Spell Leech

Why have we not seen spell leech introduced onto the passive tree as of yet? I am just wondering because we could have it anywhere between the Templar to Shadow tree for top half of the passive tree.

I think leeching in general was probably more intended for melee builds. Leeching from spells does seem a bit odd, but I can see it for mana moreso than melee leeching mana.

The simplest way to do this would be to just replace, "Attack Damage", with, "Damage", on the Blood Drinker and Mind Drinker notables in the Shadow area. Spells not having easy access to leech has clearly been a design decision, but from a gameplay perspective it doesn't make a lot of sense. Sure, you can say that spells have advantages over melee that might suggest that they should have a harder time getting defensive stuff like leech, but bows also have the advantage over melee while getting full access to Attack Leech.

It's intended, and unlikely to be changed. That responds to the extended idea of casters being defensively inferior to rangers and even weaker if compared with melee. That's why casters naturally lack a defensive layer:
- Melee have life + mitigation in the shape of armour
- Rangers have generally fewer life + mitigation in the form of evasion
- Casters have even fewer life + more effective life as energy shield, but not real mitigation. Their effective life pool can compete with the other roles but it's just a delusion.

Hard to say if casters need it or not. It's true that they lack a defensive layer, but it's also true that most sources of indirect damage are on the top half of the Skildrasil -say: totems, minions and traps/mines.

It's the downside of spells, to compensate for the fact that they never miss.

Attack builds need to deal with accuracy, but have easy access to leech.
Spell builds don't need to deal with accuracy, but have difficult time getting leech.

I think it's a pretty good balance between the two.

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golan4840 escribió:

It's the downside of spells, to compensate for the fact that they never miss.

Attack builds need to deal with accuracy, but have easy access to leech.
Spell builds don't need to deal with accuracy, but have difficult time getting leech.

I think it's a pretty good balance between the two.

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ReinEuthanasia escribió:

I think leeching in general was probably more intended for melee builds. Leeching from spells does seem a bit odd, but I can see it for mana moreso than melee leeching mana.

Except spells already have a couple of easy ways of getting leech. At least 2 ascendancy classes, Lab boot enchants, and Warlord's Mark. Even 0.4% is enough to hit the leech cap in most applications. Not to mention that mana/hybrid flasks are more than enough for most life/mana needs (and is instant vs 20%/s).

IMO, this would be a terrific differentiator for self-cast vs totem/traps.

-going for certain ascendancy classes for leech is less than ideal.
-getting a warlords mark curse requires a fair amount of investement and is not always reliable.
-lab enchant for boots is very unreliable.

So yea, compared to attack builds that can pop a single point on the tree and be ok, getting leech for spells is not easy.
Again, as it should be, since spells never miss.

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golan4840 escribió:

-going for certain ascendancy classes for leech is less than ideal.
-getting a warlords mark curse requires a fair amount of investement and is not always reliable.
-lab enchant for boots is very unreliable.

So yea, compared to attack builds that can pop a single point on the tree and be ok, getting leech for spells is not easy.
Again, as it should be, since spells never miss.

while i can agree on the life leech part the manacosts of most 6linked spells are insane compared to attacks.
imO they should change the fire/lightning/cold clusters at top giving them fire/lightning/cold leech instead of pen.
these clusters arent used because they are in a "bad" spot for what they offer.

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golan4840 escribió:

-going for certain ascendancy classes for leech is less than ideal.
-getting a warlords mark curse requires a fair amount of investement and is not always reliable.
-lab enchant for boots is very unreliable.

So yea, compared to attack builds that can pop a single point on the tree and be ok, getting leech for spells is not easy.
Again, as it should be, since spells never miss.

Whether it is ideal or not is beside the point. Leech for spells is readily available for both mana and life. But to address your points:

1) Warlord's Mark requires 1 or 2 gem slots. Either Warlord's Mark + Blasphemy, Warlord's Mark by itself, or an Elder ring with Warlord's Mark. It goes from barely any investment to about 3-8ex worth of investment.

2) I don't know what you mean by unreliable, but in any way you could mean, you would be wrong. Do you mean unreliable in that you can only leech if you've killed recently (last 4 seconds IIRC)? If so, it is very reliable because most builds go much fewer than 4 seconds between groups of monsters and it's only the first monster you can't leech from.

Or do you mean it's not consistent to find? Given that there are ~14 lab enchants for boots, if you run lab about 10 times, you have 50% chance of finding the enchant. Or you can buy them for pretty cheap (IIRC the enchant adds about 5-10c to the boots' cost).

Or finally, perhaps you mean it's not very reliable because it's only 0.4% leech at lowest and you need 0.6% (i.e. Uber Lab and considerable opportunity cost) to make it work. In my experience, there is precisely 0 difference between 0.4% leech and 100% leech with spells. With 0.4% leech, you need to deal about 50x your life/second to hit the leech cap. With 6,000 life, that's 300,000 DPS. With 8,000 life, that's 400,000 DPS. Those are fairly low thresholds. For a mana pool of 1,000 mana, you only need 50,000 DPS to leech 200/sec. For BV, I'll use about 210 mana/sec. This means that with With a decent amount of mana reserved due to Herald of Ash and Blasphemy + Flammability, I can quite literally hold down the spell's hotkey during Delve encounters and my mana stays full due to leech + natural regen.

Spells pay a premium to never hit in mana cost. Not in inability to leech.

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FathomWheel escribió:

2) I don't know what you mean by unreliable, but in any way you could mean, you would be wrong. Do you mean unreliable in that you can only leech if you've killed recently (last 4 seconds IIRC)? If so, it is very reliable because most builds go much fewer than 4 seconds between groups of monsters and it's only the first monster you can't leech from.

Go tell that to Shaper ( where it can matter a lot, if not most. )