[WHOOPS! This article is unedited – give us some time to clean it up! 🧹]
Greeting folks, Let me start off by saying if you haven’t finished “The Kevin Konundrum” do yourself a favor and NEVER complete it. At least until we get an actual test dummy. I had originally taken off Mayhem mode and went to a highly populated area to do some testing, but everything died too fast and I was getting inconsistent results. I couldn’t use Kevin because I had completed it to show my wife, the name Kevin is an inside joke for us, and I had to restart the mission just to do these tests. After Chapter 11 “!!!” you can finally get the Kevin mission again.
Anyway, I wanted to do some testing with the skill Vampyr and Pull the Holy Pin with the Mind Sweeper COM and Short Fuse. Along the way to the Kevin mission I noticed some other things I wanted to test. So lets dive right in.
Healing Grenades.
Currently in the game, some grenades can have random effects that will give health for Shield based on damage dealt. These are Transfusion
and Generator. The former gives Health, the latter gives Shield. The Transfusion effect does work as intended on health, and on shield when using the Bloodletter COM. The Generator only heals from shield damage, which diminishes it’s value. The healing from a Transfusion was significantly more than Vampyr after testing. Details below.
Further discussion on the healing from transfusion grenades is here: Vampyr, Healing Grenades, and Shields – An In-depth Analysis
Transfusion only works on health damage and Generator only works on shield damage. No grenade effect will work on armor damage.
Mind Sweeper
I can confirm with @sammantixbb that Mind Sweeper COM does work with Vampyr both from gun crits as well as Grenade crits. It would be around 20% of missing health for every explosion.
Short Fuse
I can confirm that the secondary explosion does not work with Vampyr. Not much to say here.
Vampyr
So I was able to get 20% of missing health from grenades or Mind Sweeper COM with this skill. However, when I put on a Bloodletter COM I don’t get nearly as much shield as I thought initially. I was expecting to get around 20% of my missing shield. Instead I was typically get around 2% of missing shield with a Transformer, no relic, and one point in Thin Red Line.
Max Health with no boost and no Guardian Rank: 5948
Max Health with Bloodletter COM with 1 point in Thin Red Line: 4758.4
Current shield at moment of testing in one scenario: 91
Possible expected outcomes (before testing) from one grenade explosion:
{If missing health is based on missing base Shield}
( 11659 – 91 = 11568) [Missing shield] ( .2 x 11568 = 2312.6 ) [Expected shield return]
{If missing health is based on actual missing health}
( 5948 – 4758.4 = 1189.6 ) [Missing health] ( .2 x 1189.6 = 237.92) [Expected shield return]
Actual:
Actual tested shield healing after grenade explosions: 329
( 329 – 91 = 238 )
So currently Vampyr’s healing is scaling of off missing health. If I equip a Dealthless Relic I can only get a MAX healing of:
( 5948 – 1 = 5947 ) [missing health] ( .2 x 5947 = 1189.4 ) [Expected shield return per grenade explosion]
Which is nothing compared to the what the shield capacity can be. This needs to be taken into consideration when making a build and is why some people are saying Vampyr isn’t working. The amount being healed per explosion is so small they might no notice it unless they have a grenade with multiple stacking MIRV/Clone/Bounce/etc. effects.
How do I increase my healing from Vampyr?
Currently the only way to increase healing from Vampyr is to use health bonuses. The healing for each explosion is calculated as:
[ ( Max Boosted Health – Current Health ) x ( .04 x Points in Vampyr ) ]
So Guardian Rank, +% Health, and +# Health will all increase the amount of healing received. This also means that negative health effects also decrease the amount of healing received. Turtle bonuses lower max health and thus lower total healing received on a shield.
However, that does not mean Turtle bonus are useless. If you are not using a Bloodletter COM or Dealthless Relic, you will still heal for 20% of your missing health (with 5 points in Vampyr). You can also still use a Bloodletter COM and make use of Transfusion grenades with the larger shield bonues from Turtle.
