Why does Shadow use life steal?

Agreed on life-steal mitigating Righteous Fire's main drawback. However, it seems one main benefit of RF is spell damage increase. Would an in-your-face-slashing-like-crazy Shadow be taking advantage of that?

zeto: they need to upgrade you to dev. Your keystone ideas are great. :)

just a heads up from a dev:

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Qarl wrote:

Thanks for this feedback. I'll have a look and see what we can do about it, ES leech for this would probably work very well.

It won't be immediately that we change it.

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/26526

lets hope :D

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

Agreed on life-steal mitigating Righteous Fire's main drawback. However, it seems one main benefit of RF is spell damage increase. Would an in-your-face-slashing-like-crazy Shadow be taking advantage of that?

zeto: they need to upgrade you to dev. Your keystone ideas are great. :)

You would need an insane amount of life steal to even make Righteous Fire survivable for even a few seconds . Trust me this is not a good idea.

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

However, it seems one main benefit of RF is spell damage increase. Would an in-your-face-slashing-like-crazy Shadow be taking advantage of that?

As it is an int-dex based class, with some creative thinking I believe so.

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bilbobeastlybaggins wrote:

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

Agreed on life-steal mitigating Righteous Fire's main drawback. However, it seems one main benefit of RF is spell damage increase. Would an in-your-face-slashing-like-crazy Shadow be taking advantage of that?

zeto: they need to upgrade you to dev. Your keystone ideas are great. :)

You would need an insane amount of life steal to even make Righteous Fire survivable for even a few seconds . Trust me this is not a good idea.

Ah okay, I'm assuming you have used RF? I was just guessing because I have yet to get that skill gem to test it out myself.

Bilbo: noted. Like others, yet to test it, but I suppose if it's anything like burning, yeah. I can't say it was ever really something I'd personally build for, but it sounds like a bit of fun to try.

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Silty wrote:

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zeto wrote:

Another solution would be to allow the Shadow to use a skill to sacrifice some HP for more ES, then use HP leech to restore the lost HP.

I think this is a great idea for int classes in general, including templars and witches. Right now, both HP and ES need a ton of passives to be useful, so you can't really make a good hybrid build with both, and int+dex/int+str armor is awkward and weak. There needs to be some way that a class can tank effectively with a mix of ES and HP.

Yes I agree with this. If not the HP—>ES conversion, at least find some other way of fixing hybrid ES armor.

All Hybrid armor is still at a slight disadvantage, even though one of it's problem was fixed (+defense%). The +defense stat still only affects one of the 2 (or 3) defense mods that the armor provides, which makes it half as effective.

ES hybrid equipment has that problem, but things get worse considering the mechanics of ES — you really want all or nothing. Having a mix of health with ES works terribly.

I've personally thought that ES hybrid equipment should have 20-35% higher base values than they have now. I REALLY DO NOT think it would be OP. If anything it would still be underpowered in my opinion.

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

Maybe the Shadow should have introduced some sort of evasive withdrawal skill. I can imagine it being used in conjunction with Ethereal Knives quite effectively. Until then, Phase Run.

They did — Whirling blades.

Life steal works fine with any skill that lowers health (Righteous Fire), or if you take the Acrobatics Keystone.

Also, the ES is bound to go down eventually, so having life steal is not a bad deal in the long run.

It's nice to have around...just in case.

So now that Shadow has been unlocked for a few days, what are your opinions on claws and life steal? I haven't had a chance to try it out yet.

Early on (ie normal difficulty) life steal on claws was fine, as my ES pool wasn't that large to begin with, and I could take a few hits to the health orb and live, so I could make use of the health steal.

However, once I hit cruel and later ruthless, anytime my ES was depleted, it was past time to be out of combat. I can say that with the soul raker keystones, I was regaining my health at a very fast rate, the problem is that when my ES was gone, 2 shots would kill me, so I couldn't hang around. Since then it was pretty much only of use when up against chaos dealing creatures. As I did most of my attacking when I had my ES up, all that life steal I had was not doing anything to help.

I contemplated switching to pure evasion and taking acrobatics, but then I could still only take a couple of hits before death, just might have time to regen the first hit before the second can land, not a gamble I like taking.

Also I think claws attack speed is too low. 1.10 attacks per second for some of them, like the knuckle dusters, really? After a bunch of increased attack speed nodes they were pretty fun though. Lack of AoE hurt early on, but later I could single target monsters down pretty fast, so didn't mind so much.

Also blood rage didn't really synergise as well with (my build of) shadow as much as expected. Life steal was plenty to keep my health orb filled, but ES couldn't regen at all, and you know, the whole 2 shot death once ES was gone thing I keep bringing up.

In another thread in the keystones forum I mentioned that it'd be great if there was a keystone that converted all life steal into ES steal instead.

Dual Claw evade/ES level 39 shadow

ps whirling blades is awesome, albeit a bit glitchy