Health Globes and You

[DarlosND]

So wanting to be a bit different from the old life-on-hit and/or revenge strategies, I thought I'd jack my crit rate way up and put Battle Rage's Swords to Ploughshares to use. So far its been working out pretty well, since I don't have to worry about LoH when I buy equipment, allowing me to focus on more offensive stuff like getting weapons with really good base DPS and crit damage and other things. I also increased my pickup range so I can just vacuum up the health globes. Altogether the build is effective and rather cheap. Also it's great for parties too.

I'd like to learn a bit more about health globe mechanics though, particularly in regard to barbarians. So here's some questions:

1 - This isn't barbarian-specific, but: how often do health orbs drop when you kill enemies?

2 - Swords to Ploughshares says that whenever you crit, there's a chance that the enemy will drop more health globes. What is that chance exactly? Also, I assume that they drop those extra globes the moment the ability procs since it looks like that's what happens, but I might be misunderstanding what's going on, so let me know if I'm wrong about that.

3 - The Pound of Flesh passive seems like it might be useful. It says it increases the chance of getting health globes by 25%. Does that only affect the "base" health globe mechanics, or would that also increase the proc rate of Swords to Ploughshares? If not I may pick a different passive, since getting equipment with extra health from health globes is easy, making the double health buff it gives me obsolete.

Thanks in advance!

[liquid_mage]

1. If I had to pick a number id say 10-15%, but this is a best guess.
2. Not sure I would spend skills/runes on health globes.
3. Passives are too valuable to spend on health globes, you need these for damage or survivals(Tough as Nails, Superstition, Nerves of Steel).

I grab health globes if one drops and I need it, but i dont worry about them too much. With Leap/Iron Impact and Ignore Pain/Iron Hide my survival is pretty good. Also Revenge and Charge/Dreadnought give a lot of healing. Plus we have potions.

[DarlosND]

Hey thanks for your opinion. Now if somebody could actually answer my questions that would be great.

Seriously. I've been lurking here for a while and already know all about what other things I supposedly "should" be doing. Now, I'd like to experiment with something different, and am attempting to gather information to be able to plan it out better. So I'd appreciate it if we could keep the "don't do that and do what I do" responses to a minimum, please.

[torand]

1) There is not only a chance to get health globes on killing an enemy, but also a chance to get health globes when dealing damage to an enemy (Don't know if it is per hit, or every X% damage), and I think both of these chances seem to vary per enemy, so I am not sure you will find one single answer.

2) Have not used this particular ability, but a lot of these abilities that say there is a "Chance" means that it will happen 100% the first time, but there is some kind of cooldown or throttling so it doesn't happen too many times too fast. I don't know if that is the case for this ability, just what I have seen for some others that are worded similarly.

3) Again I fail at answering your question, but I can tell you that Pound of Flesh DEFINITIVELY affects the two chances mentioned in #1 (Meaning you don't have to kill an enemy to get extra health globes). It is pretty awesome on bosses if you are doing damage fast enough to have health globes dropping every couple of seconds.

[DarlosND]

Ah, that's more like it. Thanks for the thoughtful response.

1) So I actually read up about this earlier. Unfortunately most wikis seem to be written like we still only have the beta. At any rate, it sounds like most enemies just drop them upon death, but bosses/elites/champions drop them upon losing a certain amount of health. I've been trying very hard to pay attention while fighting regular enemies, and I haven't ever seen a case where it looks like a regular enemy drops one any time before death, even using Swords to Plowshares. That might be just because they die so fast though.

2) Okay so I was dumb and didn't read the Swords to Plowshares description properly yesterday. It says "Critical hits have up to a 5% chance to cause enemies to drop additional health globes." The only real question there is if they drop additional health globes immediately upon this procing, or if the game waits until a moment they would normally drop a health globe (death, boss/elite losing so much health) and then makes them drop more globes at that time.

3) Yeah I can see how Pound of Flesh would affect the regular drop rate. At the very least that's clearly what it's there for. I just wonder if it has any kind of synergy with Swords to Plowshares.

Well, at any rate, I seem to have surprisingly good survivability if I play well with this setup. Right now I'm running through Act I of Inferno, since I'm not really equipped well enough to move onto further acts just yet. I'm using Pound of Flesh in this run-through. I'll do another run-through without it and see if I do a lot worse or not (replacing it with some defensive passive).

[torand]

Ah, that's more like it. Thanks for the thoughtful response.

