Can't help but deeming leech broken. I avoid using it because it annoys me to watch a henchman soaking it up and at full health while everybody else has taken damage and need me to play the game right.

Just fought the zombie dog, and the henchie was attacked 5 times in a single turn, and took 7-8 damage and healed 10, every time. So ended up at full health after being jumped on. Well I get a "why even bother with the rest" if that's how it is.

So I restarted and avoid leech. I'd like to propose rebalancing; maybe not being healed by your own blood, or lowering the heal amount or something.

If you think other things should be balanced you are velcome to discuss it here.

Leech do'nt work against magical attacks, and not sure it's still OP when you play on hard difficuly against end game ennemies.

Doesn't matter, it shouldn't just be balanced against the hard difficulty setting, but rather all settings. Damage and healing are not directly impacted by those settings anyway.

I don't have a lot of experience with Leech, I literally tried it once during beta for a handful of levels and it was (at best) some minor damage mitigation by healing a small percentage of the damage I was taking every turn. That appears to be no longer the case, and when used with other abilities its effectiveness is off the charts.

If you have amazing armour leech can protect you from losing HP from low damage melee attacks. I think it's only super powerful when used in conjunction with strength based armour (typically man at arms chars)

I think the quick fix is just make it mutually exclusive with man at arms skills and balance is restored

I have it on both my characters, a STR-based melee tank and a caster.

It works well for the tank, but still there are plenty of threats besides bleeding and it doesn't offer total protection. And it doesn't work well for the caster at all.

If anything is broken about Leech, it's the way it interacts with Bloodletting. But again, it's only helpful for the tank -- if the tank tries to cast Bloodletting on the caster, I don't get that massive chain of small heals, just a single one.

I understand there are scenarios where Leech doesn't help, but when it does come into play it shouldn't be making the encounter trivial. If it is, it needs to be better balanced.

also its quite op on hard too...

Yes, leech is broken. The amount of healing gained needs to be cut by half or more (testing would be required).

I've been playing with a friend who plays a knight with the lone wolf and leech traits. Most of the melee attacks against him cause him to bleed and instantly heal him. At first this would heal him about 1/2 of the damage, so the skill was effectively a 50% damage mitigation skill against melee and archers.

However, as we have moved on toward the end of the first map leech has starting healing him for the amount he is hit for or sometimes even more. One battle had a number of archers which were lower level than us. The archer and melee attacks were effectively healing him. Their damage was lower than the leech heal he was receiving.

To abuse this broken skill further is to have blood letting on hand. My character has blood letting and if things go bad like a bunch of fire damage I can cast blood letting on my friend and it will heal him to full hps. Right now he has about 700 hps, as long as he has around 20 hps left I can heal him full. That is a 600+ hps heal, instantly. My int is 7 and witch craft is 1.

For comparison our companion hydro mage has 13 int and 3 in Hydrosophist. The largest heal in that line currently is strong regenerate. It heals about 180 hps over 2 turns.

The healing amount from leech needs to be tweaked. Even encounters with a lot of elemental damage are trivial with how much leech heals, especially when combined with blood letting.

Leech's numbers don't really go up with the game while enemy damage does. Healing for ~24 when you take a hit for 300 isn't very impressive.

Zombie is much, much stronger for Cyseal than Leech is.

Leech's problem comes when combined with Comeback Kid or the skills that cause bleeding...

Yeah, I didn't want to get into the discussion of zombie because it is another skill that needs some adjusting.

Zombie falls off very hard.

Really? I was enjoying the battles that lasted a bit longer. The trivial 2 turn kill on a boss like the source spider are rather boring.

Anyhow, I hope they do a pass on skills at some point. I'd like to see the healing mechanics come in line with their other heal skills.

Who gives a damn about magical attacks in a game where you can max out resistances easily? They get pointless and leech combined with bleeding attacks is retardedly powerful, combine that with the crazy damage output of 2 handed weapons and you get bored on every difficulty.

Yeah 2 handed damage is pretty crazy. I run with a friend that uses 2h and lone wolf. My two characters are just there to clean up what doesn't die in the first turn or two.

Bloodletting and Teleport, boss.

