Life on Hit
LoH or Life on Hit (or Life per Hit) is an item affix that returns health to the character each time he/she uses a skill with an animation, and hits at least one valid target. Players can add Life on Hit via primary affixes on many item types, and Life on Hit can also be added with Paragon Points spent in the Utility Tab.
LoH was much weaker than Life Steal in D3v, but with Life Steal removed from the game in Reaper of Souls, LoH became a much more important stat, and most players find it essential to stack a fair amount of it to remain alive during combat.
Patch 2.1 Changes[edit | edit source]
Prior to Patch 2.1 this affix worked more or less as it seemed, with X amount of life returned for each hit on a monster (though the proc chances for each skill affected it). This function made LoH very powerful when hitting multiple enemies at one with AoE skills, and much less useful against a few or a single target.
Life on Hit was revamped in function in the Patch 2.1. Blizzard's official explanation:[1]
The bullet-point basics:
- You gain your Life on Hit amount per cast, so long as you’re doing damage.
- The amount healed per cast does not change based on the number of targets hit.
- You continuously gain a portion of your Life on Hit value while channeling.
- We’re increasing LoH on items by another 100%, and LoH in Paragon by 50% in an upcoming PTR build
- We’re aware that this needs tuning, particularly with large packs of monsters, or those with Reflect Damage.
More long-form explanation:
Currently in the live game, you’ll receive Life On Hit when an ability hits an enemy, and then that mechanic is run through the proc coefficient of the ability itself. As a general rule, this means that many AoE skills give very small amounts of Life On Hit vs. single targets, and you typically get large amounts of Life on Hit against multiple targets.
We want players to be able to heal consistently at the times you need it most: Boss fights and Elite fights. To support this, we’re altering some of the conditions of Life On Hit. Life On Hit will now trigger once per ability activation as long as that ability requires an animation*. This means casting Magic Missile, Frozen Orb, and Blizzard all provide the same Life On Hit per cast. Channeled spells provide an equivalent amount of healing over any given period of time to non-channeled spells.
Not only does this allow you to gain more Life when you’re attacking a low number of targets with AoE skills, it provides more consistent healing between various skills, and it also separates Life On Hit from the proc system. This last benefit is important as it means we can be more generous with allowing Legendary items to proc various effects.
All of that said, there is still some tuning to do now that we’ve adjusted how Life on Hit works. We’ll be keeping an eye a close eye on it, and continue to make the necessary adjustments to get it in line with where we want.
- Attacks that deal damage, but don’t animate (like Overpower, or Frost Nova) do not trigger Life on Hit. The intention is to prevent double LoH procs per animation cycle since these skills can be cast while attacking, or channeling.
Life on Hit vs. Life Steal[edit | edit source]
Life Steal was a much more powerful affix in D3v. After Loot 2.0 Life Steal was removed from the affix pool, and legacy items with LS are non-functional on a level 70 character.
Back in D3v, Life Steal turned a percentage of the total damage done into life, which made it scale up very well with higher DPS. Life on Hit did not sale, doing a same flat X total of damage.
Furthermore, Life Steal proced on some effects that Life on Hit did not. For instance, the Monk's Sweeping Wind skill effect procs with Life Steal but does not with Life on Hit, making Life Steal a far more valuable modifier for characters using that skill.
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