A little discussion about lifesteal mechanics in games & GD. also vampire stuffs

Grim Dawn General Discussion
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Recently, I’ve been wondering about the powerful recovery mechanics in video games. lifesteal, that is. I’ve come across this random neverwinter update article that has a small part mentioning the problem with lifesteal mechanic:

https://www.arcgames.com/en/games/neverwinter/news/detail/11093193-developer-blog:-stats-&-mechanics

this is part of the article that mention lifesteal problem, i directly quote:

“The removal of the Lifesteal and Recovery ratings are the two most significant. Lifesteal was problematic in that it invalidated most sources of healing and created a situation where a player’s health bar was typically in one of two states: full, or dead. For this reason Lifesteal was removed as a rating and there are only a couple of specific sources of lifesteal in the game going forward.”

so… what do gd devs and players think about this article? is adcth’s incredible power as recovery method in gd a crutch for many builds?
how is adcth state now compared to life regen, healing proc and panic button heals?

in moba games, the lifesteal mechanic is often the only recovery method for most dps glass cannon characters. it forces them to engage enemy directly and face mortal danger just to recover their hp, or rely on ally’s heal or limited healing supply.

it kinda buggles me why I’m talking about this. but in my head, when a character in any game used lifesteal mechanic, i immediately and unconsciously considers them ‘vampire’ even if they are good holy characters. yeah it sound weird, but this unconscious thought is kinda a bummer on my enjoyment when playing lifesteal mechanics. oh. i’m playing a paladin with adcth. great. that char is a vampire now. oh. i’m playing a very heavily defense oriented shield char with high regen and many health procs, but he has a small amount of adcth. great. that char is vampire too. oh. your character step on a vital essence of random human on the ground and consumes it without hesitation. vampire. oh. all character we play in grim dawn can and will absorb enemy’s vital essence ala dark souls’ undead? then we only play vampires in gd.

thats what went into my mind when talking about adcth. vampires. creatures of darkness and evil nature. yes there are some good vampires and i like those kind of characters. struggling for good despite the dark nature of their body.

i dunno why i’m talking about vampires like this. maybe i want some people to tell me there are other good archetype characters that does lifesteal but noticeably different in nature than vampire’s blood/life stealing necessity that is just so unnatural and uncomfortable. maybe they are some exclusive priest/technomaster/warrior that i don’t know about. things like you attack the enemy and the changes in atmosphere/unseen energy fluctuations around the battle rejuvenates your body through some mumbo jumbo technology/magic/miracle. if anybody knows these archetype, please tell us. at least it’ll broaden our horizon on the concepts of lifesteal, or maybe give another perspective on how to develop lifesteal mechanics for gaming in general.

thank you for reading/glancing briefly at this weird wall of texts.

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All living beings “do lifesteal”. You eat other organics, plants and animals, and you derive nurishment from them.

Congratulations, you are a vampire.

As to the adcth question… if the developers wanted to make keeping enemies at range possible, then not everyone would need lifesteal. As it is, most arpgs now make it impossible to keep them off of you regardless of stratagy/ class, so you’re going to take damage, and you better have a way to regain that lost life on a steady ongoing basis.

The last game I remember that actually let you keep enemies out of melee range via skills/ build was Diablo 2. You could play a frozen orb sorc and never get hit, because they never got into melee range.

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Errr not quite. There were several enemies that were immune or highly resistant to being frozen especially in act 5. To keep alive, the sorc had to keep using her teleport skill to keep some distance. However, a bow amazon with valkyrie, skelemancer or spell druid with bear can ALWAYS stay from melee if they’re able to keep alive/resummon their meat shields. Unlike their dedicated melee brethren like barbs and pallys who need life steal to stay alive, these classes are perfectly fine relying on heal pots.

This was also my disappointment when I first played this game in vanilla. My first ever class was a pyromancer gunner and I thought the idea of using flashbang and CoF with their combined slow and confuse can allow me kite indefinitely while I keep gunning with impunity. The idea was sound and it worked exactly as I expected for the first 3 acts. Imagine my surprise when I first met flesh hulks in act 4 and they ignored all my CC while charging me at the same time. The problem was exacerbated in the expansions with more mobs that are immune/highly resistant to CC.

These days I treat ranged combat as melee with screen-wide reach. You got a second or 2 for gunning but being mobbed in melee range is an inevitability. It would have been nice if there was a way to evade melee combat like the examples I gave in D2. The ranged classes there can get away with relying only on their heal pots but GD is not designed for that kind of gameplay. Since you will get hit in melee regardless, some form of sustain like life steal is an absolute necessity.

