more than slow attacks (classes with way more animation that attacking). So classes that are fast attackers (TR and GWF) or with large AOES (CW SW) will have lifesteal proc much more frequently. Classes that are slow (GF, DC, HR) are in trouble with the new mechanic. A DC can do about 1 attack a per second, with a 7% lifesteal chance you could be looking at going a minute and a half + without seeing a lifesteal proc (can be worse with Blessing of Neverwinter RNG).

This means for many classes lifesteal is not dependable enough. Couple that with the extreme nerf to regeneration and you can see why everyone was screaming for content difficulty to be lowered in Mod 6 until everyone could get geared up and overpowered again.

icyclass

rayrdan said:

Boons, dark enchantments, feats allow to reach 25-30% lifesteal now.

Maybe making all the stat curves linear wasn't the best idea?

umsche

Lifesteal is great for a CW even under 10% chance, considering all the dots we have, there's constant proccing of it which replenishes our HP quite consistantly.

putzboy78

arcofortep12 said:

7% is a too low Chance, even an SW is in trouble with that amount.
DC shouldn't be bad, it has many DoT powers (Breaking the Spirit, Forgemaster's Flame, Brand of the Sun, Fire of the Gods) but 7% is like having nothing with the new mechanic in place. My SW shine on it after hitting 15%, with Endless Consumption on, otherwise it's just sloppy. I would say 10% as the bare minimum.

7% is a theoretical number, not my number, lol

rayrdan

ye making all curves be linear was a bad decision.
for example power and crit both linear with same shape means crit is always better than power.
stuff like movement speed with ratio 400:1% is hilariously bad too, this is a case where a much faster growing curve was needed.
Lifesteal too should have a cap but at least now we have different ways to build a toon.
in pvp it really needs a cap tho

putzboy78

rayrdan said:

for example power and crit both linear with same shape means crit is always better than power.

That is incorrect sir, if your crit severity is less than 100%, crit chance is not necessarily better than power. Also in PVP where burst damage is necessary there are many scenarios where power stacking will out perform crit.

rayrdan

putzboy78 said:

rayrdan said:

for example power and crit both linear with same shape means crit is always better than power.

That is incorrect sir, if your crit severity is less than 100%, crit chance is not necessarily better than power. Also in PVP where burst damage is necessary there are many scenarios where power stacking will out perform crit.

well ye in reality the function to maximize is [crit% (1 +power%)(1+ critsev%) + (1-crit%)(1+power%)] so its not always true than crit is better than power until you effectively reach 100% crit but still close enough
lets limit the discussion to pve

kemi1984

Life Steal is, by far, the most useful defensive stat (apart from HP of course...).
Campaign boons, SH boons and dirt cheap r 8's this all makes pve as trivial as it can be.

I've skipped few mods and only came back at the last day of mod5 when LS was a God pill. You stacked some and of you go to solo CN, it was crazy.
Now? I would say it's even more crazy.

When mod9 pops, I'm sure folks will be posting CN solo from day one.

micky1p00

rayrdan said:

putzboy78 said:

rayrdan said:

for example power and crit both linear with same shape means crit is always better than power.

That is incorrect sir, if your crit severity is less than 100%, crit chance is not necessarily better than power. Also in PVP where burst damage is necessary there are many scenarios where power stacking will out perform crit.

well ye in reality the function to maximize is [crit% (1 +power%)(1+ critsev%) + (1-crit%)(1+power%)] so its not always true than crit is better than power until you effectively reach 100% crit but still close enough
lets limit the discussion to pve

It indeed depends on the crit severity.
for 125, they are equal:
wolfram1

At 150% severity it goes towards crit with 15:20 ratio
wolfram2

and for example with 75% severity (using feytouched for example), it favors highly power:
At ~28:3

wolfram3

Ont of the largest modifiers is actually lostmauth set that can be approximated as severity for low damage attacks (at-wills & dots)
In that case we will get the maximum benefit at about 1:2 power:crit ratio

wolfram_again

But all of this is without accounting for various crit sources like stealth.

micky1p00

arcofortep12 said:

It's important when you will reach 10% Life Steal Chance together with the Dread Ring boon Endless Consumption.
It's important always for some classes/paths (SW Temptation, HR Combat, TR Scoundrel).
It's useless for all the others.

