Is Life Regeneration instead of LoH viable?

[torand]

Pretty much what the title says. I really don't like LoH when I have tried it, and I wanted to try out stacking Life Regen, but before I spend a ton of gold, I wanted to get an impression of whether it would be effective...

[VagrantKing]

I've thought about this myself but I haven't dont any actual testing.

I think it could be effective but personally don't think it will be as good as LOH. LOH scales nicely with different skills and provides a nice instant gain of health.

Life Regen on the other hand, is constant and would require you to 'run away' to heal as opposed to attacking to gain life.

I suppose high regen would work if you spec a tank build.

Based upon this article: http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/com...ick-look-chart
max life regen on items (not counting legendaries) is 4,618 lps (life per second)

With Inspiring Presence passive, you get 1% lps. If you can stack life up to 100k, you can get 10k lps.

So you can lps quite up there.

[zakaluka]

It comes down to what you're using the regen, and the LoH, for.

When does your build seem most fragile?
If the answer is "when I'm tanking/DPSing an elite pack" - LoH and health globe bonus will always serve you best.
If the answer is "when I'm running away - I can't seem to catch up" - now you need to start thinking about LPS.

FYI: LPS and LoH are exclusive on most slots - rings amulets are possibly the only exception. What I'm saying is that there's no reason to limit yourself to just one or the other. Get some of both.

HOWEVER: if you make heavy use of one of the %heals and stack vit heavily, flat life returns don't gain nearly as much. Revenge/funnel/revel/juggernaut/presence - taking any of these skills should encourage you to stack vit heavily. Which in turn will reduce the EHPS value of LoH/LPS/health globe/leech relative to these skills.

Take the type of regen that fills a hole in your strategy. For instance, I'm most vulnerable with my build when I'm rage starved and can't whirlwind, or if things get so out of hand that I have to run. Since I need to plug both those holes, I really want a good mix of all 3 regen stats. Without neglecting LPS since that covers the most dire situation.

[Kinmaul]

I don't have a level 60 barb, but I've been using life regen on my monk who's cleared the entire game. I've gotten up to 1500 lps buffed and I can say at that level it's definately not enough on its own to keep you alive. However I think that it synergizes well with LoH because there are going to be times when you have to kite and if you have decent regen then you are still healing even if you are not hitting anything. It also helps to lessen the drain on your hp when you are dealing with molten/plague/reflect/electical mobs since these affixes deal steady damage to your character in addition to the mobs hitting you.

I wouldn't waste a ton of gold stacking it if you plan on it being your only source of sustain because you'll end up dissapointed (and dead). You still are going to need some other source of regen to be successful.

[DoxieVon]

When does your build seem most fragile?
If the answer is "when I'm tanking/DPSing an elite pack" - LoH and health globe bonus will always serve you best.
If the answer is "when I'm running away - I can't seem to catch up" - now you need to start thinking about LPS.

^This.^


1) LOH scales with attack-speed and number of targets hit. Alot goes into how much healing per second LOH actually provides, and I'm not gonna go into it other that to say with a 2.0 attack speed you can expect the healing per second of LOH to be at least 2x the listed LOH value for as long as your whacking stuff with a single target skill.

2) LOH tends to be much cheaper itemization wise, IE rings can get up to 479 LOH, but only 342 LPS.

These two facts make it easy to see why LOH is preferred for the "When I'm tanking/DPSing an elite pack" situation.

One thing to be aware off is that I believe LPS ticks in intervals, so don't be surprised when you have 1k LPS but see less than 500 ticks.

[supermo]

yes it is - and it's much cheaper and undervalued

lps>loh - you get it when you are feared you get it when you are stunned - and that's the point where you die normally

and ofc - it's like it was with IAS some weeks ago - going for only one stat is useless

get something between 1200 and 200 lps and get some loh (for me 600 is more than enough for akt4 - but tbh gear is pretty good)

to sum it up - for me lps works fine - gonna improve my dmg soon to something beyond 70k and put lifeleech into it instead of loh

[edistotiger]

I love life regen, but I find it better as a supplement rather than a replacement. I have about 1100 regen on my gear, and it definitely does not always provide sufficient healing on it's own (even with Revenge). I've been using two different 1H weapons lately. One is a really big damage mace with no LoH, and the other is my old tanking spear with 930 LoH. There are quite a few instances where i have to switch to the LoH spear to take stuff down.

I think it would take an exceptionally large amount of regen to provide all of your healing, and it's really not that cheap. Not when you are trying to find large amounts of regen on gear that is already high quality. Go take a look at chest armor with high str/vit, 70+ res all, and 400+ life regen. If you even find something that matches that criteria, it will be very, very expensive.

The best thing you can do is be patient and keep searching. Every once in a while someone will essentially ignore the regen mod and price an item based on just the other stats.

[torand]

So, I decided to try it. I dropped all of my LOH hit gear (Only had like 400 anyway), and spent about 3 Million gold on the AH getting myself gear with about the same stats as what I was wearing + 1400 LPS. I went from dying a lot in act 2 to being able to clear from the beginning of the act to the fairy boss without dying once. Before, the big mace slamming dude used to be impossible for me to solo, and now if I get low I just charge away and wait like 10 seconds...

I don't know if it is better or worse, but I like the play-style better personally .

[MagisterMan]

Life regen is very underused imo. If you go for a frenzy build loh is going to be more effective to stack, but if you use a slow two hander loh isn't that great. Also the ias nerf of course effected loh as well.

[saint_of_killers]

I use both, roughly at ~1000 each. It really depends on what Act I'm in, that determines my build, but A2 I go about 1/2 off/def and barely die. In A3, I go pretty much full tank and barely die. But I got about ~880 rst all, 12k~18k dps (depending on spec), 8k armor, etc.

I'm too scared (and poor) to test one w/o the other! >_>