Well, at any rate, I seem to have surprisingly good survivability if I play well with this setup. Right now I'm running through Act I of Inferno, since I'm not really equipped well enough to move onto further acts just yet. I'm using Pound of Flesh in this run-through. I'll do another run-through without it and see if I do a lot worse or not (replacing it with some defensive passive).

Yeah, I was using it for the longest time, and I felt like it got worse the more gear I had. Where the other passives scale along with your gear (25% armor, 1 armor per vit), this one just kind of is (I guess it scales with DPS, but my gear upgrades normally don't increase my DPS). Also most of the times I am worried about my survivability I am trying to kite to get away from plauged/molten/arcane death, so I am not attacking a lot of the time anyway, and if you are not attacking this passive does nothing :(.

[zakaluka]

Regarding question #2.

You apply each skill's coefficient to that 5%. It works exactly the same way critical mass does. For instance, Cleave has a coefficient of .667.

If "up to 5% of crits" cause a health globe to drop, with cleave it will be 5% * .667 = 3.3% of all crits. Whirlwind has a .133 coefficient, so 5*.133 = 0.67%.

If you are 1h/shield, and run overpower/killing spree, weapon master/axe, ruthless, and battle rage, your maximum possible crit rate is about 87%. Pretty crazy =/=. In that case, about 1 in 34 hits by Cleave would net you an extra globe. And again, about 1 in 170 hits by ww. Apply your APS and make an assumption about how many enemies you're hitting to figure out how many extra globes you're actually getting.

I like the health globe bonus for barbarian, since we have them %-of-max healing skills, we tend to stack vit. With so much vit I can manage with larger, more spaced-out heals. I've thought about using Swords to Ploughshares, and think it would work wonderfully in a ww crit build. Haven't done any math or research to back it up though.

[DarlosND]

Ah, I didn't know about skill coefficients. Neat.

Yeah I'm pretty much running a WW crit build plus sprint with run like the wind. If I pop sprint and then just whirlwind straight through a group of enemies they just hemorrhage health globes, even with around 45% crit rate. Then with my 21 yard boost to pickup range I just twitch a little and suck them all up.

Also I tried it without Pound of Flesh and everything works just fine. My current running theory is that when Swords of Ploughshares procs, it guarantees that they drop a globe whenever the game would normally check to see if they should drop one (like when they die, or an elite/boss looses so much health). So there really isn't any synergy between it and pound of flesh, since all pound of flesh does is increase the chance of their natural globe drop at those same times. So yeah, you definitely got space for an extra passive of your choice, after the obvious choices of ruthless and weapon master with an axe.

I'm really enjoying this, lol. It's kinda nice to not have to worry about buying LoH equipment, since you can forgo that to get some better offensive stats on your equipment. It IS a bit riskier though since it is relying on chance. But that's just how I roll.

[bud]

Hey thanks a lot for this great topic. I had been tinkering to create a build based around health globes, too. thanks for the information.

but if you are going to use WW and sprint/tornadoes, you can as well pick the rage rune for battle rage, and then run infinite wotb. i have been running that build for a while and now i am looking for a different build, one which might play nicer in parties. because the ww/tornado build required monsters to be clumped but in a full party monsters tend to wander off and once you lose that critical mass of monster you become useless.

so, i guess i'll be looking to create a plowshares build around a single target ability.

[DarlosND]

Hey thanks a lot for this great topic. I had been tinkering to create a build based around health globes, too. thanks for the information.

but if you are going to use WW and sprint/tornadoes, you can as well pick the rage rune for battle rage, and then run infinite wotb. i have been running that build for a while and now i am looking for a different build, one which might play nicer in parties. because the ww/tornado build required monsters to be clumped but in a full party monsters tend to wander off and once you lose that critical mass of monster you become useless.

so, i guess i'll be looking to create a plowshares build around a single target ability.

I actually don't rely on enemies being clumped together because I don't actually use WW as much as you'd think. I mostly just hit people with Frenzy while occasionally sprinting around the battlefield, leaving tornadoes next to various enemies for the sake of getting a lot of crits. WW I save for special circumstances, like when I need to pass through enemies, or my health is low and I REALLY need those extra crits for more globes, or yes when enemies are clumped together and it seems worth it. Though even in that last case I usually just pop sprint and then whirlwind straight through the group once, stopping at the other side. That's usually enough to mostly kill them. I try not to use WW constantly because I like to save some Fury so I can pop WotB when some elites show up, and also because I need to stop within 5 seconds to refresh Frenzy. So WW is a lot more of a "utility" ability for me.