Disclaimer: This is not my thread. All credit goes to @Scottes
Many threads discuss the usefulness of Riotous Remedy. I figured that I’d give it a quick test.
Setup
My Mordecai is outfitted for 4/5 in Riotous Remedy, which means:
“You can be healed for up to 12% of your maximum Health over 7 seconds”
I had no shield, and a Ranger COM so no healing from that unless I tossed out the devil chicken for some serious healing.
I made a test map so that I can control the situation a bit. For the initial test, I set it to spawn Bandits at level 50, give or take. After one died, it would delay for 10 seconds - allowing RR to do its job - and then spawn another. The spawning used the Mixed Bandits group, which means that the enemies would be the generic random bandits that one runs into - midgets, psychos, lunatics, executioners - whatever.
I recorded the action using Fraps, and played the videos back frame-by-frame using VirtualDub, recording what happened.
Initial Test
I let them hurt me a bit so that I’d have something to heal, and then started killing them.
This list will show each enemy, my health just before I killed them, the health after RR healed me, and the total health healed.
Note that they often shot me before I killed them, so one “end” health does not always equal the following “start” health amount. I sometimes threw out the bird, with 5/5 in Out For Blood, to get fully healed.
Level 49 Outlaw — 730-800 — healed 70
Level 50 Desperado — 545-586 — healed 41
Level 50 Killer — 535-599 — healed 64
Level 50 Killer — 709-750 — healed 41
Level 49 Outlaw — 750-839 — healed 89
Level 51 Bruiser — 839-891 — healed 52
Level 49 Outlaw — 440-503 — healed 63
Level 50 Desperado — 503-590 — healed 87
Level 49 Outlaw — 590-662 — healed 72
Level 50 Psycho — 662-764 — healed 102
Level 51 BadAss Psycho — 764-818 — healed 54
Level 49 Outlaw — 818-848 — healed 30
Level 50 Desperado — 631-692 — healed 61
Level 49 Outlaw — 692-756 — healed 64
Level 49 Outlaw — 756-794 — healed 38
Level 50 Desperado — 794-850 — healed 56
Initial Test Summary
Pretty random distribution, ranging between 30 and 102 points healed. This range is between 3% to 10% of my maximum health. Since RR says “up to 12%” then I would expect between 0 and 12%, so this may indicate that the extremes are rare, or perhaps impossible.
Enemies don’t seem to matter - 7 different level 49 Outlaws ranged from 30 to 89 points healed. And 4 level 50 Desperadoes ranged between 41 and 87. The level 50 Psycho yielded 102 points, but the level 51 BadAss Psycho did about half that, 54. Enemies and enemy health obviously don’t matter.
Current health doesn’t seem to matter either.
Total was 984 points healed - which is almost exactly my full health of 1000, out of pure coincidence. That took 16 enemies to heal that much. This was an average of 62 points healed per kill.
I’m convinced that it’s just a random percentage between 0% and 12% of the maximum health of 1,000.
More Tests - Increased Enemy Levels
16 kills is a small sampling, and I wanted to ensure that enemy level didn’t matter, so I edited the map and increased the spawn levels so the bandits were coming out at level 57ish and killed 10 of them. I won’t bore you with another table of numbers, but the results came in a little lower: range was 24 to 76 points healed per kill, with an average of 50 points healed per kill.
Though these kill numbers are small, this showed a lessening of points healed. So I raised the bandit level to maximum, and killed 10 more. The bandits spawned at level 59 to 61. Average health gained was 64.
At one point, thanks to a Level 60 Killer, I was down to 9 points of health. I got back 80 health when I killed him, which would indicate that current health does not affect RR’s healing amount.
The very next enemy was a Level 61 BadAss Bruiser, and he had me bleeding out before I killed him to get a Second Wind. I healed 162 points for the Second Wind, and 97 points healed from Riotous Remedy.
I’m kinda confused by the Second Wind heal amount, but that’s another test for another day. (Edit: This is because he had fired some bullets right before I killed him. His bullets were in the air when I killed him, and I revived 250 health thanks to Second Wind, and then his bullets hit me. I saw this many times when testing Second Wind.)
Tough Guy Shield
Finally, I grabbed a Tough Guy shield with a 30% health boost. Killing 10 more bandits gained an average of 66 points of health gained per kill. This average is almost identical to the last test, so it would seem that Riotous Remedy is based on the character’s maximum health without such bonuses.
Heal Rate
One very interesting thing that I saw was how the health came back - slowly at first, then faster about halfway through. For example, here’s one list showing the health regained for each second that RR was working:
4 - 3 - 4 - 12 - 17 - 16 - 14
This was quite consistent - RR always heals slowly at first, then speeds up about halfway through.
Stacking
Riotous Remedy does not stack. It lasts for 7 seconds after the last kill.
For this test, I set the map so that a once an enemy died, a new enemy would respawn 1 second later. I let the first enemy hit me until I was low on health. I killed him, and as soon as the next two spawned, I killed them as fast as possible.
After the first kill, subsequent kills did not increase the rate of healing. Here is a second-by-second listing of the health received:
13 - 15 - 15 - 11 - 11 - 10 - 10 - 16 - 11 - 9
I got 10.5 seconds of healing for a total of 135 health regained. The healing lasted for 7.033 seconds after the last one was killed.
So if you killed three enemies simultaneously then you will get the same amount of Riotous Remedy as if you had killed only one.
By the way, this Mordecai is set with 3 “on-kill” skills: Riotous Remedy, Relentless, and Killer. The icons for all three appeared and disappeared at the exact same instance. So they all last for 7 seconds each.
Final Summary
My Mord is level 61 with 1,000 health and 4/5 in Riotous Remedy.
36 kills showed an average of 59.4 points of health per kill, or 5.94% of the health regained per kill. This is an important statistic here, since 4/5 in Riotous Remedy says:
“You can be healed for up to 12% of your maximum Health over 7 seconds”
Since random is random in Borderlands, so the fact that I averaged almost exactly half of that 12% is quite confirming of the accuracy of this test. “Up to 12%” would indicate an average of half that, and my sampling matches that expectation within 1%.
The low health regained was 16 points, or 1.6%. The high was 116 points, or 11.6%. Given the phrase “up to 12%” this is pretty darn close to the expected range of 0% to 12%. Proving that would probably require hundreds or possibly thousands of kills - no thanks.
I can say with some confidence that 4/5 in Riotous Remedy will heal, on average, 6% of your maximum health per kill.
Riotous Remedy Potential
Again, this was with 4/5 in Riotous remedy, and 1,000 health. I am fairly certain that the full 5/5 would yield another 25%, giving a average of 75 points of healing per kill.
Assuming you can get a COM with +4 RR, that would bring it to 9/5, which would being an average of 135 points healed per kill, with a max potential of 270 points for a kill (though that maximum seems quite unlikely).