Haven’t played Rabies for a long long time and thinking of making a Rabid Dog again.
Does anyone know whether Rabies has had mechanical changes?
Old intel was Poison with highest dps is applied, if this is rabies all functions as no other poison was carried over, if it was the other source it will run its course and should Rabies timer be longer it takes over after the other source has run its course.
Is it still working like this?
Been tweaking it on d2maxroll, but there it seems rabies function more like Poison Dagger and thus Venom’s dps is added to Rabies for the whole duration of Rabies, which would basically make Treachery the best armour for it and the skill actually playable good total damage, but low dps, still seems enough to do things like cows in a decent pace.
However not using Venom in d2maxroll seems to mess up the build due to facets (and other sources of poison with a short duration decrease Rabies duration.
So before starting on another SSF to try something different, does anyone know the current mechanics of Rabies?
Nothing changed. It only got a dmg syenrgy from Poison Creeper.
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That’s a shame.
Means the calc isn’t correct as far as I can see, and cows hell won’t be fast paced.
Ah well maybe I’ll make it anyway, but not immediately and won’t be going after 451 sc then 
Tnx for the reply!
OK I guess you were playing with Venom on Maxroll, so it doesn’t work like I thought.
…
Haven’t played rabies, so I don’t know if this works, but what about Venom?
Can get from Treachery RW, and supposedly its duration (0.4s) overrides other poison lengths and forces all poisons to use its length instead. So maybe that’ll let you stack the charms.
Someone can probably correct this because its rehashed from something I read somewhere else.
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Poison dmg is so complicated, some times i don’t know what to expect. So many things can screw whit your dmg.
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As far as I know, it should still work like this (short version).
Venom active means all other poison damage (that would be applied to attacks, so no Poison Nova for example) is calculated as normal (which is strange enough ) and then instead of applying the full duration it is reduced to 0.4 seconds and added to Venom.
So if total damage would be 100 Venom plus 1000 over 10 sec, it would become 100 Venom plus 40 over 0.4.
There was always one exception which was (and is afaik) Poison Dagger, this skill would overrule Venom, thus it works in reverse and if you apply Poison Dagger with Venom active it would increase the time Venom deals poison damage, but keep the same dps.
Thus say you PD lasts 40 seconds, then Venom of 100 per 0.4, would add 10000 poison damage over 40 seconds (or 250 per second, 40 seconds long).
This is why Treachery is a very good armour for PD builds.
Because the d2max calc did something similar to the Rabies damage I was wondering if Rabies mechanics had been changed to do something similar, but alas it seems this is a faulty calculator effect.
Best explaination i could find.
You can belive in maxroll via how to gear up, but the calc will lie. Rabies is still a good build for cows.
And this
I’ll check it out later when I have more time, but here’s how Poison should work if not changed…get ready for a very hard explanation
htt ps://diablo2.diablowiki.net/Guide:Calculating_Poison_Damage_v1.10,_by_onderduiker
Afaik this was all correct.
If you master poison calculation you will be hired by Nasa, as it makes rocketscience seem like childs play 
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Well to be honest i’m very band at math, and just belive anything people, with better understanding say. But over all Rabies should be a tad bit better than before.
Well just thought I’d start a playthrough of a Rabies druid on the side, but Rabies doesn’t do what is says at all.
Rabies: 480-610 over 6.4 sec so 75-95.3125 per second
Poison Creeper 194-211 over 4 sec so 48.5-52.75 per second.
Crusher (canyon normal) 127 HP (average) 157 max. (no resistance except magic)
So worst case scenario.
Rabies kills Crusher in 2.093 seconds.
Poison Creeper kills Crusher in 3.237 seconds.
However what actually happens is often Rabies takes more than 4 seconds over a Crusher (first on hit and not counting the attack itself which should only help kill it faster), more than twice as long as it should.
Tested multiple times without Poison Creeper out (so it cannot interfere) and no other poison damage on gear.
