How I think poison imbuement actually works / scales - My findings

Rogue
1

In this thread, I am trying to optimize the damage from poison imbuement, and go over examples as well as some testing I have done. If you have any contradictory information, please reply so we can figure this out together since we are not getting any support from blizzard.

To get started, let’s say I have a level 9 poison imbuement, 216% of base damage as extra poisoning damage. Let’s say I use a level 1 penetrating shot that has 70% damage without combo points. So i’d expect the poison imbuement to do 70% * 2.16 = 151.2% poisoning damage over 5 seconds, assuming no other multipliers. I think this makes sense so far.

The problem is then what about all the other damage mods? This is actually not easy to test, as the damage range of a weapon is at least +/- 15% from the average, and there are a lot of multipliers are not more than 15%. To understand the rest of this thread, you must understand the distinction between ‘Poison damage’, and ‘Poisoning damage’. Poison damage can include both the hit as well as the damage over time, while poisoning damage is exclusively the damage over time. This distinction is shown on the tooltips in the character stats.

For testing, I had to attack the same type of enemy multiple times to try and get the highest poison tick, as well as make sure I got low ticks as well, to have extra certainty that I had a high roll (the 30% weapon damage range)

I think the following do NOT increase poison imbuement poisoning damage over time (Disclaimer: I have not retested these since 6/24 since I am not playing rogue this season. It’s possible that blizzard changed these modifiers intentionally, or unintentionally. For anyone playing rogue this league, I suggest doing your own tests while you are low level (e.g. below level 70), when it is cheap to unspec, you have low damage, and have few conditional damage modifiers from paragon. Use a low damage weapon bought from world tier 1, pay attention to / remove conditional stats like close damage, healthy damage, damage vs crowd controlled, glyphs, stat threshold requirements on paragon board, etc, that could skew testing results)

  • Condemnation Core skill damage bonus when using 3 combo points
  • Aspect of the expectant Core skill damage bonus when attacking 3 times with a basic skill
  • Impetus bonus attack damage when moving 15m
  • Edgemaster’s aspect skill damage bonus at full energy
  • it needs to be said that crit damage does NOT affect poison (some people believe this), the tooltip literally says crit damage does not affect damage over time.

Basically, it seems the ‘core skill/skill/attack/cast damage’ multipliers, do not affect poisoning damage over time at all. This would also include ‘Imbued skill damage’, which should not affect the damage over time, only the initial hit (because it is referring to the skill being imbued). ‘Imbuement skill damage’ however, should affect the poisoning damage over time, but it’s a much rarer stat and not on the paragon board.

So what scales poisoning damage?

  • dexterity - although the tooltip for dex mentions ‘skill damage’, I think it could be applying to ‘imbuement skill damage’, which affects the damage of the imbuement skill itself, rather than the skill that applies the imbuement. I tested this on a naked char with 481 dex vs 800 dex (48% vs 80% multiplier), making sure to remove all conditional mods / paragon dex bonuses. This is still inconsistent with the wording vs edgemaster’s, though, which also only mentions ‘skill’ rather than what type of skill.
  • Combo points (because it increases base damage)
  • vulnerable damage, but the target needs to be made vulnerable before the poisoning is applied, because the vulnerable multiplier is snapshot.
  • Exploit - healthy / injured appears to be dynamic / not snapshot, as the poisoning will tick stronger then get weaker after they are no longer healthy.
  • Blended poison imbuement - 75% more poisoning damage over time when crit
  • Deadly venom
  • Efficacy glyph / Aspect of corruption - imbued skill potency. Directly increases the numbers on the imbuement skill itself (e.g. shadow imbuement damage, cold imbuement chill, poison damage), evident in the tooltip. this does not increase imbuement skill modifiers (blended / mixed).
  • Eldritch bounty increases poison damage by x20%, which affects the hit as well as the damage over time.
  • Tracker glyph - scaling poison duration. I believe the way that increased poison duration works is you have the base x damage over 5 seconds, or y damage per tick. The same y damage ticks are extended past the 5 seconds.
  • poison damage (affects both hit / DoT - this is what tooltip says)
  • poisoning damage (only affects DoT - this is what tooltip says)
  • % damage over time
  • Canny glyph and non-physical damage (non-physical damage is directly added to your your character sheet stats as +% fire, cold, lightning, shadow, poison). Also, for some reason, the non physical damage seems to be multiplicative with your elemental damage on the character sheet. I have not verified whether this is tooltip only, or actually the case.
  • Bane glyph, 10% chance for double damage, or 10% more damage on average
  • % damage/ % damage while X / % damage vs Y - any damage that is not tied to an ‘attack’ or ‘skill’, with the exception of imbuement skill damage. One example is the conceited aspect, which has generic % damage while have barrier. I have tested that it works for the poisoning damage over time. There a lot of different non skill/non-typed damage stats, though and I cannot test them all.

