Life per Spirit Spent

Lpss or Life per Spirit Spent is a item affix that does exactly what the name says; provides X amount of Life (hit points) for every point of Spirit spent. Since only the Monk has Spirit as a resource, this modifier is only of use to that class.

LpSS is not a common modifier and is found exclusively on Monk-specific items; Fist and Daibo weapons and Spirit Stone helms. The affix is not very popular and as of v1.08 it is considered a novelty at best, with a maximum value of 30-64 life per spirit spent. Many fans have requested a considerably upgrade to this affix, with much more healing per point of spirit, in order to make this affix viable when compared to the much more powerful Life on Hit or Life Steal properties.

Developer Comments

Wyatt Cheng spoke about potential improvements to this modifier in July 2013. [1]

I think buffing the numbers on things like LpSS and Life Regen is reasonable. I lean more towards LpSS.

Passive Life regen is good for allowing you to withstand some amount of damage over time, but when things go wrong and I’m close to death then my response is to back off and run in circles or run away until my regen has time to kick in. If I become overly reliant on this, then I may find myself running away a lot. This is not universally a bad thing, but it’s bad if it happens too much or it becomes the dominant way in which I play my Monk or Barbarian. (Ranged classes don’t suffer from this as much because they have tools to continue doing damage while minimizing how much damage they take)

If we were to buff LpSS instead, then when I’m low on life I still want to play carefully and conservatively but I still want to engage monsters, generate spirit, and then spend it to heal myself. I think LpSS has the potential to be a great stat, but the current tuning numbers are too low to be competitive in today’s environment. I think Life for Fury Spent could be tuned to be attractive as well. If I were low on Life (and healing were harder to come by then it is now), it would encourage me to do things that generated Fury and then spend that fury to heal myself.

There is no ETA on any changes to LpSS, but the affix is expected to see some tweaks in the Diablo 3 Expansion.