by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

Death’s Bargain…one of the coolest useless items in Diablo 3.

You only need to take a look at it’s unique legendary ability to understand how cool the concept is, and how the same item would lack any kind of practical application.

“Gain an aura of death that deals 750–1000% of your Life per Second  as Physical damage to enemies within 16 yards. You no longer regenerate Life.”

Why is it a cool design concept?

Death’s Bargain takes your Life per Second (LPS), and turns it into a completely different stat. It gives you something unique which has the potential to open the possibility for very different builds.

The mechanics on Death Bargain’s are interesting enough to make the item at the very least the core of some niche builds, but why isn’t the item seeing play?

Well, it’s all about the numbers. Death’s Bargain is just one item, so it can’t be THAT strong. And you might need it to be THAT strong to warrant losing your Life Regen.

Why is it useless?

Ok, this item basically takes your Life per Second, multiplies it by 7.5-10, and deals that to everything around you. So now we gotta ask, how much damage could we actually get out of these?

If you were to get max rolls on LPS on every gear piece, you would get about 70k LPS. This would turn into a 700k DPS aura. Now, we can’t expect these pants to be able to solo Torment 6. After all, it’s just a legendary item, right?  700k DPS isn’t that much, but it should be a welcome addition to any melee class. Even if you add paragon points or skills, you will be hard pressed to hit a million DPS.

The problem with Death’s Bargain is this: “You no longer regenerate Life”

If we consider that, you can’t just treat the aura as a nice added bonus. The aura becomes an investment, and it’s a pretty crappy one at this.

The biggest issue here is that your life is just way more valuable than the monster’s, a player will usually have HP values under a million, while monsters can have Billions and Billions of HP.

Monsters don’t usually have damage reduction or any kind of mitigation, so their toughness is equal to their HP. But since we as players have a lot of mitigation and our toughness is way higher than our HP. Life Regeneration is way more valuable than you would initially think.

Your HP is worth way more than 10 times a monster HP, so Death’s Bargain is useless from the get go.

How to make Death’s Bargain useful?

But all hope isn’t lost yet, with a small tweak or two we could actually turn this pants into the key of a very viable build. But what is it that we would have to change?

Let us analyze our options:

Remove “You no longer regenerate Life” from it

Being able to keep your Life Regen would make our death aura just a small bonus. The problem with this approach would be that we lose the fantasy behind the Death’s Bargain name, and the item loses all potential to be build changing. Basically you give up everything that made this item cool on the first place, NEXT!

Increase its damage output

Here’s where the unfortunate design part of the post comes into play. You could increase the damage number on Death Bargain until it becomes at least a viable build, but how powerful would it end up being for a single item?

We have to remember that Death’s Bargain is just a pair of pants, it isn’t a full item set like Marauder or Jade Harvester. The amount of power that we can give it should by all means be limited by that.

Death’s bargain should definitely see its damage buffed, but it can’t be the only thing we do to it.

Provide Synergy with other stats

Death Bargain’s gives us an aura that damages enemy every second, it’s damage is the same regardless of your attack speed, your critical hit, your resource cost reduction, or your cooldown cost reduction. The only way to increase your Aura’s damage output would (or at least should, not 100% sure how the item works on the live servers) be Area Damage and Physical Damage

But imagine the item read something like this: “Every time you strike an enemy a wave of death emerges from you, this wave deals  4000–5000% of your Life per Second as Physical damage to enemies within 16 yards. You no Longer Regenerate Life.

So now you would get to add about 3 Million damage every time you attack, which means that if you get a very high attack speed you could be doing about 6+ Million DPS just with the pants.

But what if we take it one step further?

“Every time you spend primary resource a wave of death emerges from you, this wave deals  8000–10000% of your Life per Second as Physical damage to enemies within 16 yards. You no Longer Regenerate Life.

Now you will really be hitting hard, but only when you spend resource. You can stack attack speed to increase it, but you still need to worry about your resources. Theoretically, you could finally get rid of crit and try a build of Life Regen, Attack Speed, Resource Cost Reduction, and your Main Stat. Add in Physical Damage % when possible and you would be set.

Maybe you won’t be able to solo T6 as fast as some of the OP builds out there and you wouldn’t be likely to dominate the leaderboards, but Death’s Bargain would certainly look interesting enough to actually have players trying to take the item to its limit.

Provide Synergy with other items and skills

What if we let Bul’kathos Wedding Band and Consecration give us LPS instead of directly healing us? Having extra sources of Life per Second would make Death’s Bargain more powerful and would make dedicating your build to the item much more appealing. Rogar’s Huge Stone is also an item that has great synergy with Death’s Bargain as it’d be able to double your damage output. Though, that particular item might work better if it was worded like this:

“When your HP drops below X%, your life per second is increased by Y% for Z seconds. This effect can’t occur more than once every W seconds.”

But that isnt enough support to make Death’s Bargain viable, what if we help by making items like these:

Dracul’s Grasp – Legendary Gloves

• Primary
  • Increases Attack Speed 6%-7%
  • Adds 4000-6143 Life Per Second
• Secondary:
  • Gain 85%-115% of your Life Per Second as Life per Hit. You no longer regenerate life.

Nosferatu’s Coil -Legendary Belt

• Primary:
  • Increases Attack Speed 6%-7%
  • Adds 5000-7370 Life per Hit
• Secondary:
  • Everytime you hit an enemy, deal 750%-1000% of your Life per hit as Physical damage.

Skin of the Flayed One – Legendary Chest

• Primary:
  • Adds 4000-6143 Life per second
• Secondary:
  • Whenever you kill an enemy, gain 10% of your life per second for 15 seconds. This bonus stacks up to 10 times.

Vampire Gaze – Legendary Helm

• Primary:
  • 15%-20% Physical Damage
• Secondary:
  • Every time you kill an enemy, gain 18%-20% of your Life per Kill as Life per Second for 5 seconds.

With a supporting cast like that, you allow players to build around this Life Per Second concept and grant them more power for it. While we established that a single item shouldn’t have such a powerful effect, combining various items would justify a level of power high enough to compete with more traditional builds. Small tweaks on some healing skills to provide Life per Second instead would also highly benefit this concept.

Death Bargain’s might be one of Diablo’s coolest useless items, but it doesn’t have to be useless. I’ll keep hoping for buffs or synergies, because I’d love to be able to build around this item.