Sacrifice

[Taem]

OK,  I've been having a bit of fun with my Martyr (Sacrifice specialist). He is dealing around 2000 damage per hit even though he has not yet completed normal difficulty (Go upgraded Steeldriver!), but that is not the point i am interested in.

What puzzles me is how exactly the price of Sacrifice is handled by the game. A few instances has convinced me that everything is not like I thought.

Firstly I have suffered a string of inexplicable deaths, though there seems to be some sort of pattern. Basically they happened while I was swinging at an enemy moving slowly away from me. The swing would not connect (because the creature had left my weapon reach), but I would still suffer the damage (that would occasionally one-hit kill me). This will only happen with creatures moving slowly away from me (like those fat taskmaster thingies). With faster creatures I will merely hit air and not pay the price.

Secondly it seems like Sacrifice deals damage to you before your life leech is accounted for you, so if you deal enough damage to kill yourself you die even though you might have leech enough to ameliorate the life loss.

My question is. When does Sacrifice deal damage to you? It seems neither to be directly on initation of the attack, nor on successfully damaging the target.

Thirdly it seems like I suffer less damage when barely missing targets with few hit points (like imps) than when barely missing targets with high hit points (like the aforementioned taskmasters or what they are called). Is Sacrifice's cost decided by the amount of hit points a successful attack would remove instead of the listed damage?
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There is a post about this exact subject awhile back, but it's worth looking-up. Either Crystillion or Adyken discusses with me the mechanics of Sacrafice, and I remember writing my skill placenement and items, and theoretical future items and skills to survive in hell.