by Alweth on Thu Dec 01, 2011 4:33 am
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.)
Were you expecting a coherent message? Alweth does not deal with such trifles. Ignore him or watch the thread get locked!