Poison Creeper

[Baajikiil]

Wow, nice run down. Very interesting indeed. Thanks for going through the trouble. It makes perfect sense(blizzard sense) now.

[Crystalion]

Wow, nice run down.  Very interesting indeed.  Thanks for going through the trouble.  It makes perfect sense(blizzard sense) now.

Hehe, yeah.

For fun I made a new Druid (ladder, untwinked, pubbie game player)... of course this means I was in act 2 at clvl 8. By clvl 11 I was restless, so I decided to do normal cows (I have a mule that can open the portal).

This "build" has slvl 11 Poison Creeper, junk gear, a lvl 9 act 2 merc (croaked right away) and no other Druid skills (used at least--I have a Druid cap that would let me be a Wolf and cast a couple of Ravens).

Shortly after entering the cow level (with the clvl 11) I encountered the Cow King. Turns out it is very very easy to kill Hell Bovines with slvl 11 PC, but considerably longer to nail the King.

Nonetheless, it worked (milk, aka stamina potions were needful). The xp was awful, of course.

[QuickShifter]

Hello all

I usually post at the diabloii.net site but a 1,5 years ago I did some posting here also.
Anyway since this question has not been answered on the druid forum at diabloii.net I will give it a try here for the computer wizard's. :D

Do poison creeper and rabies work in tandem? That is, if a monster is standing on the ivy matt of the PC and getting poisoned and then is given rabies, will both rabies and poison from PC affect the monster or will only the highest source of damage apply?

I have heard before that rabies and other sources of poison work in tandem.

Best Reagards

[Crystalion]

Do poison creeper and rabies work in tandem? That is, if a monster is standing on the ivy matt of the PC and getting poisoned and then is given rabies, will both rabies and poison from PC affect the monster or will only the highest source of damage apply?

iirc (no time to double check) Rabies is implemented as an aurastate (but with a couple of "missiles" involved). Perhaps re-infection is attempted at 4 frame intervals (give yourself a mess of antidote potions and try to see for yourself how fast you get re-infected).

*If* the re-infection is done as an attack regardless of whether you currently have the Rabies aurastate, then I believe you'll take a (one frame) slice of poison damage from the attack, even if, as far as the duration goes, "poison doesn't stack".

The RabiesContagion missile does the LastCollide hack (but not NextDelay) and has a size of only 1, so unless we're overlapping ghost type monsters I don't see much opportunity for it to be even possible for Rabies to have a "stacking with itself" oddity like Poison Creeper mats can.

To answer your other question, since you used the " highest source of damage" phrase that simplified "poison doesn't stack" people use as a mantra, I will reiterate:

When an attack "succeeds" part of the "immediate" damage dealt will be one frames worth of whatever Poison damage is part of the attack. No issue of stacking or not exists to qualify this statement.

Yes, this means that if a target has a high damage long lasting poison on it and you dink it repeatedly with your pathetic poison damage attack that you are, in fact, doing (a little bit of) damage.

This also means that the "weak" poison from the Mats, when in overdrive mode (monsters close enough together) will do it's magic (at full force, because the effect is due to repeated attacks every frame) even if some other stonger poison (rabies, in your question) is in force.

However, in case it also wasn't clear, the Poison Creeper mats are pretty lame, even at super high slvls, in Hell, if you don't have the victims in close proximity on mat(s). In normal, however, they are pretty decent even then, if you have a little patience (and do something absurd, like my experimental build, who, at clvl 19, has slvl 19 Poison Creeper... in act 4 atm).

So, if you want to build a Rabies Druid, without using the Carrion Wind synergy cheese, you can certainly start life untwinked by pumping Poison Creeper a lot. Eventually, though PC and Rabies will help, you're going to need a decent weapon and Fury or some other use for your remaining (limited) skill points to cope with Hell (and Poison Immunes even sooner).

...

But I've played with a Rabies Druid before (I didn't know about mat mechanics and the value of bunched victims and stacking mats though)... so if I continue my clvl 19 experiment, it will be to put 1 pt. into Bear, prereqs, Shock Wave, get some +skills gear, and do an Armageddon build. The theory there being that the Bear (with some HP boost) is allowed to cast: Shock Wave, Poison Creeper, Armageddon at will, and that these latter two both wish for tame stationary targets (courtesy of SW).

