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/
A bad necromancer always blames the corpse.
Only change I would make is use an axe in the offhand (for the life force gain and burst damage in skill 2, and so you can start damaging at range), and possibly replace Reaper’s Precision with Weakening Shroud or something as 1% on every third crit seems very little even with your high crit chance and attack speed!
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!