[Item] Vampiric Set

Bleed is an underutilized mechanic that is interesting in that it does not scale off of your damage. However, this means it typically is overlooked in order to maximize damage, because bleeding can't roll as high DPS.

Bleeding also has a couple problems:

1. It is a DoT effect, which means you have to stick around long enough for enemies to die (meaning in situations with X damage over Y seconds, Y needs to be relatively low).
2. It does not roll high damage.
3. If it did roll high damage, it would be overpowered if you could add it on top of your normal damage output.

In an attempt to resolve all of these problems and make a viable "Bleed" build, I've come up with a "Vampire Set" that solves each issue.

In keeping with the recent design goals outlined by Travis Day in the Design a Legendary community event, I have also designed the set around the following tenets:

• Little to no new artwork or development time required
• Build changing
• Changes/relies on a (perhaps underutilized) game mechanic
• Synergizes with builds and other items
• Not a boring non-choice like a straight up damage buff, or a cast on effect (poison nova etc.)
• Has some amount of background flavor
• The affix should be offensively orientated
• The affix should not be too complicated

Here is the set, intended to be able to be played by any class.

There are no weapons in the set, but the bleed damage increase is high enough that you should be able to decide whether you want two 1Hs (stacking fast hits of smaller bleed amounts) or a 2H with high bleed (stacking slower hits of more bleed damage). And I think 6000% hits a sweet spot of enabling you to still have enough damage from bleed + regular DPS if you wanted to go with a 1H bleeder + shield.

And just for a final example, lets throw out some numbers: Skorn has the following affix:

• 95.0–100.0% chance to inflict Bleed for 5825–6628–6825–13256 damage over 5 seconds.

So on the best roll of Skorn, you've got a 100.0% chance to inflict Bleed for 6,628-13,256 damage over 5 seconds, which averages out to about 9,942 extra damage over 5 seconds per hit, or 1,988 extra damage per second from Bleeding. Negligible. 

You can stack more Bleeding each time you hit, so if you assume a base attack rate of Skorn's 1.00 attacks per second, you should be able to have a concurrent 4 stacks of Bleeding up at any time if you just continuously attack. This amounts to, on top of your regular DPS, about 7,952 extra damage per second from Bleeding if you stack Bleed procs. Still negligible.

Now, while this set might forgo some offensive capabilities in straight DPS, it makes up for it in the complete set bonus of +6000% Bleed damage.

Going back to our original best roll of Skorn, the max-roll 6,628-13,256 damage over 5 seconds suddenly becomes 397,680-795,360 damage over 5 seconds, which averages out to 596,520 damage over 5 seconds, or an extra 119,304 damage per second from Bleeding.

Stacking Bleeding in the same way as before (assuming your rate of application allows you to have 4 stacks active at any time), you now have an effective DPS through Bleeding of 477,216. Whether or not the sacrifice in losing 4 pieces of gear's worth of crit chance, crit damage, etc. is worth it is up to you.