[Trobb]

I think plague javilins may work the same however they have a 4 sec delay between castings. In season one I had this skill maxed (with synergys) and most normal mobs didnt last 4 sec.

I'm really intriged by this idea and think I'll be making a fury ww druid on useast if anyone needs help with testing. If your theory is correct is it best to spam cast PC near a group of mobs? or just cast once to position the PC near the enemy?

Trobb

[Raziel]

What affect, if any, would Bramble/Death's Web have on this?

[QuickShifter]

Thank you Crystallion for the answer!
My druid is lvl 20 with 20 points in PC.
Now since I have the answer to if poison creeper and rabies work in tandem I am considering making my first rabies druid. What I like about it (we will see in Hell thoug) is that those 20 points wont have been a waste. Usually a rabies druid will trade for a carrion wind ring.

An armaggedon build sounds like another good idea.

My idea is something like
20 Poison Creeper
20 Rabies
20 Oak sage
10 Lycantropy
10 Dire Wolf
10 Feral Rage (for posion immunes)
1 grizzly
+ Prerequisites
All available at lv 83n and then we will see

Strategy:
Holy Freeze Merc Carries Hwanins refuge (And so do my wolf once i get another one)
Holy Freeze attract alot of monsters
Big crowd is thumping on Werewolf, Merc And grizzly. Static triggers alot (This part is already tested in 1.09)
Add rabies and PC for nice area of effect damage.


As for if Tranq Gloves adds damage to PC? No i think Electricblue already tested it.

Best Regards

[electricblue]

damage of rabies and poison creeper are not added together.

psdg wont work with creeper.

[Crystalion]

damage of rabies and poison creeper are not added together.

This, I believe, was written in reply to QuickShifter writing:

Add rabies and PC for nice area of effect damage.

So I should clarify what I've said before, lest there be confusion.

Poison damage over *duration* time, does *not* stack (as of v1.10, though some versions of D2 do, iirc).

The (typically) tiny initial frame's worth slice of poison damage from attacks *does* "stack" (i.e. you'll get this damage from an attack even if the target is currently poisoned with a more powerful poison such that the new attack's duration poison is discarded/ignored).

Now the Poison Creeper's mats are something of a rare and special case, because when (and only when!) more than one target is on the mat in close proximity to another target, the submissiles that make up the mat go nutso, apparently throwing their poison attack at the targets each frame.

In simple terms, Rabies and PC will not work together normally. However, the "nutso" situation of uber PC mat effectiveness, should not, afaik, be impeded by the targets already being poisoned (by any source, including Rabies).

In other words, I currently believe there is nothing wrong with using Rabies with PC, other than the fact that *only* the nutso damage situation of PC mats will then be useful, in practice.

In short, however, PC isn't very useful in Hell, unless you're making use of the nutso effect, and so I'm presuming that anyone reading this thread will not be overly interested in using the mats "normally".

Caveat Emptor: the current theory and research about how/why this anomalous PC effectiveness arises does not include, afaik, careful controlled confirmation of this "nutso" stacking with other poisons effect... and I am not in a position to do such a complex test for at least a week (I'm on a trip).

p.s. I'm not very impressed with the damage output of either fully synergized Rabies or of the nutso mats in Hell difficulty unless you either have a lot of patience and some clever method of crowd control or alternately some other powerful attack... YMMV. But in normal/nm they both seem really really powerful to me.

[electricblue]

for the 'attacking at every frame' state of the mat, you are right, but I think it is not the only state of the mat against multiple opponents.

for the rabies, at high levels, hell is very easy, why or at what points are you not impressed?

[Crystalion]

for the rabies, at high levels, hell is very easy, why or at what points are you not impressed?

Well, I am impressed with Rabies overall.

