What skills next. Avenger

[adeyke]

At skill level 20, Vengeance costs 8.7 mana per swing:
Now suppose you are VERY LUCKY and find a Herald of Zak shield and receive a +1 skills from your weapon, armor, and helmet for a total of +7 combat skills raising Vengeance to 27 costing 10.5 mana per swing.

With a Strength of 150+, a Might merc adding some physical damage (say +200% at skill level 10; only clvl 38) and a typical weapon (say 100 average damage after non-elemental/magic damage magical effects), you'd be doing the following physical damage:

Actually:
100 * (100 + 200 + 150) / 100 = 450 physical damage

That is, with 150 strength and 200% might, you have 350% off-weapon ED, which boosts the 100 to 450.

So, assuming the worst at 500 physical damage, exactly how much mana leech would you need to use Vengeance without loosing any mana (not including physical immunes)?  In Hell difficulty, Life/Mana steal are reduced to 2/3:
500 / 'x' = 10.5
x = 2.1%

2.1 + ((2.1 / 3) * 2) =
2.1 + (0.7 * 2) =
2.1 + 1.4 =
3.5%

Unless my math is wrong (completely possible) 3.5% mana steal is all you need in Hell with the simplest set up!
[right][snapback]58865[/snapback][/right]

In hell, life/mana steal are reduced by 2/3 (so it's just 1/3 the normal value).

Monsters have physical resistances that reduce the amount of damage you can deal to them. The average physical resistance (looking only at entries in monstats.txt, ignoring rarity and including many "dummy" monsters) is 38%. Some monsters have 0%, some 100%, some inbetween.

So the 450 damage is really, on average, just 279.

Then the monsters have their individual leech penalties. On average (same method as above), leech is only 75% effective against hell monsters.

So, if you deal 279 damage per hit and want to leech 10.5 mana, you'd normally need 3.8% leech, but this needs to be multiplied by 3 due to the hell penalty and by an average of 4/3 due to the average individual leech penalty. That means you need about 15% leech to maintain your vengeance.

Of course, the actual averages for physical resistance and leech penalties are different, and nigh impossible to calculate; you'd have to know exactly how many of what type of monster you encounter, and what bosses and such are among them. Against some monsters, you can't leech at all, while others just have very harsh penalties. For example, with the 450 damage against the Diablo Clone, you'd need 93% leech to maintain the vengeance.