EDIT: Upon further reflection, I find it amusing that the Inquisitor, designed as THE ranged specialist, has a nifty skill called Inquisitor Seal. Said skill grants damage absorption while standing inside the seal. Guess the designers really were expecting their ranged class to get hit a lot. :laughing:

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I wont even read that article to write my answer:
YES! I completely agree, that HP sustain from instant “lifesteal” (ADCTH in GD) is far too powerful, hard tobalance and renders other sustain methods obsolete.

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Entirely and unequivocally this.

You’d be hard-pressed to make other sources of sustain satisfactory. If Regen or Panic-button heals or anything else allowed you to facetank everything, we’d be writing threads about how problematic that is because that is a far more passive gameplay experience than lifesteal. Lifesteal can at least be countered via enemy life leech resist and enemies possessing some form of CC, be it hard (stun, freeze, etc.) or soft (OA reduction, fumble/impaired aim, slow, etc.).

How do you counter Regen/Heals? -% Regen debuffs and -% Healing Received debuffs, respectively. But if such debuffs are the only means to do so, that rather makes everything a little samey, doesn’t it?

As long as dying is a very real possibility without lifesteal, lifesteal is a necessity for ninety-nine out of a hundred builds. Why focus on defenses that will eventually be thwarted when you can focus on offense that will improve your defense?

PoE -> Leech
D3 -> Life on Hit/Kill/Leech
Victor Vran -> Leech
Borderlands 2 -> Moxxi Leech/Transfusion Nades

Noticing a trend?

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wow! that never crossed my mind! thanks for the perspective! now, when i play a lifesteal character, i can imagine they shout “LIFESTEAL IS THE LAW OF NATURE” to those who disagree with their survival mechanics.

melee contact is unavoidable in grim dawn. that is just how crate design gd, and we have to adapt to it by using adcth, heal procs, health regen, and debuffing enemy attack power.

that’s what i feel about adcth. it makes non-weapon damage builds feels harder to survive without relying on a lot of health/defensive procs and debuffs.

the trend here shows that lifesteal is probably the king of recovery mechanics. a healing method that is scaled on how much damage you deal to the enemy is very powerful indeed. and hard to balance around. you just need to raise your damage, accuracy, speed, and avoid/increase resists to enemy debuffs (stuns, slows, lower damage, blind).

i’ve played borderlands 2 uvhm lvl 72 and op 8. moxxi leech weapons like ruby or the controversial grog are basically the crutch of most end-game bl2 builds. especially if you’re soloing raid bosses. not to mention the health-gating exploit that gives players brief immunity to one-shot from above 50% health (dot damage can oneshot though). i hate that fake clown moxxi. so its kinda irritating to me personally that you have to rely on lifesteal almost all the time because its too powerful and other healing methods are scaled too weak/limited in sources. thankfully borderlands pre-sequel tries to fix this problem by heavily reducing the amount of moxxi leech items and increasing/properly scaling other healing methods.

sooooo… in arpg games… if you want the best healing methods, be a vampire. oh wait, like rasalom said, every living being is basically a vampire with lifesteal ability through eating other living beings… what a confusing paradox.

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Attack damage converted to health is really good defensive mechanism. But in order to survive you need more. In SR deep realms or Crucible 170 vitality melee with big health pool and around 25 % life steal can die as easy as any glass cannon.

You need to add further layers. For example Infiltrators seems they survive only on AdctH, but they still got damage reduction from Censure, OA shred and good DA, avoid projectiles, fumble, 2 heals and Ghoul. Sometimes, Inquisitor Seal.

So AdctH is good mechanic, but how casters survive ? Actually Demo based casters like bombs or mortars rarely have it. But they still have sustain from Bat, heals, procs and regen. WIth high CDR you can use defensive skills and procs more often. For kiters healing devotions makes more sense. And of course absorption of damage!

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I don’t feel like lifesteal is that big an issue in GD. Granted I have not played a build that specifically focuses on it. However I do have a few builds that have some and its a nice bonus but not nearly enough for sustain on its own.

Now in PoE however I think its way more of an all or nothing ability. I had a build that centered around life steal and it was amazing until you came across those select few monsters/bosses that were immune to it. That’s when it was super hard to win those fights cause you got nothing else to really fall back on.

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And what’s more important, it feels unfair compared to other sustain methods (life regen, heals, etc), as those require far more invesments for too little benefit (not to mention that some debufs might screw over your HP regen).
Also, isnt it wierd, when your “defense” (HP recovery) depends on “offence” (damage deal to an enemy)? Shouldnt offence alone be good enough to invest into it (you kill enemies & clear Crucible/SR faster, and they have less time to hurt you)? When some defence stat is calculated from offence, that gives offence an unfair advantage…
Why cant we, at least, limit HP recovery via ADCTH, like it was done it Path of Exile (life steal cant restore more that 20% of your total HP pool per second, regardless of what). Yes, i know, Path of Exile is a shity and imbalanced game nowadays, but that doesnt mean we cant learn some things from it, if they’re performed properly…
And dont you find it wrong, when a character can restore almost all of his HP pool within a fraction of second? Doesnt that means you have to throw overwhelming damage (“oneshots”) and/or dire debuffs to make any danger for him? Cause anything less than that would be just harmless.
Sure, GD would need a major rebalance, if we get such a limitation. But it would make only good for game in long term.