And it is pretty OP even in Hard, especially around melee enemies. You could have one guy bleeding you and 3 other casters wailing on you. As long as you're bleeding or standing in your own blood (or theirs), it's pretty sufficient to solo kill almost everything aside from bosses.

Have you considered the possibility that Leech isn't as overpowered as Weather the Storm?

Leech+Comeback Kid is stronger than Weather the Storm because it's not that difficult to get immunities without weather the storm on a plate wearer. Really only enemies with tenebrium weapons are going to kill your leech+comeback kid+immunity guys because it's actually very hard to get tenebrium immunity.

Resistances need to be changed to be multiplicative instead of additive so that you can never reach immunity, only have really high resistance.

leech / zombie isn't over powered, it's just a good strategy, of which there are many. Making good set-up's are part of the fun of the game, and there are even better ones than leech.

Along those same lines I'd encourage everyone concerned about various balance issues to listen to this podcast David was on.
http://5by5.tv/dlc/31

Most relevant bit starts at about 1 hour 3 minutes.

ha! that's cool, that's exactly what I'm talking about. What he explains at about 1h 5m, It's part of the fun.

I must admit, as a big two-handed tanky warrior-- Leech is broken.

I accept that physical damage is 50% of the damage you receive in this game, but to use that as an argument for leech not being broken is untenable.

When you get to a point when you think "Phew, that guy is only hitting me with an axe. I'm safe." then you must admit that somethings wrong.

I'm not saying the game is broken as a result, but I won't be heart broken if the % ratio of heals got reduced in the next patch, or if perhaps you only get heals when you DEAL damage.

Bloodletting + Leech allows you to survive and instantly recover from any hits that don't instantly kill you.


If you seriously don't think that's OP you haven't tried it.

Swen said he was looking forward to seeing all the ways in which players would be able to exploit and break the game. I do not think this combination is OP at all. It's simply a technique to use for those who want it. If you feel it isn't fun, just ignore it.

Sure it isn't op. Immortality isn't op at all. This is pretty balanced, because with leech game becomes so boring, that you can fall asleep at any moment, and hit the keyboard with your head, accidentaly removing all of your savegames. So this is very dangerous trait, and it's completely justified that it makes your char immortal.




No, not really. Leech is op. More op than anything in this game. Need to be fixed.

To be honest, in a non-competetive game, I couldn't give two figs about "balance".
It's not like using Leech would spoil someone else's enjoyment, and you don't have to use it if you don't like it.
On my first playthrough, I didn't take it at all, and that wasn't because I thought it was "OP" or "imba". It just didn't fit with the way I wanted to play.

Some people cannot handle that other people like to have fun in ways they don't approve of.

I don't give a shit if you want to play on godmode. Probably on one of my playthroughs in the future I'll also want to try immortal character. Any game should have cheats, coz cheats can be fun. But they should be accesible by writing some stuff into console, and not picking traits.






Ffs, but you don't know you don't want to use it, before you actually use it. You take a funny looking traits, and then few hours later you realize you're immortal, and you're stuck with it. Of course, sure you can restart the game and lose hours of playing, or you can respec after next 30 hours of playing and lose all your spells. But this is not a very "fun" option.

Enabling godmode should be a conscious decision, you shouldn't be able to do it accidentaly. At least, they should add big red "GODMODE" sign, to the description of leech. This shit spoiled completely one of my playthroughs.

Make Leech heal more the lower your health is, cap each instance of healing to a percentage of missing HP (capping at 70% missing HP equaling to a maximum healing cap per instance of healing of 5% of your maximum HP, or some other similar system)

Or you could go back to an earlier save and lose minutes of game play, or simply don't cast bloodletting on your character with leech lol. You guys may not realize this, but you can make yourself impervious to all damage in this game and never even take damage and you wont need leech and bloodletting to heal. There are lots of ways to be OP

Agree. I get the point of interesting tactics and discovery but that or healing from taking an arrow, it's just weird. If that is what they are after great, but to me my guess is they want experiment in a somewhat logical/non-game breaking way. We could then say "so many other things suck" because they are drab in what they do and the creativity you can use with them.

