Guild Wars 2

With last week’s fix to Vampiric Precision and Bloodthirst I thought I’d try out a build that relied on stealing loads of health by critting constantly.

I came up with this: http://www.gw2build.com/builds/high-crit-build-crits-pvp-7326.html

With both the Vampiric minor trait, the blood sigil on my dagger, the Vampiric Precision major trait, and a high crit rate, I was expecting that I would be stealing health with every hit, and that some of my hits would be proccing the lifesteal three times!

Sadly, this proved impossible to test conclusively, as health siphoning doesn’t appear in the combat log.

I therefore did some testing on the combat dummies, and, indeed, although I can’t confirm it because I can’t be bothered to FRAPS a test session and count exactly how many times it procs, it’s definitely not proccing multiple times per hit like I thought it would! In fact, I don’t think it even procs on every single hit like it should because of that minor trait!

Is there some kind of internal cooldown to health siphoning? And, if there is, then what is the point of Vampiric Precision at all??? If the cooldown is too long for even the Vampiric minor trait to proc every single hit (using the fast attacks of dagger at least), then why does Vampiric Precision even exist?

What I HAVE been able to successfully verify is that, with the build I used, health siphoning does 90 damage and heals for 52. I assume those numbers will vary depending on your Power and Compassion stats. In fact, if other people can post their results with different Power and Compassion stats we could figure out how it scales. (Which is the help I wanted in the title.) Remember to also say whether you had traited Bloodthirst too, since that presumably also affects the amount.

If any devs are listening, I would LOVE for health siphoning to appear in the combat log! Or at least for the option to do so!

Anyway, anyone who wants to contribute to this by posting some numbers, please do so and I’ll collect them in a spreadsheet or something.

This stuff was also posted in http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/69514-health-siphoning-build-testing-lifestealing/

With Bloodlust, Vampiric Precision was ~51 HP/Crit. Vampiric was ~39 HP/hit. Sigil of Blood is ~430 HP/proc. No ICD on Vampiric nor Precision. The Sigil has an ICD of 2 seconds, with a 30% chance to proc.
When lifestealing, your current HP has to be below Maximum, or else you won’t get any healing via lifestealing.

Without Bloodthirst, Vampiric ticks for 21 unmitigated damage per hit as damage, while Vampiric Precision ticks for 25 unmitigated damage. With Bloodthirst, Vampiric ticks for 33 unmitigated damage per hit, but it looks like Vampiric Precision gets screwed up in terms of damage.

Edited in; Damage and healing are both unscaling in terms of your stats as far as I have ever been able to tell.

OK, guess I have to eat my words, I switched to testing with staff with its slower attack speed and can confirm that it does in fact proc on every hit! Guess with dagger the numbers were simply flying too fast for me to be able to tell… :p

And yeah, you’re right about the numbers too: they don’t scale with stats, which I found pretty shocking tbh!

I’ve noticed that both Vampiric and Vampiric Precision heal for more than they damage though, which was unexpected. Vampiric heals for 25 without Bloodthirst and 38 with (damage is 21/33 like you said). Vampiric precision does 25 damage and 32 healing without Bloodthirst, so only marginally better, pretty poor considering how seldom it’ll proc with most builds!

I did find a bug with Bloodthirst and Vampiric Precision though (yes, again). When both are specced, the damage text for the lifesteal appears in green, as if it were healing. In fact I think it IS healing, because the number was 51, which definitely isn’t 150% of 25, but is roughly 150% of 32. However, the text was appearing over my target, like damage text does, and anyway I was at full health so healing text shouldn’t be appearing (I definitely wasn’t seeing any green healing numbers from Vampiric, so I shouldn’t have been getting any from Precision either). I hope it doesn’t mean that my target was being HEALED by 51! When I wasn’t at full health Vampiric Precision seemed to be healing for 38, which is ~150% of 25, so I suspect that’s the real damage number. However, it was DEFINITELY healing text as it was appearing over MY head, not my target’s, and it was ALSO in green!

I don’t know if this is just a visual bug or if the trait is bugged and it’s actually HEALING the target. And I don’t know if the trait has actually inverted the healing and damage numbers or if it simply made the damage numbers appear in green by mistake. I submitted a bug report just in case.