Sacrifice

[Baajikiil]

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.

I've seen this with my Martyrs before. I chalk it up to desync of the worst variety. I simply stopped attacking monsters who were not definitely next to me. It's a good habit to get into anyway, because it is the same type of situation were you can get a zeal whiff sequence. Really, any melee attacker can have this problem, sacrifice seems to be especially bad about it. The damage you take will be based upon what damage you would have done to the mob if you had hit; you won't take any from attacking phys immunes in this manner.

You can see this bug in action with assassins as well, when charging attacks vs a fleeing foe, you can score several charge ups without damaging the target at all.

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.

I'm not as sure about this. I *believe* that the damage is done at exactly the same time as normal life stealing. It just puts a -8% in place of the normal 0% base. This fits in with my experiences; I've never killed my self with my martyrs against monsters that you can leach from. This was with a martyr doing about 5K top damage 1 handed.

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?

Yes, the cost is based on how much damage you can actually do to the target. Missing fallen in normal in the way you describe will only cost 1 life, but missing them in hell can cost tons. This is simply a bug though. Normal sacrifice misses without the desync will not hurt you.

Martyrs have a real problem once they reach hell; many monsters have very high leach reductions, an you had better have a backup skill for mephisto and diablo. They are tons of fun while they last though.