Life Leech

In order for you to not explode in this situation, which I might add happens a lot because it's Kole, you could get the Vaal Pact keystone which would make your lifeleech instantaneous.. It does however shut off regen and such so I would seriously ponder this and it's compatability with your build before taking it because it's not for everyone.

I have linked a Life Leech gem to my Bear Trap, and another for Fire Trap. I have zero life regen. I understand there's no leeching from dmg over time from burning, but neither of my traps are leeching any life whatsoever. My health doesn't even move a point.

Am I missing something?

You cannot leech life by using Traps, your Traps would be leeching the life instead of you. But since they're gone once triggered anyway, there's no point in linking LL to Traps.

Thanks for the quick response Delirii :)

I'm a bit mentally challenged - and hoping I can get some help

So the patch notes:

"The way leech applies to the player has changed. If you leech additional life while currently leeching, it no longer queues after the current leech. Technically, where multiple leeches are stacked, the largest one is used."

I use leech with spectral throw + lesser multiple projectiles. Im pretty happy with life leech - it keeps me topped up.

If I'm reading the patch notes right; it doesnt seem to me that I will notice a huge difference.

As long as Im attacking its business as normal, right? I still leech, Ill still see my happy hp's go up as Im taking damage. Ill keep refreshing leech, so all is good to go.

After Im finished attacking - this is when I may notice. I wont regen as much health because the queued leeches are no longer there?

Or am I off base?

Mostly correct, you dont get much leeching if you're not dealing much damage. Leeching before stacked untill you reached full rate and then carried over into a duration.
Yes it end up sroping soon after no longer attacking but that depends on you hp max and the damage you deal for a single hit (instead of many).

This change to life leech seems to have completely ruined it for my CI character. I tried many different spells with a CoC build and none of them leech anything like before even with a 20/20 gem and spells.

It seems the new nerfed vaal pact is almost mandatory at least for a CI user.

How does it work for single aoe attacks? If I hit 5 mobs with a single ice nova, is the leech based on the total damage of that one spell, or only a single mob hit with a given spell? It really seems like the latter which renders leech rather useless and gives no option at all for casters. Sorry that one unique for spell LOH is not a reasonable option for every caster.

After further testing with a level 87 CI character, 20/20 life leech is not even a shadow of its former self.

I do not know what you guys were thinking with this life leech change, people were just recently commenting how the entire end-game survival is balanced around life leech.. So your conclusion was to nerf life leech?? Seriously?

Let me give you an example of how idiotic this is:

I have maximum elemental resists, 75% across the board.
I ALSO have 70% chance to block spell damage.

With the new life leech change, I have 100% chance of killing myself to elemental reflect in a map.

Now please explain to me why it should be the case that after taking EVERY possible precaution to mitigate elemental reflect, I am still unable to handle a single rare with this mod?

This has reverted the game back to the days when your build required you to pick up every single health node just to be able to play end-game maps. I was farming them pre-patch without an issue.

You're playing a character that (probably) has an insane DPS/Damage per Hit. You know that Reflect exists, yet you chose to deal enough damage to kill yourself with Reflect. You can't blame GGG on that.
I've got a Discharger, played it for quite some time, and I'm glad both LL and Vaal Pact were changed.

And yes, LL is needed on almost every character, because it's too damn strong and LoH/Life Reg can hardly compete with it.