So the discrepancy here is probably because I was unclear in my full statement, which was:

I'm not very impressed with the damage output of either fully synergized Rabies or of the nutso mats in Hell difficulty unless you either have a lot of patience and some clever method of crowd control or alternately some other powerful attack... YMMV

So, first off, YMMV. ;)

Secondly my statement is qualified by:

1. patience and crowd control, or
2. some other (i.e. non-Rabies) powerful attack

What I didn't make clear is that these qualifications are consequences of two facts of life for high level Rabies (in Hell):

1. the damage is applied over ~dozen seconds, and can't be sped up
2. some critters will be highly resistant or immune to Rabies (also in werewolf form you can not easily use charges of Lower Resist)

Take, for example, the Hell Zombie Garden (Pindle's area)... you're in a tight space, and these guys hit hard, so you either want to control them (avoid getting hit in some way) or kill them very fast. Unfortunately they are 90% poison resistant and have many thousands of HP. A Holy Bolt Paladin (build) will also not be able to CC very well (where the wolf has lots of HP the Paly has lots of block, typically speaking, so both can tank, of course) but the Holy Bolts will tear individual undead up in a second or two.

I would, of course, also say a Holy Bolt Paladin doesn't impress me in Hell, unless they have some other powerful attack (because so many monsters are not undead).

Naturally both Rabies and Holy Bolt builds totally rock the parts of Hell that aren't immune to their specialty element. The same is true of Fireball Sorcs, etc. etc.

In party situations weaknesses can become either more or less of a problem. While the party is likely to handle poison immunes just fine (so a pure Rabid build would work just fine in Hell, partied) there is the issue of killing speed... some parties will kill so fast, the poison is largely irrelevant (for example, in Necro or trap Assassin parties, one often finds CE suddenly ending most battles after the heavy hitters have taken down a couple of corpses, which might be only seconds after encountering a new batch of monsters).

Make no mistake though, I am impressed with Rabies in terms of normal/nm and, in terms of efficiency (for skill point investment) in any difficulty level, (it is especially efficient in Hell for those that didn't invest in PC and wait to get Carrion Wind at clvl req 60).

Rabies seems like one of the very notable skills in the game for a player to "easily" get far in the game without a lot of uber equipment or fancy tactics.

[electricblue]

1. the damage is applied over ~dozen seconds, and can't be sped up
2. some critters will be highly resistant or immune to Rabies (also in werewolf form you can not easily use charges of Lower Resist)

Take, for example, the Hell Zombie Garden (Pindle's area)... you're in a tight space, and these guys hit hard, so you either want to control them (avoid getting hit in some way) or kill them very fast. Unfortunately they are 90% poison resistant and have many thousands of HP. A Holy Bolt Paladin (build) will also not be able to CC very well (where the wolf has lots of HP the Paly has lots of block, typically speaking, so both can tank, of course) but the Holy Bolts will tear individual undead up in a second or two.

some numbers here,

with an above average rabies attack, it takes 3 seconds to kill a hell zombie garden resident + rabies infects others in contact and also kills them in 3 secs.
ok a duration of 3 secs is very, very subjective, but this should't be so bad :)

also, it consumes little skill points and lets strong hybrids with fury or fire claws

[Crystalion]

with an above average rabies attack, it takes 3 seconds to kill a hell zombie garden resident + rabies infects others in contact and also kills them in 3 secs.
ok a duration of 3 secs is very, very subjective, but this should't be so bad :)

a prowling dead in the hell ZG, afaik, has between 5k and 8k HPs, roughly, players 1.

At 90% poison resist you'd need to deliver 50k to 80k of damage.

slvl 20 PC as a given, and allowing for slvl 24 Rabies (which most players should be able to attain by Hell ZG I would hope) I still fail to see where 3 seconds is anywhere close (e.g. the full damage of the Rabies should not be delivered in less than 10+ seconds, iirc).

So if your personal experience confirms your ~3 second estimate, I think this deserves a closer look (Perhaps the actual outer garden monsters there don't have 90% resist, etc., in which case I picked a bad example, eh?).

[electricblue]

no, resists are right I think.

I used -%enemy poison resistance items with about 50k rabies dmg.
-% enemy poison resistance makes the trick

[Crystalion]

I used -%enemy poison resistance items with about 50k rabies dmg.
-% enemy poison resistance makes the trick

Well, since rabies lasts so long, if one doesn't have (fairly rare, no?) -enemy poison resist% gear, then perhaps dropping out of werewolf mode to cast a charge of lower resist occasionally makes sense.

At 50k dmg I'm guessing you must have well over +12 on skills? Somewhere around +10 it starts to get hard for ordinary mortals (on ladder at least) to acquire such gear.

