Life leech is mandatory, it shouldn't be

[Supply Side Jesus]

Combat revolves around different types of attacks but it is unrealistic to stack defense to more than 1. Armor and will don't do enough, especially when dealing with high-tier units.

Consequently, you can't avoid or mitigate damage, so you are left with healing or life stealing. Healing doesn't work on many types of units, so you end up equipping your units with life leech and stacking on life.

I think armor and willpower should scale up past early game. Having 12 armor would not do much against 30+ hits, it needs to be more effective.

[Drakilian]

You have the numbers off a bit, health is actually worth less than armor and willpower on higher tier units, especially if that unit has life leech. If it takes more than 5 hits to kill a unit, an armor upgrade or a willpower upgrade is worth more than health upgrade. Armor also makes your existing health pool worth more point for point, since you will need more net hits to take it down.

Life leech, which returns health, would also make armor more valuable, because it would make your existing health pool replenishable and therefore your actual health value itself becomes less important as long as it is above 0 - anything that makes it go to 0 slower has increased value.

[dontplease]

Originally posted by Supply Side Jesus:

Combat revolves around different types of attacks but it is unrealistic to stack defense to more than 1. Armor and will don't do enough, especially when dealing with high-tier units.

Consequently, you can't avoid or mitigate damage, so you are left with healing or life stealing. Healing doesn't work on many types of units, so you end up equipping your units with life leech and stacking on life.

I think armor and willpower should scale up past early game. Having 12 armor would not do much against 30+ hits, it needs to be more effective.

there are absolutely lots of ways to mitigate dmg.

[Mort]

Life Leech is definitely the most straight forward way to win as an artificer, and might need a nerf to make other glyphs worth using. I definitely wouldn't call it mandatory, however - alchemists can win on impossible without any glyphs at all

[meiam]

Only one type of vampirism should be active at once and glyph should cap out at 25%. It's fine to make some units around the concept of life leech, but you can't have every unit use it.

An overall armor buff of every unit (especially melee) would be nice to counter leech being so strong.

[Sartarius]

Ye easily exploitable. F.e. death knight (or any other tough unit) parry stance, life leech glyph. 25% leech cap seems reasonable.

[Riftwalker]

man, earth mage with stone skin for 50% physical dmg reduction slap it onto something ethereal, take no dmg from physical sources....

if they wanted life leech to be more interesting they could limit it's effectiveness to specific unit types. life leech only working on mortals or some such.

edit: tbc i haven't put life leech on any of my units.

[archonsod]

Originally posted by Mort:

Life Leech is definitely the most straight forward way to win as an artificer, and might need a nerf to make other glyphs worth using.

I never use it. In fact, my initial response to the suggestion was "oh, you still take damage?" :P

[Supply Side Jesus]

Originally posted by Riftwalker:

man, earth mage with stone skin for 50% physical dmg reduction slap it onto something ethereal, take no dmg from physical sources....

This still leaves you open to other sources. Like undead that all deal death or beasts that deal a lot of elemental.

[Supply Side Jesus]

I think one of the issues are 50% debuffs that are so easily thrown around as mage domain powers. The game allows you to have NEGATIVE resistance and AMPLIFIES damage in such case. So coming in with, for example an elf unit with weakness to death magic into undead domain and getting -50% death debuff from domain power, results in massive damage. I have seen mobs deliver 50+ hits.

So unless you hit back equally hard, which is doable, and life steal (which is a type of a universal damage reduction) you are not going to be able to keep up.

I think willpower and armor promotions should be +1, +2, +3 instead of +1 +1 +1.
I think resistance floor should be 0%, debuffing should only be used to negate resistance, not to create vulnerabilities.