Unconfirmed

  • Cutthroat/marksman skill damage - someone else in thread posted video about it affecting poisoning damage
  • Core skill damage [+] not [x]

Conclusion
Blizzard made it hard to double dip on multipliers that affect both the hit damage and the poisoning damage over time. The most commonly used rogue aspects / uniques / stats I listed at the beginning do not affect poisoning damage over time at all. Unless you are going for a full damage over time build, the best multipliers for poison imbuement will affect both the hit and damage over time e.g.

  • vulnerable damage
  • poison damage (not poisoning damage)
  • damage (untyped ‘damage’ with no prefix, as in not tied to any skill/attack/cast stat, conditional suffix is ok).
  • dexterity

Because of this, I feel poison imbuement damage over time overall is actually very weak the way most people use it, a hit crit based build that just slaps on poison imbuement for ‘single target’, unless you are going full into damage over time build / crit chance, like the videos of rogue killing uber lilith / world bosses with bursting venom aspect. As a lot of aspects/stats that affect the hit damage, do not also affect the poisoning damage over time. The videos of rogues killing uber lilith in 10 seconds with poison are not relying on the hit / crit damage and instead stacking multiple separate poison imbuement instances by using aspect of bursting venoms (and bursting venoms has very buggy behavior already reported on the forums). The crit chance, not crit damage, is only used to boost the poisoning damage over time due to blended poison imbuement / aspect of bursting venom.

Has anyone else done any testing on this? If ‘skill / attack damage’ not affecting poisoning damage is a bug, and it gets fixed, then poison imbuement would be significantly stronger.

16 Likes
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I’m a little confused, you mention how Deadly venom passive does increase the damage of the poison dot, but then go onto say how, “poisoning damage” as a stat does not, when the tooltip describes “Deadly Venom” passive as “poisoning damage”

By the way I love your dedication to testing things, I am looking for someone who enjoys testing things. May I add you in the game and we can get together to test things together?

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I don’t know what you are quoting. Where did I say that poisoning damage does not increase the damage of a DoT? Do you mean at the end where i said poison damage (but not poisoning damage)? I was giving examples of stats that affect both the hit as well as the DoT. The character sheet actually gives you tooltips for both poison damage and poisoning damage. For poison damage, the tooltip says it affects both the hit and DoT, while poisoning damage is just the DoT. That’s why I said that pure poison damage is better, at the end. But yea feel free to add me, i figured out how to test with PVP as well, can fight each other as long as we started in same party

4

Besides the mentioned damages, have you tested poison imbuement with rapidfire?
I did a little bit of testing and iam quite confused.

On paper Its insanely good because with combo points it can go up to 9 arrows that could each apply poison, but in reality when I dealt 3/4 of bosses hp with rapid fire, the poison damage wasnt even the last 1/4 hp.
But then I tried it in pvp, and even when the rapidfire didnt kill the person, he had to overheal more then his HP, 3-4 sec, to not die from it.

So if you ever try it, let me know, Iam curious what results other ppl will have.

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I have not tested rapid fire, but the way i would expect it to work is that poison imbuement is multiplied to the base% dmg of each arrow, which is low compared to a single hit skill like penetrating shot, but you will get one poison imbuement stack per arrow. I tried PVP with a friend, testing some poison stuff too, and but it seemed bugged. Their health bar showed the future poison damage over time dealt (e.g. 75% of his health), but then it gradually went up and only did 50% damage, like he was healing, even though he did not have any healing

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Interesting, even more so when you put it next to the twisting blades with aspect, which deals 1x full dmg+ 1x increased dmg when coming back and then each time it hits while orbiting.
So while the twisting blades deals damage 4 times and the dmg sum is lets say 500k the poison stacks to deal much more than 500k with the ability to scale much further thanks to itemization to poison dmg.
But weirdly enough rapid fire that deals 500k dmg 9 times deals around 250k dmg of poison in 5 sec.

