How Does Life Steal Work?

Hi there c:

Life steal increases the amount of health you gain when dealing damage, that includes melee and spell damage, so both work. If you have, for example, a chestplate with 100/2 life steal, it means 100 life steal every two seconds.
The way life steal works: it's a % chance to activate every time you hit a mob, so if you are constantly hitting mobs, that % chance makes it activate around every 2 seconds. But since it is a % change it could also mean it won't activate, therefore those 2 seconds are actually an approximate timeset, not a precise one. That means it could take longer than 2 seconds to activate the life steal, which might be why you are having trouble with it, maybe?
Hope this cleared up your question :D

 

The way people usually go about it is increasing the amount of life steal itself, so for example someone who has 600/2 life steal, even if they are on the brink of death, can be saved if the life steal activates, in comparison to someone who only has 200/2 for example, since 600/2 will help you heal a lot more of your health and can get a person back up and ready to battle again.

Now I am unsure about this, but I believe there are ways to work with it, such as using weapons with higher attack tier (in case of melee damage, to hit mobs a lot faster to increase the amount of times life steal can activate) or using spells that can hit multiple mobs at the same time (like the warrior's war scream, if you do multihits they count as hits and as such can help activate life steal faster), but as I said, not sure if I'm right on this or not, might have to wait for another opinion on that :)