Why should I care about bleed damage?

Question

In my upper 30s, at a time when my effective DPS was about 600, I found a weapon which gave a chance of causing bleed damage. The numbers seemed... underwhelming. Basically, it was some small chance to cause 1-5 damage for 5 seconds. Now +1-5 base damage might be OK, since it would be multiplied by all the percentage increases. But it doesn't sound like the bleed damage would get that increase, and so it seemed completely worthless.

So why does this affix even exist? Did I just happen to get a really low level of bleed damage compared with my DPS at the time? Does it ever reach a point where it is worthwhile as compared to other affixes that increase your base damage? Am I missing something else that causes this affix to be worthwhile?

Answer 1

Why should you care at the level you are at currently? You really shouldn't, at least you shouldn't go out of your way to care about them. Diablo 3 seems to have affixes that are only really helpful at certain areas/difficulties in the game.

Why should you ever care? Because later on in Hell/Inferno there are monsters that hit incredibly hard and you can bleed-kite them without ever being in too much danger.

As you hit these higher difficulties the items with the Bleed affixes can be quite significant as @Cyril Pangilinan mentioned.

Answer 2

You just happened to get a low-level of bleed damage. I've spotted Legendary gear with Bleed damage ranging from 500-4.5k DPS. A little more DoT wouldn't hurt.