What's wrong with Poison skills

Necromancer
1

This is a quick write up on what is wrong with the Poison skills. I am not looking at large changes but if you want to change/fix anything with poison you need to see why the skills are ‘flawed. The Poison bug, being a bug should definitely be fixed, but here’s a look at the skills themselves.

To understand why Poison dagger sucks you need a quick crash course on Poison. The TLDR is that poison does not stack it gets overwritten by the ‘highest’ damage per frame. There are far longer and better write ups on poison if you wish to go into those.

Let’s look at the poison skills at lvl 20 with no additions.

Poison Dagger: average 5045 over 7.7 seconds = 655 dps
Poison Explosion: average 9030 over 9.6 seconds = 941 dps
Poison Nova: average 2102 over 2 seconds = 1051 dps
The situation gets worse with more + to skills.

As you can see Nova is the highest dps of all the poison skills. This means even if you wanted to use Dagger or Explosion they will be overwritten by Nova. There is effectively no reason to use explosion or dagger as they have no up side. If you wanted to actually make a PDagger necy you have to intentionally not use Nova to ensure that using dagger is useful, or you just give up and go as a caster Nova build.

PDagger needs to have the highest ‘dps’ of all the skills followed by explosion with Nova last. PDagger requires you go get into melee range to do it’s damage, this is the highest risk thus it should come with the highest reward. Explosion is stationary while nova is just a radius around you. This does not mean we nerf Nova, but we reduce the duration of Dagger and Explosion

A quick change to duration
Poison Dagger: average 5045 over 4 seconds = 1261 dps
Poison Explosion: average 9030 over 8 seconds = 1129 dps
Poison Nova: average 2102 over 2 seconds = 1051 dps

With these durations we can make sure that you can cast nova, explosion and stab something as each skill is still ‘working’ and not being overwritten by the ‘easy’ skill to use. You can cast nova to kill off quick trash monsters and run in and stab the elite or boss monsters and be assured it’s still worth doing. If you understand how poison works you can even get a about 10 seconds out of dagger while keeping your dps high: Blackbogs is still the best option for PDagger.

2 Likes
2

another issues with poison explosion. It competes with corpse explosion. If poison explosion doesn’t do enough extra damage corpse explosion will always be used instead.
I actually think poison durations should be lowered into 3 categories
.4 seconds This will be like a single spell hit. like Ice blast
2 seconds This will be like a timer spell. Like frozen orb
5 seconds This will be like open wounds

3

Poison Exploison will never ever be useful with just a 2 yard radius.

throw a plague javelin and when it impacts something, imagine Poison Explosion doing that. That’s what it should be.

i mean if it does the same tick damage as poison nova, but poison nova casts in every direction for 12 yards, then why would anyone ever even consider even hotkeying poison explosions, ever?

It could be useful, if it had a 12 yard radius, then you could use it on corpses in packs that you dont want to approach.

1 Like
4

If the duration of poison is reduced drastically, it won’t really feel like poison anymore.

I know the numbers need to be adjusted to make it more viable, but if the duration is 0.4s , 2s etc for most poison skills might as well call it green burning fire instead of poison.