I disagree. I don't see why for Trapper, MI Exe TR, or CW for example LS is not important.
LS works great for any DPS class. And each player with each play style has a treshhold to self sustain, for example the more reliant a player is on DoTs and fast attacks the lower the treashold needed to reach for them to beself sustainable with heals using LS. Big heavy hits will require higher LS chance.

rayrdan

on trappers it does wonder since it procs aoe on thorned roots.
and on a tr is perfect too, i lost count of the time it procs off shadow demise for 2M+ burst of heal

adinosii

arcofortep12 said:

It's important always for some classes/paths (SW Temptation, HR Combat, TR Scoundrel).
It's useless for all the others.

Useless? I disagree. I have a bit over 15% on my DC and it is pretty nice, thank you...

katamaster81899

arcofortep12 wrote: »

1 Dark Rank 10 costs 450k. Just saying... :*

I think I made 1mil farming DR lairs this weekend alone - 450k isn't really that much anymore. the rAD cap has been raised, you can get AD from everything right now - 450k is pretty damn cheap for a rank 10 enchant. Try farming one back when it was actually a grind, I remember how proud I was to have r7s and r8s in mod 2 and 3. r7s alone were 100k a piece back then.

And to clarify, I spent about 2.5 hours grinding DR lairs, about 3.5-4.5 minutes per run. Let's round that to average 4 minutes per run, which is 15 runs per hour. Drop rate on greater marks seems to be about 50% in my experience. That's 50k per mark, and 7.5 marks per hour which adds up to about 375k per hour on average.​​

katamaster81899

arcofortep12 wrote: »

x micky: I didn't said that, I did say 'it's always important for' (because those classes/paths benefit from tree features).
For the others isn't important if not have said boons and enough LS Chance.

I'm sorry, I disagree. You specifically said

It's useless for all the others.

You listed three different specs that it was useful for, and said that lifesteal is useless for the rest.

Lifesteal is probably more effective on a CW than any of the classes you listed - Every single encounter used in a proper PVE rotation by a CW has DoT (CoI, Steal Time, Icy Terrain, etc.), along with lostmauth procs, storm spell procs (or smolder), and boon procs. If you have a plague fire or terror (which I wouldn't recommend over vorpal for CW), that's even more damage procs. I have about 9-12% lifesteal on my CW, and I'm healed by it multiple times every second. (at least it feels that way) Lifesteal is extremely useful on almost ALL dps classes. Honestly, I've gotten by with 6%-7% on my second CW quite fine.

Here's some actual data on CW # of hits in combat. Here's a screenshot of less than one second worth of hits parsed from Sharpedge during a Demo run we did about a month ago.


That's right. 48 hits in one second time span (might actually be a couple more because I couldn't fit them in on screen). Even at 5% lifesteal odds are fairly high that you will get multiple lifesteal procs in that one second. The next second (:47) had over 60 hits done. Same for :48. It tapers off at :49 and :50 as the enemies have mostly died, and then we have 10 seconds of nothing before Sharpedge has reached the next portal and we get huge quantities of hits per second once more.​​

zibadawa

katamaster81899 said:

And to clarify, I spent about 2.5 hours grinding DR lairs, about 3.5-4.5 minutes per run. Let's round that to average 4 minutes per run, which is 15 runs per hour. Drop rate on greater marks seems to be about 50% in my experience. That's 50k per mark, and 7.5 marks per hour which adds up to about 375k per hour on average.​​

Is this farming something that works solo, or does it require a group? I've never tried doing more than my one daily lair--which has so far given me most of the marks I need for the one toon I'm actually trying to gear--, so I don't know how purchased keys work: does everyone in the group need on to get in, or does only person (the leader?) need the key and then everyone can get in and loot the final chest without needing/using a key?