Sounds like your gear solves any problem short of poison immunes.

My little Poison Creeper druid is clvl 21 now, still untwinked, and still with no points in anything but PC (now using a druid helm with +2 dire wolf and +1 twister, which turns out to be quite useful to stop mobs on a mat).

[electricblue]

At 50k dmg I'm guessing you must have well over +12 on skills? Somewhere around +10 it starts to get hard for ordinary mortals (on ladder at least) to acquire such gear.

Sounds like your gear solves any problem short of poison immunes.

My little Poison Creeper druid is clvl 21 now, still untwinked, and still with no points in anything but PC (now using a druid helm with +2 dire wolf and +1 twister, which turns out to be quite useful to stop mobs on a mat).

Yes, its hard to make a good druid, but when you achieve that, they are really though.

I have won duels 1 vs.7 with my fury/rabies (now he's retired).

Gl with the PC guy :) I have one fury/PC druid on hc west.
he's 20 I think now. I use myself as the meat shield on the mats.

and, btw, looks like my summoner guide will take a long time, since there are so many variants.

[wally]

My my, what an interesting thread :) gogo "minor" druid skills. Are there any thoughts as to how to go about facilitating the multiple sub-vine attacks tactically?

So far, I gather that Attract via charges seems to be the winner, but the first thing that leapt to mind was a Shockbear, since Crystalion's testing (as I understood it) seemed to indicate that standing enemies incurred large amounts of damage (perhaps contrary to the general wisdom of rapid movement = rapid damage application).

It might be a great addition to a fireclaw shockbear build, the companion to mah own little baby, the potato druid :)

[Crystalion]

Are there any thoughts as to how to go about facilitating the multiple sub-vine attacks tactically?

So far, I gather that Attract via charges seems to be the winner, but the first thing that leapt to mind was a Shockbear

My experiment, Bermat, was untwinked to clvl 25 (been throwing him +life charms and junk since then plus a good sword for his act 5 merc). He is 28 atm (act 5 normal; still does cows very easily).

Recently he has been a bear and using shockwave to try to hold the enemies on the mats and keep the merc alive. Sometimes this works really well but not always... the problem seems to be that the vine and merc AI don't always cooperate!

I think electricblue has to have really good +skill and reduce enemy poison resist gear in order to make the rabies or PC mats work well in hell.

Seems to me a Fury druid blowing an extra 19 points into Rabies and (?clvl 66ish?) using a Carrion Wind Ring (synergy and occasional PC cast) isn't a bad investment. But it sure doesn't look to me like PC mats will be viable at slvl 20 something past nightmare (though they are a lot of fun, when working well, in normal--cows are very amusing, e.g.). YMMV.

BTW, since I didn't seem to be clear, it doesn't matter if the targets are motionless on the mats or not, it only matters (i.e. helps trigger the hyper-effect) that two or more targets on the mat are very close to each other.

[wally]

Nope nope, crystalion, you were perfectly clear--I was only trying to underline that specific point that you articulated.

As for tactics, here's something that leapt into my head:

If the merc AI might be problematic, would it be worthwhile to look into an A1 or A3 merc and rely on summonable (and hence, placeable) minions to do the group gathering before being shockwaved into oblivion?

[Crystalion]

If the merc AI might be problematic, would it be worthwhile to look into an A1 or A3 merc and rely on summonable (and hence, placeable) minions to do the group gathering before being shockwaved into oblivion?

Well, if you had the choice, a Fire Golem would be perfect (I've recently been reminded of how "attractive" the FG's Holy Fire Aura is, making him a magnet for monsters to clump up on).

Failing that, an Act 2 HF merc might be good (same idea). The wolves don't have the HPs to easily survive for gathering unless they're pumped and the Grizzly has that knockback effect, which doesn't help clumping. I suppose it is conceivable that using Ravens to blind them once they're on the mat might help. (This is similar to suggesting to a PJav build to make the runeword helm Nadir--NefTir--with 9 charges of slvl 13 Cloak of Shadows, 20 seconds duration unclipped by difficulty)

My Bermat experiment is clvl 30 now... I'm not real thrilled with Armageddon (targeting issues) compared to Hurricane. Still, Armageddon ramps up and fits with the shockbear/mat concept, whereas Hurricane can't be recast in bearform.