I just need to reiterate what’s been touched on in many prior postings here. The games core design when it comes to how difficulty was designed (simply increasing monster health pool and damage), will not allow healing (both life on hit and life regen) to scale well when it comes to content like Greater Rifts.
This new life on attack method of healing, applies only to attacks that have an attack animation (that’s the current system they are going with). This means that skills that previously could proc life on hit, will no longer be able to contribute to healing. What’s going to be interesting is how they plan on dealing with something like Explosive Blast. Grimiku specifically mentioned that something like Frost Nova would not trigger life on hit; Frost Nova does have a casting animation. Explosive Blast works similarly in this regards. But it’s currently a key damage skill used by Wand of Woh wizards. If they get no healing due to this change, that build is essentially dead.
Furthermore, you cannot just slap static numbers/percentages into the database and attempt to find some sort of balance when one of your new end game systems, has ever increasing difficulties that utilize such a lazy design (based around gear checks). This is why I’ve been a proponent of difficulty based on ever better monster abilities when it comes to their AI, tolerance to crowd control, increased resistances, ability to work more intelligently with other monsters, etc.
I do realize that is what the new legendary gems are supposed to help mitigate this as well as there currently being a tier 100 max on Greater Rifts. But just like with the initial Paragon system where P100 was the max, players will eventually get to those higher tier levels without exploits. Which may lead to adding more tiers and thus having to re-balance the numbers again. But as I also mentioned, all that does is it balances the numbers in such a way that it will eventually obsolete/trivialize the games base difficulty system.
Without overhauling the difficulty design, the healing mechanic (this applies to amounts from items as well as Paragon) really ought to have a base amount that dynamically adjusts based on game difficulty setting. This same system would also scale dynamically throughout Greater Rift play based on the tier. Once outside of that game play, healing will scale back to something more appropriate. Again, I point out how Paragon points for life on hit and life regen are appropriately scaled based on character level. This same concept should be utilized where a scalar is applied based on game difficulty settings as well as Greater Rift tier.
I’m not saying that characters shouldn’t eventually reach this sort of power ability either. But the way they are currently trying to balance healing, it will completely trivialize the core difficulty systems to the point where they are going to have to go in, and re-tune those numbers (and all it would lead to is them increasing monster health pool numbers and damage for the base game, basically negating their designed power creep from new legendary items plus powered up gems).