Don't care how easy they make normal mode. And I fully admit to having a pernicious character flaw, in that I hate playing pick my own difficulty, by deciding when to tie one arm behind my back. I think there's enough individuals that share my character flaw though, to support a difficulty mode where skill balance is taken into consideration.

Whether balance is important in a single-player game or not, my personal opinion here is this:
A talent that is making you practically immortal, in a game where challenge is definitely supposed to be part of the fun (challenge to some degree, of course, learning some useful tactics will help a lot), is unlikely to be the way the devs intended it to be.
Sure, you can not take it and avoid the feeling of cheating the game that way, but that's not really satisfying, imho.
After all the concept of leech is interesting. It's the execution that might need some tweaking.

Yup, I agree.

I get the feeling that most arguing for not balancing skills/spells are primarily interested in being OP and just burning through content.

This game has interesting tactics mostly involving status effects, ground effect placement, and some positioning. I love these and how the combat feels like a tabletop system. There are unbalanced components to this game, like any other game. Of course it's up to the devs if they want to do a balancing pass or not.


Blood letting on leech - Instant Full Heal - 6 AP
Only requires 1 point in witchcraft and 7 int for 90% application chance. Currently in our play through this heals 600+ hps, this will continue to go up as it is a full heal.

Strong Regenerate - 110 hps for 2 turns - 4 AP
These stats are for 13 int and 3 hydrosophist which is a 15% boost to the skill.


I like the idea of the leech trait, it just need some adjustment to better balance with other heal skill costs and performance.

The problem with leech now is not other peoples fun. It is leech removing fun from my game. It does bother me as I ignore it. Firstly because Madora has leech. SO that's her I can't use in the game. Going to the homestead, I have to filter out all the henchmen with leech. Some of these have the traits I am looking for, for a particular build, but I have to use second best to avoid leech.

Lastly is scews with the difficult setting. If I want to play hard, I should be able to by choosing hard in game menu. But now it is so, that normal with leech, is easier than playing easy without leech.

So it blurs and limits the game. I bypass it, and leave each to their own. But I should be allowed to critizise. Because what if there were like, 10 different things that were all broken? I can just bypass those 10 too can't I? Of if there were 100 different things that were unbalanced, I could just avoid those 100 things too right?

You should be able to critizise a fault without people arguing to just avoid said fault.

I don't understand this thinking. We just had an talent adjusted for balance in the last patch. We've had balance passes all throughout development. Why are we trying to balance anything at all if the goal is to watch players exploit and break the game?

Heck, why remove the "T" teleport feature that was in yesterday? Nobody is forcing anyone to press that key and abuse it.. should it be there for those who want to "exploit and break the game"?

I don't care how people abuse Leech in their game.. but I would like to be able to have a talent *like Leech* as an option, without breaking the balance for *my* game in the process.

I think the day developers wash their hands of balancing their own game and instead fall back on the excuse of "abuse it if you want, up to you", we're all in trouble and in for some really crappy gaming.

I picked leech because I expected it would make healing easier and more interesting (walk over blood on field if wounded). I do believe that was the intention. The solution IMO should be to prevent Leech characters from dropping blood, I hope it's not too complicated.

I also agree with the godmode argument, if someone wants godmode more power to them, but I don't want fun abilities taken away from me due to that. Part of the fun is using everything you've got to overcome challenge, when you have to handicap yourself it's just not the same.

Yeah, because you'll realize how OP is leech immediatly after choosing it... It takes a lot of time, and at the beggining game is very hard anyway. But if you pick a couple of talents like leech + comeback kid, on second map you suddenly realize you're immortal. And this is wrong.



Sure, people also could play naked, don't use any armor. Or try to kill enemies with their bare hands. But this applies to people who like to replay the game. On your first playthrough, when you're more casual type of player, you just want balanced difficulty, a challenge, without making this harder for yourself on purpose - because it's destroying immersion. If some talent/skill or their combination make you immortal even on hard difficulty - It should be nerfed. You want immortality, use cheats. Eot.

I think Leech should heal (Damage x 0.25) of every physical melee or ranged attack. If the character attacks an enemy for 100 points of physical damage he would heal 25 points.