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Oh, so it seems i was a dumbass, to solo only some raidbosses and get only to op 6, since i didnt knew about those weapons.

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Well, i’d rather Argue the Reason why such skills exis is due the Class-System itself plus the Build-Variety of GD… to give a different options for different builds. And i wouldn’t call it espacially desigend for being “the ranged specialist” even if some skills / passives encourage that… like Shaman is not designed exclusively for being an two-hander meele class, but also have pets for pet-builds and skillchanger for ranged weapons etc etc.

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i don’t think crate will drastically rebalance the current adcth mechanics. yes its the strongest healing mechanics, but as others have pointed, there are a lot of ways for enemies to resist this. so adcth alone won’t help you survive against many champs & bosses that swarms you (though if you solo duel a boss, adcth will most likely be enough for it. with the exception of superbosses)

well done. its hard to play op levels. one wrong move, and you can get two shotted. or one shotted if you get hit with dot.
there are some raid bosses which is quite easy to solo without moxxi weapons. pyro pete is the easiest. transfusion grenades can help a lot (use the seraph transfuse grenades), though its limited in supplies. also, tough chars like krieg fo example have easier time to survive without moxxi weapons. i played gaige a lot, but her only means to heal is by not shooting and having full magazine, or consume anarchy stacks to heal with discord (you will run out anarchy stacks fast, and your damage will be gimped). so basically moxxi weapons are mandatory for gaige if she wants to solo raid bosses other than pete.

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adcth being or not being enough is not the issue here. it’s that ADCTH + WD is necessary, meaning that even for non-leeching (normally) casters, replacing it with another form of sustain takes far more sacrifices (stats lost elsewhere) than relying on it on top of the enemy dr, armor, flat absorb, etc.

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yes. the weapon damage problem with adcth on caster. i’ve seen several players giving suggestions on adding some more weapon damage to arcanist skills or caster rares. would a little bit %WD will make those %WD-less caster skills op?

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This is wrong. Well, if ADCTH wont help survive that, then it means they’ll oneshot (or near-oneshot) you, and no sustain mechanics would allow you to survive through that.
Have you played a build with really strong ADCTH and AoE? Like this build, for example:
https://www.grimtools.com/calc/pZrPylj2
35% ADCTH, hits 13 targets with big AoE, his every 0.2 sec, 100-200k DPS… full HP in split-second.

I’ve played Gunzerker. As far as i remember, i’ve tried all other characters, and put a verdict - they’re all total trash compared to him. Well, mechromancer (gaige) is so-so, but still sucked badly compared to zerker. Others were so bad that i wondered, why are they in the game at all? Ok, Siren can act as healer in party (despite useless solo), but others are pieces of crap. It was an example of vast imbalance for me, where one class trumps over other by a mile - compared to that, GD felt perfectly balanced!
OR am i wrong?

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true, adcth alone won’t do it. i meant to say if players focused greatly on adcth and just raise other stats only to passable level for end game. it’ll be vulnerable to huge single damage or… fumble.
i haven’t played with builds that focused heavily on adcth & aoe. just watch other player’s builds and statements about it. adcth seems to be best paired with aoe and targeting multiple enemies. since if fumble hits you, at least some sort of adcth will be acquired because of multiple leeched targets due to aoe.

you’re not wrong. gunzerker is op and imbalanced. money shot can be exploited for huge dps. sal can just use a moxxi weapon in 1hand and bis weapon in other hand and facetank almost everything. gaige is best for mobbing and maya is best for coop support. zer0 and krieg power are close to sal. axton is just sadly restricted to explosive & grenade damage with some okay turret support. dual wielding in a shooting game where almost every stats and bonuses went into what gun you’re wielding will definitely make dual wielding’s dps capability far surpassing anything else. and even in gd, dual wielding seems to be very popular. even for casters. however, 1h shield, 1h off hand and 2h in gd aren’t far off in dps capabilities compared to dual wield.

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That’s why i play builds, immune to fumble. The build i gave before is one of them.

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is retaliation damage unaffected by fumble? does adcth work with ret damage?

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Spells are unaffected by fumble, and that build uses spell (Drain Essence).
Of course, normal retalliation is unaffected by it too. But “retalliation damage added to attack” works just like any other damage, dealt by skill. If that skill is an attack, it would be prone to fumble/impaired aim. If it’s spell - it wont.

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