Which one would you prefer to have in D4? Hectic replenish of lifesteal% with slow life regeneration per second, or the life per hit, usually paired with rapid life regeneration? Diablo 2 is the epitome of the first iteration, while D3 uses the latter forcing you to commit to combat.
Arenāt you mixing things up a bit? The %lifesteal, is a % life stolen per hit. Which converts into a flat amount of life per hit, based on a % of your weapon damage. Replenish life is a different affix, that has a flat amount filling back your life per second.
So basicly thereās no difference between %life stolen per hit in D2 and life on hit in D3. But one gives you a % based, which converts into a flat value, and the other is a flat value right off the bat.
And replenish life has nothing to do with %lifesteal. Itās life per second in D3. Only difference is, in D3 you get a bigger value, because your Health is also bigger.
And what is this suposed to mean? % life stolen per hit only works if you hit with your weapon. So mainly melee and physical ranged characters use it. And yes in order to gain xp and items, they have to commit to combat and not die, while getting swarmed.
PS.: Iām not fanboying over D2, but i feel thereās an unnecesary smearing 
allover a mechanic that is the same in result, as in D3 but by spreading misinformation it looks like one is better than the other mixing in a mechanic that is totaly different. I donāt care which gets into D4 because itās the same in result.
Practically yes. Mechanically, not so. For sure you can have +20 LpH from an attack or buff, and have 20 life replenish by dealing 100 damage with 20% lifesteal.
I mean it still affects the pace of combat though. So I thought itād be nice to ask. Itās actually a thinly veiled question to ask how much effective health theyād like to characterize as in-game at Diablo 4.
I just gave examples of the best, familiar to the fanbase out there. Both games use life sustain to keep you in combat; however the weight of passive replenish is greater in D3 compared to D2, while active replenish in D2 is somewhat greater when you hit the ratio.
In D2, you greatly replenish your health with very high lifesteal, you recover a quarter of your health with stacked Lifetap and lifesteal; thatās keeping you alive as you commit to combat. Compared to that, in D3 a single Life per Hit value isnāt even 3% of your health, you really have to stack it forward to recover and lose so many other benefits.
Your effective health, absolute health and damage output values in D3 were leagues greater than what offered in D2, hence Lifesteal% was made defunct after RoS expansion rolled in. It was breaking the game with only 5-7% lifesteal per hit ratios.
None please. I want to have to protect my hit points with defensive skills and strategically use limited potions to refill at the right moment. Any kind of auto-heal while hitting enemies (which is the main activity of combat) is crippling that gameplay.
Though Iād settle for the ā5% chance on hit to heal Xā they currently have in D4, for having it random is making the player adapt to the situation instead of mindless hitting.
Or some kind of D3 āheal when consuming resourceā as long as you canāt have unlimited energy of course.
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Iād prefer neither honestly, and this comes from someone who relished in using lifesteal weapons back in D3 vanilla. Just having that sort of nigh-immortalility makes having one-shots an almost requirement in hindering a player.
Same.
D3 has both, noobsausage.
D3 has % based life steal on hit affix? Where?
The question is actually when, not where. Back in vanilla, we had weaponry with lifesteal on them (Skorn for Barbs was a favourite for this) but it was changed with the release of ROS so that the benefit of it rapidly diminished after your hero was higher than level 60 and to be pretty much useless at 70. Only legacy items will have this affix on these days.
I like both options for different reasons. Lifesteal makes more sense for some effects and possible skills/creatures whereas a slower life per hit/second fits a more regenerative path. Either can be ridiculous if too high or not fast enough. Getting 1 HP every 20 minutes, for example, would be too slow but 200% lifesteal would be way too much.
i actually chuckled at that one
edit.
If I had to choose between % life steal and life per hit, I choose % life steal. All I have to focus on is increasing my damage. Usually 10% is good enough, but 15% or 20% is perfect.
Okay but we are talking about now. Not vanilla days.
