[Newbie] My build was wrong, what works with leech?

[Honeycone]

Hello.

I created a duelist gladiator (currently level 40) that revolved around life leech and bleed + poison. But I just recently discovered that leech does not work with bleed or poison, only with direct hits.

If I have to choose between leech or bleed + poison, I choose to keep leech. What should I replace bleed + poison with as a way to deal damage? What works well with leech?

[+|A.O|+]

if you can reach the shadow area, the leech is "attack damage leech" not "physical attack damage leech"..

this means you can use ele conversion and still leech from it.


[Edit]
In that case, adding flat ele jewels also adds to overall damage, adding flat phys jewels is also strong.

[BelChris666]

what are you using as your attack. If its a a fast hitting/aoe you could add Herald of Agony to your build by going poison.

[DasSemiPro]

If you're really wanting to focus on leech, then you'll be wanting to hit enemies as often as possible. You might want to look at life gained on hit as well, and combine it with something that has a large attack area and hits often. Like BelChris stated, Herald of Agony might be a really nice choice in that instance since you'll be hitting a lot. Bleed is going to be tough to work in as well. Since you're limited on how many times it stacks, you'll want to prioritize sheer physical damage each hit to maximize the damage it does.

[Honeycone]

I actually had Herald of Agony and also Crimson dance, but I was under the impression that leech doesn't trigger on bleed or poison?

So my thinking was that it would be better for me to stop spending on bleed / poison and instead use those skill points / equipment slots to increase my raw physical damage. As leech only works with the latter.

[Drake]

Also, while the dots won't leech, the initial hit from the skill does hit, so you can still leech with a bleed poison build.

The main issue isn't actually leeching here. The main issue is the viability of a bleed poison build altogether. Bleed and poison are very difficult to build efficiently, you'll need a lot of theorycrafting and item and skill knowledge to get a good build out of that. It's not newbie friendly.

[Dregor]

Generally speaking bleeding and poison are crap because they don't scale well. So don't worry about the damage loss from those. Unless you really lean into the poison stuff its not particularly effective. If your only source of poison damage is HoA then don't worry and just drop the poison from your tree.

For leeching you just want to hit as hard and as fast as you can with whatever direct damage attack you're doing. DoTs aren't going to help you with leeching.