The only thing Plague Bearer does is give you skills to rabies. All the other crap including the damage from the weapon is useless. And as everyone agrees, the issue with Rabies is that damage doesn’t increase enough with the time. So even that item isn’t very good.
Death’s Web is the actual way you’re amping up damage. And it’s simply just the -ER.
My point being, adding -ER synergy to Rabies without needing items is a way to really boost the damage without reducing the timer.
oh ofcourse that goes without saying. I just disagree that it would even make a difference with helping rabies get off the ground.
Cool. Glad we got there.
I think it’s a step in the right direction, you think it’s still not enough.
But Hopefully that’s for a play tester to figure out.
It’s ultimately the way the skill is designed right? it’s for ticking damage over time. And the skill is actually very good when you have good gear. Rabies when its online kills things quite quickly.
The real problem is getting to that point requires multiple gg items. The d.web. the p.bearer. bramble and then tranq gloves.
If you do little buffs, then it doesn’t really change the fact that you can’t effectively use rabies until you get big ticket items and by then rabies is doing well. Thats ultimately the problem with rabies. It’s a rich-get-richer, poor-stay-poor kind of situation.
And if you want to fix that, you have to fix the rabies damage significantly earlier on. You can either do that with stats/gear or with skill damage(duration).
If we do it with stats, it has to be a lot or rabies remains bad until those big ticket items. but also if it is a lot, then the GG version of rabies would end up being overpowered. A catch 22.
So the alternative is buffing the rabies overall damage. We know max skill+synergy rabies isn’t enough to turn the build online, even with tranq gloves + plague bearer. So straight buffing the damage could work out, but would have to be a lot. But then again GG gear version gets out of control. Throwing 50% enemy poison resistance or like +5-10 rabies skills worth of damage would probably do the job. But the impact at end-game rabies would probably end up making rabies a #1 build outside of bossing. Which I don’t think is the goal here, but druid in general needs buffs across most of it’s builds so maybe it’s fine? I wouldn’t think so at first thought though.
You could buff Poison Creeper’s damage since it doesn’t interrupt rabies (which I honestly think is needed in general) The only problem with poison creeper is it lacks on-demand damage.
Or you could alter the duration of rabies. Which ends up lowering the AFK-ness of the build since even hybrid damage is stopping rabies damage on everything you hit. Whether thats hitting things with fury, or weapon procs.
The other alternative is you could just add some new poison buffing gear to the game. But to what degree/effect, would be hard to say.
Poison builds are really fun. It just sucks how much more gear dependent they are than most of the other builds in the game. Ultimately it would just be nice if they fixed poison damage getting interrupted by other damage types. Then true hybrid poison builds would actually feel like they do appropriate damage in hell.
I agree with most of your sentiment.
Rabies decimates when it’s really good.
In other times I’ve talked about Rabies, this is how I described it too.
So I was trying to think of a way that would help this build get off the ground faster without needing items, hence add the -ER synergy somewhere. I’ve mentioned the synergy in Poison Creeper, someone else said it would maybe better in Hunger.
But that fact that it helps the build even more when you get the gear is kind of whatever. If you have all that expensive gear, it should be leveling places.
The only hesitation I have to basically adding buffs to Poison Creeper, is that it’s still the best skill to have on a Normal playthrough. Druid doesn’t have a lot going for him, but Poison Creeper is nutty in Normal. It does fall off a cliff in NM, so finding a medium of buffing would be nice.
And the other reason why I’m not fond of reducing the timer simply for more damage is that Rabies is easily a hybrid build. If you want to do the AFK thing, that is a way to play it, sure. But an aspect that makes it interesting is that you can swap to other builds while the timer is ticking.
Ultimately if they did this, I think it would be the best thing to do before all this other nonsense we talked about.
But I’m not sure how hard that is to fix or why the devs would choose not to.
Yeah its hard to say. I mean to some degree it can be done right? they did it with poison creeper. I don’t know enough about why that exception exists though
Without knowing how it’s coded, yeah, there’s not much to say. Maybe it’s that the game has a hard time calculating 2 damage types at the same time. But like you pointed, they treat Poison Creeper basically like a different damage type somehow–maybe they can do that because they are the same damage type and the calculation with resistances can still be made?
There also might be other rippling effects. When they do big changes like that (Next Hit Delay for example) they change it for the player and for the monsters. So the game will get harder too. Which the game being harder is another type of fun I’d welcome.