How Poison Damage Has Always Been Bugged

Truth be told, there are several issues with poison, but this will talk about the largest one.

How Regeneration Works

Monsters and players alike have the ability to regenerate their health over time. We’ll focus on the monster side. Once a monster takes damage for the first time, it can begin regenerating its health, unless it has been specifically coded to have 0 regeneration (meaning it simply does not gain life over time). Regeneration happens on every game tick (frame) using bit health values.

Whenever a monster takes damage, its health regeneration is ignored for that frame. This is how bitrate skills like poison damage and pyre skills like Fire Wall are able to prevent monster regeneration. Since bitrate skills apply damage on every frame, they prevent regeneration on every frame too. Open Wounds does something similar, but it is coded differently. More on that below. This is how strategies employing Fire Wall or reviving Arach monsters for their poison to disable Uber Boss health regeneration works. For as long as the monster is taking the damage, they will not regenerate. The moment they stop taking that damage, they begin to regenerate again.

The Problem With Poison

Why do we care about regeneration? Well, that’s because poison damage is coded as negative regeneration. This means that while a monster is poisoned, if they take damage from any other source, the poison damage is also ignored for that frame. This is the issue.

In most cases, it’s difficult to notice this effect. But imagine you’re a Plague Javelin Amazon, Rabies Druid, or Poison Nova Necromancer and you’re playing with your friend who is a Meteor and Fire Wall Sorceress. For every monster that your friend is damaging, your poison damage is entirely ignored.

How Open Wounds Works

But Warren, Open Wounds exists! Does it run into the same issue as poison damage? Does Open Wounds also cause poison damage to be ignored? The answer to both is no. Open Wounds is coded as an entirely separate function. It neither prevents poison from dealing damage nor can it be ignored in the same way poison can. But it does still prevent health regeneration! Strange.

The Solution

Re-implement poison damage similarly to Open Wounds. Of course, you can’t just slap poison damage onto the Open Wounds function and call it a day. Open Wounds has other special interactions that should not apply to poison damage (such as reduced damage against specific monsters and dealing less damage in some scenarios when applied by ranged attacks). Open Wounds is also pure damage. There is no way for you to stop it or lower its damage output. There is no resistance for it. So, naturally, poison damage cannot simply hop onto the Open Wounds function. But if poison damage was re-implemented not using negative regeneration and functioned similarly to Open Wounds but did poison damage, factored in poison resistance, poison length reduction, etc, then it would no longer have this bug.

Notable Instances of the Bug

A Necromancer having an army and using any poison skill. If the army are all hitting one monster (happens most against bosses), the Necromancer’s poison damage will be ignored on more frames than not, heavily reducing damage output. This means a Poison Necro cannot have an army without penalizing poison damage heavily.

Large group play or being partied with someone else who does bitrate damage. So you’re a Poison Necromancer and you’ve realized you must forsake your fantasy of having an army to be able to deal poison damage. Now you must also forsake playing with another Necromancer who has an army as well or face the same issue. Additionally, you must avoid playing with bitrate skill users. Your friend running a Fire Wall Sorceress will render your entire damage output worthless.

So you’re a Rabies Druid, wanting to step away from the meta. Your friend sees the cool, new Fire Trap Assassin after its massive buffs and wants to play it. Unfortunately, Wake of Fire when all 5 traps are up and attacking is also a bitrate skill, and massively area-of-effect, so your cool Rabies infections simply get to sit on the sidelines and watch as the fire kills the monsters since you cannot deal any damage.

The list goes on. Even something like a Martial Arts Assassin with many projectiles can apply damage very often, causing poison damage to be cancelled more often than not.

Another Noteworthy Poison Issue

This one may not technically be a bug, but it is extremely detrimental. Venom, from the Assassin, overrides item poison length and sets it to 10 frames. Poison does x damage every frame for y frames. So if you have a charm that does 100 poison damage over 10 seconds, you effectively do 0.4 damage every frame for 250 frames. However, Venom sets this to 10 frames. Now you do 0.4 damage every frame for 10 frames. Meaning after 0.4 seconds have transpired, you will have done 4 poison damage and then the poison damage ends.

This bug only involves item/weapon poison damage, and does not apply to any poison skills at all. Poison Dagger, Poison Javelin, and Plague Javelin actually have beneficial interactions with Venom. But it ruins item poison damage. Do you have a bunch of poison damage charms in your inventory but also use Treachery? Venom will prevent you from doing any poison damage. Are you an Assassin using Venom and not sure if you should have poison damage charms or not? Don’t bother, Venom ruins it. You would either have to pick Venom (which only lasts for 0.4 seconds but does notable damage in that short time period) or poison damage from items (which you can stack a lot of and applies over notable durations), as you cannot have both.

21 Likes

i used psn dmg as a child once. just once, on a bowzon, realized it was trash. never again. didn’t know technically it is the worst element by far. it just felt, way too slow.

poison damage being relatively underpowered compared to other elements is another topic, but yes, this bug makes it even worse

2 Likes

well to me, this post magnifies just how bad psn dmg is because of how it works.

1 Like

Another nice writeup Kabryxis, I had no clue that poison functioned as negative regen. Hopefully this gets addressed so that poison specs are no longer crippled by rapid damage instances and/or in party play.

2 Likes

Looks like I’ll stick with Bone Necro build.

idk… even with this bug i think bone necro is still worse lmao

3 Likes

so basically any other source of dmg causes some kind of “next hit delay” of a single frame for poison dmg

if you want to think of it that way, sure

yah they should put poison in the open wounds category even if they interrupted each other im okay with that because i mean realistically if you have an open wound and are poisoned irl then the poison is draining from your wound too so the poison is kinda stopped a bit.

try reading the thread buddy, they cant be in the same category without huge issues that i outlined in the thread

what kind of bottom barrel programmer are you that you would literally not compensate for the differences?

look, your post was kinda pointless to begin with, as a literal profession programmer i have already solved the problem.

you see poison is just a negative regeneration, and i being the genious that i am modded offline and switched poison to the Replenish Life category and then added a negative to each instance. Now it’s just a negative Replenish Life and works perfectly.

that’s the difference between you an me. I think big, you’re small tomatoes.

yes yes, low effort trolling, very fun

we already solved this issue easy fix. you’re like 6 months behind.

your idea of “hey just make poison it’s own thing” is so smart like none of us have ever suggested that ever in the history of time. well done.

yes yes, low effort trolling, very fun

well for instance right here, you’re literally wrong. Open Wounds can be completely ignored.

i bet if i bothered to read even half your post i would find it littered with mistakes everywhere.

Get some streamer to rant about it for a lengthy time and it may finally get fixed or changed.

1 Like

all of the streamers are fighting over who gets exclusive rights to advertise and market diablo 4 at the moment. no time for d2, maybe a shoutout because blizzard product.

Good read very informative. Thank you for posting this!

I always thought venom should retain the total weapon poison damage dealt, but over the .4 second duration. So it would be 100 dmg over .4 seconds.

It sounds OP but it likely still wouldn’t be.