And when you can attack around 3x faster with twisting blades, poison is really useless on rapid fire.

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All I know is, when my Flurry is Poison Imbued, it hits like a truck. When the Imbuements run out, the damage is substantially lower, and I don’t just mean the dot; the Imbuement seems to be making the direct damage substantially larger too.

I don’t have enough of stats like Poison damage or Crit Damage on Imbuements to make up the difference. I presume it comes from the ‘potency’ effects (Aspect of Corruption and Efficacy Glyph). Can you test if these apply to both the direct damage and the dot?

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Nice research my friend. Following to know more about this, running Flurry with Poison Imbuement myself but I have no idea how well it is performing compared to other builds, it’s my first and only character, currently lvl97 running NM 55-60 so to me it’s decent enough. Gonna read your post again and see if any of my gear/aspects is not at all suited for this build. Thanks.

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imbuement potency should only affect the damage over time from what I understand, but i havent tested it. The eldritch bounty node should give you a x% multiplier on both your poison damage and your poisoning damage over time, though. You probably have a lot of imbued skill damage, imbued skill crit damage, or poison damage / damage vs poisoned, that doesnt apply when your skills are not imbued. Can’t really say without knowing your build, though.

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Could there be a difference in resistance? Do mobs have different resistances to physical than to elements (players definitely do)? Also, does the Crit Damage on Imbuements actually add to Crit Damage or is it a multiplier (tooltips says this adds, but I know some Necro effects are weird this way)?

Maybe it’s just psychological. Like obviously when you hit with a Poison Imbued skill you get a direct chunk of health deleted and then an extra portion which is the dot damage, and yes obviously I’m aware of the difference. But is it just that Imbued skills “look” bigger, because of this? I don’t know. I just know that my Imbued skills feel way more impactful. Not just a bit more, but a lot more.

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yea, physical damage and poison damage would definitely do different amounts based on resistance / armor (also nightmare dungeon mods, e.g. a mod that says you do 60% less physical damage)

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dude thx a lot for your research! I was also wondering what affixes and aspects do interact with poisoining dmg. except for edgemasters everything makes sense to me since PI is tied directly to “skill base dmg” and not core skill dmg for example. Im playing a PI spammy build with lucky hit, high crit chance and cooldown reduction from traps & preparation/expore passives (you can look it up on youtube its called death trap flurry rogue guide). now that I have read your research Im thinking of switching some “strong” glyphs like the combat glyph for more poison dmg type of stuff since most of my dmg comes from spamming PI. It feels weird kinda weird but It may be worth it to go all in on poison

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Yea edgemaster’s is the only inconsistent one. Maybe it’s a bug, I dunno, though. It’s easy to test yourself if you want to try… Maybe it’s because poison imbuement is a skill that doesn’t actually do any damage when you use it. Canny, Bane, Tracker, Efficacy can make for a really strong poison build. I want to make a PVP focused rogue eventually, and if PVP crit damage is capped, I would drop the combat glyph also.

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Does poison damage multiply on frozen enemies?

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if you have a stat that like ‘% increased damage to chilled /frozen /crowd controlled enemies’, then yes. The poison may be snapshot, though, so you must freeze them before you poison them for maximum damage.

16

You have no idea what you’re talking about.

17

then inlighten us please. knowledge is key(and blood)

18

Fantastic effort Esteban, thank you.
We are talking about this in the rogue discord :slight_smile:

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Thanks. It’s pretty hard to have a discussion on the rogue channel as there are so many conversations going on at once. If people have their own tests / data to share we can compile it here together.

Some remaining things I want to test:

  • Does PVP actually have a crit damage cap? (can test by comparing crit in controlled duel between 150% and 300% crit damage+)
  • Does versatility glyph ‘non-basic / non-core skill’ deal increase damage affect imbuement damage. x15% is not as good as the other poison glyphs, but if you are only stacking poisoning damage, it might be worth considering.

Some other things I’ve observed after using eldritch bounty. I think imbuement skills have some common bug that makes the effect linger / apply when it shouldn’t, as in the game thinks you have an imbuement active but you are not using an imbuable ability. For example, sometimes I am able to refresh both the poison / shadow damage buff from eldritch bounty by using any evade or puncture, other times, it works as intended. This may be the same bug that makes it strong with twisting blades / aspect of bursting venom.

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do you deal more dps if you max out every bonus to poisoning damage ? or if you mix crit damage + bonus to poisoning damage ?