Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General I feel leech is broken (Game balance discussion)

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.