if you have to swap necro for healing for some of them, why not just run with healing instead of necro all the time?
Well, for one, my template is reasonably unique - I've never seen anyone here talking about my mix. You see the sampires, you see the bush paladins and true paladins, but I'm the only one that I've see running a Vampire Paladin.
I have a well thought out reason for it too. Variance. I don't like it.
What do I mean there...
OK, lets compare the pure paladin vs my temp as you're suggesting. I'll call the pure paladin 6x120 in WS, Anat, Tact, Chiv, Parry, Heal.
Assumptions: similar suits(HLD on head slot), assume either simple slayer, or super + EoO. My AI damage is 153 - 201, so we will assume that too for an average hit of 172. Lets also assume that we hit every time (I've gotten 33 in a row against a UEV once), because both builds have the same WS anyway so neither mitigates THAT problem. This also means that the mob has about a 33% chance to hit us.
A major difference between the two builds is the weapons.
A pure paladin: 100HLL, 81HML, 50HSL, SuperSlayer, DI. (it is possible to not have DI on the weapon, but I've never seen anyone post a suit that relies on no DI on weapon)
My weapon: 100HML, 50HSL, SuperSlayer, HLA, DI
Lets look at 21.25 second long windows of battle. Why 21.25s? Well, that's the least common multiple between 4.25 and 1.25 so that we get an even number of swings and an even number of heals. Why 4.25 and not 4? Because you need that extra tick to let the aids take effect...
This window gives us 5 bandaids and 17 swings. We will assume that we're lucky (I am not...) and that we land HLD on the first hit, and it stays in place the whole time which means we're reasonably likely to actually hit every time.
My average healing will be:
# hits * .2 * avg damagee done = 17 * .2 * 172 = 585
The Pure Paladin:
# hits * .15 * damage done + # bandaids * avg per heal = 17 * .15 * 172 + 4 * 56 = 439 + 224 = 663.
Wow... that's a big difference. Pure Paladin is for sure better, right?
Well... not so fast. We're also likely to get hit during this time, and hit hard - otherwise this whole discussion is moot.
The simplest calculation is a pure melee fight. This means that we're getting hit ~6 times in this 21 seconds. For the sake of argument we will assume it happens evenly distributed. Lets also assume that what we are fighting hits for 30 damage on average past our armor. Plenty of the melee masters are like this (yes I know no slayer there but I can't think of what else hits hard and often and has a slayer, Stygian Dragon maybe?).
My healing is unchanged taking into account getting hit, the pure paladin is not, since each hit will drop their bandaids effectiveness by 35%.
New equation: 17 * .15 * 172 + 4 * 56 * .65 = 439 + 146 = 585.
Now here is where I have to say that I am pretty amazed that the numbers ended up exactly the same. I didn't plan that, and when I saw the answer from the calculator, I rolled my eyes. I will, however, say that being a developer myself, this is the kind of thing that I would think about when designing the system, so ... kudos to the devs, I guess.
Now that we have established that the "reasonably expected healing rate" of both templates is the same, we can talk a bit more about the variance aspect.
Vamp form ALWAYS heals 20% of damage done. 100% HLL heals between 0 and 30% to get you to the 15% average, healing will heal between 43 and 70.
At this point, I assume I've already lost some people, and if I go any deeper I will lose most of the rest.
Lets just say that I think the likelihood that randomness in the amount healed by the paladin is less than that of the Vamp and that it leads to a death robe is greater than that it works the other way. Especially when we factor in that I run resist and the pure paladin doesn't.
This also doesn't take into account the situation where we do not have a slayer and we need to rely much more heavily on that HML to keep us in AIs.
