Life leech and spells

Hi all,

I have a question about life leech and damage dealt by spells:

Currently i am using firestorm, chance to ignite, elemental proliferation and faster casting to ignite enemies while they approach (plus gang's momentum, and ignite/fire nodes), and flame surge/Conc.effect/Spell echo to damage close-by ignited enemies.
As defense, I am using chaos inoculation, with nearly 7K ES, with nearly no noticable evasion/armour.

To boost my tankyness I was hoping I can add some life leech to my setup, using the node ghost reaver (?) to transform life leech to ES leech.

- Do life leech nodes by themselves work with spell damage, or only physical damage?
- can i use the life leech gem with flame surge = does life leech gem work with fire damage?
- should I use vaal pact too?

Any advice is welcome, or a link to a similar build I could take some inspiration from :-) !


The link to my character:

Life leech support gem works with any kind of damage (physical, elemental or chaos). Yes, life leech nodes (I think you are talking about the ones who improve the leech rate and leech cap) do apply to elemental leech, unless it is specified it doesn't (like by example xxx of physical attack dmg leeched as life).

From my 2.0 experience, if you play a caster, life leech should not be your primary regen (unless you have 300k dps and vaal pact of course), its too underwhelming to be so, but it can be a nice quality of life improvement if coupled with other source of regen (like zealot oath).

thanks alot for clarifying!
I need three more points for ghost reaver, so it might be worth a try to gain some in-between es regen.
My current build uses void bringer, so the mana cost of flame surge is quite high. with es leech, i might switch that to something else (i like it for the both high es and spell damage..).

thanks for mentioning zealot's oath!
I kind of misunderstood it so far (I assumed my regular life regen, based on my life, gets applied to es. But apparently ES will be the base for that regen, so it should add a decent boost to my ES, without my going the ghost-reaver route (one more skill point, as well as sacrificing a gem slot).