VA: What the heck? (in General)

Recently trained VA on my new NCB and encountered a very odd problem. Check this out:

Traxex draws strength from his weapon! [-20]

It actually hurts me. What's going on? There's no DM involved or anything. Any reason my VA is hurting me?

mine started out like that to till i got it trained more.

It isn't big by any means... but it isn't base, either.

And even if it was base, it still seems stupid to have it cast for a negative effect.

Yeah, at low levels trained it does that. As it gets bigger the life drain goes positive.

It's almost worth saving your xp up before you put VA on a minion.

Well that is stupid and I do not like it.

That happened to me too. The only solution I could find was to untrain it until my MPR was able to support it. I think it was around 50k MPR? Probably less, but that sounds like a reasonable time to train VA.

If the armour penalties drop it below base it will damage you. So make sure you have enough to get above base before you train it, simple. It makes complete sense. a positive effect gives a drain a negative or base effect gives a damage hit.

Flatcap, it's not below base. If VA is far lower than damage dealt, then the effect will be negative. Like 10k VA being cast on a minion dealing 400k damage /shot will cause the minion to "draw strength from his weapon [-x]. The higher you get the VA, the smaller the negative gets until it eventually starts working its way into the positive.

"Flatcap, it's not below base. If VA is far lower than damage dealt, then the effect will be negative."

This is untrue as well, in this particular case. When I had just started my NCB, I trained VA to twice my MPB and it was still damaging me. Just don't use it in the very low MPR ranges (1-50k or so).

I had a 1.4k level VA, and at my level, there's no way I am outdamaging it enough. I can't be entirely sure of the damage I was doing, but I am positive it was less than 2k.

Whatever. I unlearned it anyways. Heh.

i'm pretty sure it says it on the vampiric aura stats itself, when you have it trained at base and a base/low str hit you will lose hp, had the problem myself when i was fiddling around with a new character.

If your VA level is below base, due to penalties, it will damage your minion(s).

I believe I may have found the cause:

My minion with VA was effected by EC, which in turn reduces his ENC limit. EC reduced my limit far enough where I actually started to be encumbered, which in turn reduced my VA (although since EC and VA both cast simultaneously this seems silly to me). It reduced VA below base thanks to a rather large EC (for my level), and bam. I began taking damage.

It still seems mighty stupid, but at least it's within the norm.

Actually, encumbrance doesn't touch enchantments.

I was told once that the levels given by training VA don't count in the calculation. Try subtracting the base level of VA and go from there.