Poison Creeper kills in seemingly as it should, rarely see it take near 3 seconds, usually a lot faster.
Worst thing is I observed it with other creatures as well, some don’t even die though according to the calculator and the ingame damage stat they could never survive.
And I am talking about the first bitten here, not after spreading as that may deal less damage due to less time.
Not attacking a second time so not interrupting poison ticks.
And each time when I then try to test how a Poison Creeper deals with them, I summon it and watch the Creeper kill the monsters faster than Rabies does (without it present).
Anyone have any idea what is going on?
It sometimes doesn’t even spread while the enemies are packed, it deals less damage then Creeper were the problems seems to be the Rabies damage.
Because unless there’s another thing I could change to fix this, Rabies is actually worse then it seemed.
Other dmg sources can interupt poisons tick rate, dealing far less or no dmg. So make shure you’re not procing any other dmg source. Like added elemental dmg on a weapon or something. And if you hit the target with two different poison sources, the dmg adds togeather, but the duration avareges out. So you’ll deal totaly different dmg. In one of the videos i sent you, MacroBioBoi explains in high detail.
Tested it with 1 bite, no added poison damage (because that messes up Rabies big time, unlike other poison it doesn’t get added up it can block the Rabies from dealing damage and spreading).
No elemental damage, but I done the test by taking 1 bite and backing off multiple times, so if the first hit counts as distubance (would be odd) it should cancel out 1 tick, that would not explain more than double the time.
Gear with testing was Angelic Set, Gloves/Boots/Shield Sigon, plain 3 Rabies Pelt and a strength belt with resistance, charms all bonus to life and/or mana, nothing else.
Also did testst without the Creeper so it cannot apply poison and I have no minion which apparantly is bugged anyway.
I really couldn’t find any explanation to why the damage is so low.
Just a really odd one, guess I’ll have to dive into the comprehensive poison guide and see if this was something already affecting Rabies.
IIRC the poison creeper synergy is bugged to not work in D2R or something like that, there’s been a lot of reports that rabies is dealing low damage in D2R.
EDIT: Apparently rabies functions as intended, it’s a bug with the way the lying character screen/skill tree calculates and displays the poison damage according to this guy:
https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo2/comments/u83hvy/comment/i5n6m3c/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
I have tested rabies. It does exactly what it should do. The issue is the skill doesn’t actually show how much damage it will do over what time frame because that isn’t actually how the game calculates damage. Any values in game are incorrect approximations and are derived from a formula that actually details poison bit rate per frame over length in frames, along with the fact that poison damage does not apply if other damage is applied in the same frame.
Another problem is that Poison Creeper is currently adding multiples of it’s damage when multiple targets are hit by it’s AoE, which is not intentional and goes to make Rabies look even worse by comparison.
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Tnx, I’ll delve into that a bit more later on, but on a glance it does seem to explain why Rabies doesn’t kill things it should and if it does slower than expected.
But also why it seemed a lot faster during playing then when I was testing, I tend to run past groups and throw the creeper in them (like a poison meteor ), but during testing I tried to single out individuals to make the timing better, though I was simply wrong in feeling it did very good damage.
Maybe I’ll try a Poison Creeper nuke in cows then XD
Edit: Forgot it’s a summon, -res won’t work so don’t think damage can become remotely enough.
Bit of a shame that the already on paper sub-par skill actually deals a lot less damage than it does on paper.
Edit 2: After calculating the values themselves based on the original bit rate damage I came to number around 48% of the damage according to the calculator and sheet damage, which is in line with what I saw in testing.
The calc’s duration is also failing, it deals the damage over a lot longer time than the calc indicates when you use other poison sources on gear (such as facets) eventhough these do not work with Rabies (can block Rabies if their damage p/s becomes higher than Rabies).
All in all skill is near worthless unless making heavy investments and then it becomes viable in some areas, but not worth it unless you really just need to make one…
This skill really needs a huge buff imo.
