Priest immortality?

[[DODO] Alice]

I've been toying around with the priest and had to make some decisions and got thinking. While on Consecrated Ground any damage dealt to any enemy on Consecrated Ground is stolen at a 0.25 rate.
With maxed out Remedy all life gains are at a 3.0x rate. With the Symbol of Retribution blessing any damage taken is returned at a 2.5x rate.

So, if I understand all this correctly, the Priest would be unkillable within the Consecrated Ground, right? Say an enemy hits for 100 damage, 250 damage is returned to them, Consecrated Ground steals heals for 62.5 and Remedy makes that 187.5. So however much the Priest is hurt, they heal 187.5% of that damage right back.

So the questions are:
Have I understood this correctly, or am I missing something?
When is damage returned calculated? Would the Path of the Defender or blessing (0.8 damage taken) reduce the damage returned?
What about armour?
What about damage redirected to mana by the Divine Protection passive?

Additional notes:
This is disregarding any other damage or other life gains the priest might have (like the damage from Consecrated Ground itself and normal life regen).

Enemies that can one hit kill the Priest should still do so.

Enemies outside the Consecrated Ground won't be affected by the life steal from Consecrated Ground, like most ranged enemies will be.

[Zarcos]

Symbol of Retribution returns the damage AFTER the mitigation. So, it's entirely based on how much damage you take, not how much damage was done. For instance, an enemy attacks you for 100 damage, but after armor and flat DR it becomes only 30 damage, and then again after mana shield passive it's only 10 or 15. So, you'll return a whopping 25ish damage and when enemies have 1k+ HP in NG+3 and up, lol yeah. Worst preacher buff in the game.

[Shiro]

Originally posted by Zarcos:

Symbol of Retribution returns the damage AFTER the mitigation. So, it's entirely based on how much damage you take, not how much damage was done. For instance, an enemy attacks you for 100 damage, but after armor and flat DR it becomes only 30 damage, and then again after mana shield passive it's only 10 or 15. So, you'll return a whopping 25ish damage and when enemies have 1k+ HP in NG+3 and up, lol yeah. Worst preacher buff in the game.

I think it deals damage before the shield mitigation. I just tested on my Priest, and he took 2 damage from a mob, but reflected 11 damage back to him. Now, granted the game does a lot of rounding, but by no stretch does 2.5x of 2 equal 11. Rather, he was doing about 4 damage (rounded), which when multiplied by 2.5 comes out to 10 damage, but because of rounding it dealt 11.

In any case, given that the Priest can heal for his entire health pool several times over, the Retribution seal is actually very good for him. Given that he's a very close-range fighter, he takes a lot of incidental damage. He doesn't really need any of the other buffs at Tier 3, so he might as be able to reflect that damage back to his enemies; especially when he can pair it with other revenge-style items.

[Khadgar]

Originally posted by Shiro:

I think it deals damage before the shield mitigation. I just tested on my Priest, and he took 2 damage from a mob, but reflected 11 damage back to him.

I think it is after armor and resistances, but before the priest's mana shield comes into play.

I got this result from my paladin. He had around 75% physical damage resistance from armor, and a basic beetle hit him for around 4 damage. He reflected something like 12, which isn't quite 2.5 times, but it definately isnt the pre-armor hit (assumed to be 16 damage), which would have reflected for 40 damage or so.

Unless... the reflected damage is also considered physical damage, and the basic grey beetele enemy type has such a high amount of armor that the 40 damage was reduced down to 12, which I suppose is possible.

[Shiro]

The thing that would be really interesting to figure out, but probably hard to test, is if it counts damage before or after mitigation from something like the Tower Shield. Even if it does lower the reflect damage, I stand by Retribution being good for the Priest since can insta-heal the damage. Granted the player still needs to be mindful of how much he pulls, but the Priest is probably the tankiest character as long as he has a couple enemies on his ground AoE.

[Khadgar]

[rampant assumptions abound, ye hast been warned]

Assuming the chain of events goes something like this:

Enemy attack > Player hit > Mitigating factors (evasion / tower shield type things) > Damage is applied to character > hitpoint reduction resolved

You can see this in action with a dodge of a fire or poison attack, but you still receive the debuff. Mitigating factors reduce or remove damage taken, but do not claim the player hasn't even been hit. You could test this specifically on a thief or ranger with high evasion, and the 'wrath of the thundergod' item. It should still fire out a visible lightning bolt for flat damage, even when you supposedly evade an attack.

My best guess is that the reflection chapel blessing is calculated between damage applied and hitpoint reduction resolved actions. So, for most classes, this is the same number in both steps. However, for priest, the damage received is NOT the actual damage taken, because of the mana shield. 100 damage taken is then further reduced, and then applied between hit points and mana points. In all other classes, the hitpoints removed is equal to the damage taken.

If I really hated myself, I could take the damage reflection blessing on a sorceror or wizard, and see what the damage reflection numbers are both when the shield passive skill procs, and when it doesn't. But as it turns out, I don't hate myself THAT much, to spend ~100k gold to respec, and then another ~100k gold to re-repsec after testing that.

[speculation ends]

All that aside, there isn't really any tier 3 blessing the priest needs really. Taking 100% more skill crit damage could be nice, but that would mean skipping mana or health regen, which doesn't seem particularly fun. So really, in a choice between primary lifesteal, damage reflection, and spell cost reduction, they are all in the same general category of usefulness, I feel.

I guess the simplest way to tell if it's pulling it's own weight would be to record some solo-priest NG+ Act 5 stuff, and just see how many archers and mages randomly die from damage reflection in the recap.

[Zarcos]

Skill cost reduction is a much better 3rd tier preacher buff since all passives are considered skills and also the Consecrated Ground is really expensive and it's particularly nice to get that reduced by 25% especially on NG+3 and up when every little bit of mana saving is nice.