There actually is a very important difference, and itās largely why %life stolen was eliminated in D3.
The aforementioned difference between % life steal and life on hit is actually highly relevant to modern D3 damage scaling.
Itās simple: % life scales with damage dealt. This makes it massively more powerful on strong builds/strong characters.
I think life steal was eliminated in D3 with the transition to RoS because at some point the devs realized that if they wanted to keep scaling damage in D3 (to keep dangling that carrot each new patch/season with stronger builds/bigger numbers, which I firmly believe was a deliberate long-term game design strategy for D3), then % life steal was not going to be a viable mechanic. Because % life steal would just get way too strong if they kept buffing damage numbers over time. They would have had to constantly rebalance it, and it would be way out of whack for certain builds/classes. It would mean the strongest builds would also have the strongest regen.
Worth noting % life steal would also have scaled very strongly with paragon. All the big paragon blasters would have a massive amount more healing compared to the minnows. Itād be a pretty broken mechanic, high paragon players already have a massive toughness advantage. They donāt need a massive healing advantage too.
% life steal would be a fundamentally flawed mechanic in modern D3.
% life steal will really only work in a game that has something approaching a realistic power balance between classes/builds/players. I wouldnāt say D2 necessarily has that, but itās much closer to balanced and has had long term stability in damage numbers, they havenāt wildly ramped damage over patch cycles. D3 does not have anything close to the proper balance and long term damage stability over repeated patch cycles that would be needed for % life steal to work. Iām not sure if D4 will have that or not. If damage stays relatively constant over time in D4, and classes/builds are reasonably well balanced, then sure, % life steal could work. If not, flat life on hit type mechanics are probably better suited.
Actually Life Steal was already broken in D3 prior 2.0. But youāre right, with the unsane scaling of damage from just leveling 60 to 70, that would have become ridiculous, not mentioning what they did later with setsā¦
Also, like you said, LS is mechanically deeply different from life per hit, which scales only with Attack speed while LS is based on actual damage, including AoEā¦ just imagine what that would mean now in RoS. ^^
As of right now D4 doesnāt seem to have LS. But if they ever add it, they would be wise to base the mechanics on the DPS stat only, ignoring skills, damage modifiers and AoE effects. But that would still not be an interesting system anyway.
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Reason on why Life Steal % was removed/reworked in D3 RoS
https://blizzpro.com/2013/09/26/41675/
According to Wyatt, this model just doesnāt lead to a very balanced experience and creates issues where upping the damage by even just a little bit will result in the repeated death of your character. This leads to balancing concerns since how do you balance incoming damage against players designed to barely survive the onslaught of attack and life through life steal vs someone who attempts to survive by dodging attacks more tactically? It becomes very difficult to balance since to challenge the tanking player you need to up the damage enough to threaten them, but at the same time you make it so that the tactical player could easily be one shotted and leaving them no room for error.
Within Wyattās response he purposely didnāt add any possible solutions to this balance problem and left it open for community discussion, but there are some clues as to what the devs have planned for this situation. In the datamined files from the internal Reaper of Souls build there is one big change to class skills that are is obviously tied to this issue, the complete and total removal of the life steal stat.
Life steal was staple of Diablo II as one of the few ways of recovering health outside of quaffing potions. In D3 we were given a few options on this with the introduction of stats like life per spirit spent, life on hit, etc but life steal ended up being the preferred stat with how well it scaled with our gear. It seems the devs have decided that life steal breaks the choice of gearing for offense vs defense since it allows players to survive through damage and not through armor/resists. Life steal just furthered the āneed more damageā mentality by letting players get away with lower defensive stats. This isnāt just a āletās nerf player powerā move, it will allow the devs considerable more control of how combat will play out.
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Copy PoE 
Where with no additional investments leech/lifesteal will basically give you a hot which slowly heal up your life. But you can invest gear/talent points into it to the point it can heal you up quickly and even have over leech and not removed at full health so it can continuously heal you even when not attacking for a while.