Heroes and abilities

[Arnuz]

Maybe life-stealing should be de-coupled from undead creation and be balanced with more power to heal? The top life stealing fantasy creature is the vampire, and its vampire spawning is distinct from its blood sucking.

This could make the strength-centered heroes more on par with the defence-centered ones. For this, it should work based on damage dealt, rather than with resistance rolls.

[Seravy]

There are two problems with Life Steal.

One, it's dependency on figures. Like every touch attack, it is executed by each figure, which makes Wraiths and Death Knights awesome at it, Demon Lords and heroes medicore.
Two, the hero version from items has no save modifier. So it's literally 4 less damage than what the common Life Drain spell can do. Against a 5 resistance target, it's 0-5 damage but you have 50% for 0 and only 10% for 5.
So it's very weak.
We can raise the save modifier, but then we need to raise the cost of the item power (both books and mana). Each additional save modifier pretty much means 1 additional damage except if the target is high enough resistance to still take no damage.

For comparison, Life Drain, the spell is -4 save, Syphon Life is -10. The Vampiric from items is +0.

So the item is as effective against 5 resistance as the common spell against 9 and the uncommon against 15.

[zitro1987]

That's very poor, I'd match it with 'life drain' strength, which is unspectacular.

[Nelphine]

To be honest, I assume life drain as the spell, or from any unit except wraiths, to never create undead. Death knights and demon lords both do way too much damage per figure for the life drain to ever work. Even if you only have a 1 figure death knight for some reason. Wraiths CAN make it work, but only on creatures with low resistance AND high armor. Not a lot of those around.

[Seravy]

One thing to consider when deciding on the save penalty : 1 damage is worth roughly 3 (assuming a "new" hero without a hit bonus) swords so...each -1 save modifier makes the hero hit as much harder as if it had an additional 3 sword item. Which is a lot. At -4 save this would be worth as much as 12 extra swords, on top of what it is currently worth (think about 3 swords vs a 5 resist target which is really quite weak), and double that much because it also gains health equal to the damage.

So, like, each -1 save modifier would need to be priced similarly to a +6 attack weapon which really limits how much we can have. (not to mention, healing is way more valuable for the hero than the damage dealt so in reality it's even better)

Or is there some miscalculation in that?

[Nelphine]

I would assume at least +2 to hit for heroes, and honestly, the average could be as high as +4.

Assuming +2, the actual amount is only equivalent to 4 swords, and if assuming +4 its only 2.8 swords. So, I'd say price it around 3.5 swords per penalty.

[Seravy]

That still makes it cost 1400 for a -4 and...that's prohibitively expensive for an earlygame power - later resistances are higher and it becomes less and less relevant. Not to mention that would make it the most expensive item power which would be strange.

[Nelphine]

Also, +attack scales with +to hit, and can stack high enough to threaten high end units. Life steal, does not scale with +to hit, and can never really stack high enough yo threaten good units. So I'd probably reduce it to the value of 3, or maybe even 2.8 per penalty.

Edit: so I'd probably only make it -2.

[Seravy]

Instead of trying to compare it to swords based on the modifier only, as the result is highly dependent on target resistance, might as well look at the full table.

   

While the 1 damage/modifier is true, it applies to the part of the table less likely to be relevant for actual attacks.

So I think we need to decide three things :
-How expensive (in books and mana) we want this item power
-How much damage we want from this ability against an average resistance target based on the cost above
-How much do we consider "average resistance" for the above, taking into account that damage drastically increases the further below it resistance drops

If we have answers to these three, we can point at a specific row and column in the table and read the required modifier.
Please keep in mind the hero will be able to kill anything without taking damage and even gaining additional hit points if it takes less damage than that when fighting against that enemy.

[Nelphine]

I think there are two different resistances that matter. Average resistance where the damage done (meaning that it will actually contribute to the heroes ability to kill the creature) and average resistance where the healing will matter (this will typically be units that are othereise unable to hurt the hero, but the hero can attack them to get some healing).

I think for the first number, this will be for creatures with lots of armor and/or HP. This also typically translates to high ish resistance. I would say this average resistance will be at least 8, probably higher.

The second number is much lower, probably the average unit that gets put into stacks everywhere. This has 2 numbers - in the fortress (usually heroes and powerful summons - minimum 8, often higher) and anywhere else (I think its safe to say standard halberdier +1 is an average, so 6).

So, either 6 or 9 depending on what is more important. Given this is an early tier enchant, if you want to keep it as such, assume 6 resistance as the average it will face. This also means it's not the amount of damage it does, but the amount of healing it does which is more important. So, given that I would want it around 1.5 per attack. (So that it can't actually be used to attack a big scary creature, then a little creature, and repeat until the big one is dead.)

Edit: which means I vote for a -1 penalty. As to cost? I'm not sure. I'd like to see other peoples opinions on my average resistance thought first.