Vampiric items

[Naja]

Here's an idea: what if there were items you could collect that gave great bonuses (+1-2 to all skills, +5-10 resist all, etc.), but drained your life energy over a period of time? Perhaps these items wouldn't drain you completely to death, but maybe as low as one hitpoint, making you extremely vulnerable.

It would accomplish Blizzard's goal of making combat go faster times ten! In order to enjoy the effects of those items, you would have to seek out more combat to hunt those precious health globes to stave off death.

A potential problem of course would be that characters with healing abilities, healing items or life leech skills/items may have an unfair advantage. But this may be countered with other attributes to the item.

All in all, I'm just interested if the idea has any merit to it. Does it?

[PlasmaTorture]

We had that mechanic in Diablo 1 (Constricting Ring) and the ring returned in Diablo 2's gamescript, although was never officially enabled (some hackers have I think).

Makese sense it woudl return in Diablo 3, but it'd be nice to see more than just one ring with it.

[Arbedark]

As has been said, the life drain mod was in D1 and D2 (on items other than constricting ring, Malic RW just to name one other)

So I'm sure along with replenish life, drain life will be in D3, just hopfully making a larger impact than in D2!

[phool]

large scale life drain is quite a hard negative affix to be used for balancing purposes, mostly due to time frame it operates on. I doubt it'll be used to counterbalance and major positive affixes.

[Gamekk]

Originally Posted by PlasmaTorture

We had that mechanic in Diablo 1 (Constricting Ring) and the ring returned in Diablo 2's gamescript, although was never officially enabled (some hackers have I think).

The ring really existed when the x-pac was launched, in 1.07. It was required level 95 so it was a pretty hardcore thing to find and wear... Then it was patched in 1.08 (or 1.09?) so it stopped dropping, but the original ones didn't disappear. The hacker thing came with the "Iths" and "occy rings" vague where hackers could edit pretty much anything they wanted in-game so they could maximize profit, so they recreated the constricting ring from 1.07, and it was then duped and common (in 1.09).

Now back to the topic... I'd really like to see some negative stats back in DIII, that'd make the game so much more interesting. Everyone would try different things, no one would be cookie-cutter build, and sometimes you'll find yourself being 20 times stronger then others until they understand what happened... such a feeling that misses in nowdays games... (*COUGH* WOW)