Improving and Changing Gods!

[The Avatar]

Seeing as it junks your resistances, it really only combos with DR from the EM.

[Darvin]

I think when I did it, it was with a Paladin on a hard dungeon. I agree though that it could/should be changed.

Paladin probably has it worst here:

25% (class) + 18% (dragon shield) + 15% (blood shield) = 58%. You're pretty much at the cap already, so even a single level of blood hunger is lowering your max resists. This is not a good tradeoff at all, even if it does pay for its own piety cost.

Seeing as it junks your resistances, it really only combos with DR from the EM.

Yeah, but she hates lifesteal so you'd need to start with Earthmother then convert to Dracul, so you'd only be picking up Blood Hunger in the end-game after you've already cleared out most of the monsters. So it really isn't relevant anyways...

[The Avatar]

Oh really! I didn't know she hated lifesteal.

[q 3]

It does combine reasonably well with Taurog's -5 damage shield (and the -2 damage shield from the blacksmith), although not necessarily well enough to justify losing 2 max MP and an inventory slot. Taurog is fairly easy to convert in and out of, too.

[Darvin]

Even then that's only really good at low-levels. Even the softest-hitting bosses are smacking you for 75 damage, so all that damage reduction and lifesteal still isn't as good as a naive Paladin with a Dragonshield against a physical damage boss, or just a naked Berserker against a magic damage boss.

[The Avatar]

Very true... Hmm... What to do.

[Alweth]

The problem is that life steal is currently a form of damage reduction that combos exponentially with resistance--each one gets better the more you have of the other. For this reason, life steal can never be good on its own, in its current form. Probably life steal should just be changed into a form that does not combo well with resistance. How does one do this? The heavy-handed way would be to make life steal key off of how much resistance you don't have. The less heavy-handed and less effective way would be to make it a percentage of damage. Another option might be to have it steal back a percentage of the life you are missing, but that would still be pretty strong with resistance. Yet another option might be to make it give you back health points based on the percentage of life you have lost. So being at 10% life, you would steal 9 life points. (This would be very powerful at low levels, though.)

The problem with making damage reduction and life steal not work together is that getting hit a lot is already a worse strategy than hitting hard, if you can pull it off, because of the preponderance of enemy abilities that trigger off of hitting you. The prime example of this would be the monk. So a suggestion I would have for improving the monk would be to make Weakening trigger off the amount of damage you do to the enemy, to the extent that a "good" monk would be able to avoid getting stuck with any weakening at all. Corrosion and Resistance Reduction would still trigger off of the number of blows. If that wasn't enough, Mana Burn effects could take away an amount of your mana as a percentage of the damage you do (say 5%). I like both these ideas as they turn Weakening and Mana Burn into effects that can be worked around with certain strategies. (Although mana burn can already.)

[The Avatar]

So the more damage you do the more weakening you get? I'm kinda confused.

Also, in the Alpha, lifesteal was based on percentage. I think they should revert back to this system.

[q 3]

A percentage based system is possibly even harder to balance. At low levels, it's terribly underpowered; when you're hitting for 10 damage, even 50% lifesteal (which would have been an absurdly high level in the alpha) only restores 5 HP, i.e. the starting amount of lifesteal in the beta. At high levels, it can become ridiculously overpowered; it's quite possible to hit for over 200 or even 300 damage if you min-max enough, and with 50% lifesteal that would make you invincible to nearly every boss.

What about changing lifesteal from a fixed to a level-dependent value? E.g., instead of each additional lifesteal boon restoring +5 HP (or +5%), it restores +1 HP times character level (1 HP at level 1, 10 HP at level 10). Modify the cost a bit so a couple of levels are relatively cheap but several levels require a serious investment, and it could conceivably be a serviceable ability both early on and late in a dungeon.

[The Avatar]

Now we're talking. That is a good idea!