Diablo – What conditions can be broken

Although I didn't find anything to support this, logic and compare with other skills tells me it's total life. If it was about current life, it would have said 15% of your current Life.

Also, if it was about 15% of current life, it wouldn't have been very ok in terms of gameplay. Think about it, after you drop below 50% health, every time you get a hit of 15%(that's 7.5% if I'm not mistaken) you reset your cooldown. That's almost like reset cooldown on every slightly above average hit. When you go below 25 of health most probably every hit will reset your cooldown if we follow the same principle(it's ok to presume that most hits(even mob hits) will take about 3% of your life if you are in an area corresponding to your level).

So as I stated above, documentation didn't provide full info, but taking logic and previous Blizzard skills even from different games in consideration, we can asume it talks of 15% of your maximum life.

Unlike in Diablo II, on-hit elemental damage is simply that - bonus damage, with the sole exception of cold damage (which has a small snare). Frost damage does a little less damage comparatively because of this.

While there was originally a more complex critical hit system (as documented below), that functionality did not make it to the final game.

Critical hits just add damage.

Historical Answer:

More interestingly, in the Diablo III Beta, each type of damage has a different effect on a critical.

• Physical: Double Damage

• Arcane: Silences targets for 4 seconds (prevents abilities)

• Cold: Freezes targets for 2 seconds (Duration can be affected by talents, etc.)

• Fire: Sets them on fire, fire DoT (tick rate scales off weapon speed)

• Lightning: Stuns targets for 2 seconds (Duration can be affected by talents, etc.)

Poison and Holy presumably have effects on a critical hit also, but I haven't been able to find info on them.