Mercs...

[Professor Frink]

So now I'm left wondering, which gives the most poison damage?

A 6 socket Long War Bow with 6 P Emeralds
A 2 socketed Pestilent Bow of Blight (with 2 P Emeralds)
A Venom bow

from The Tao of Poison:

P. Emerald: 14.3 hp/s for 7 sec
Pestilent Weapon: 45.9 hp/s for 6 sec
Weapon of Blight: 2.34 hp/s for 3 sec
Venom Runeword: 30.5 hp/s for 7 sec
Tal Rune: 15.0 hp/s for 7 sec
(the Tal rune in venom is counted seperately)

Total Poison (for ranged weapons, sum of rate for sum of durations) :
6 P. Emerald Long War Bow: 86.1 hp/s for 42 sec
2 P. Emerald Pestilent Bow of Blight: 76.8 hp/s for 23 sec
'Venom' runeword Bow: 45.5 hp/s for 14 sec

Both the rate and duration are best with the plain socketed emerald bow, so the final damage should always be highest with it (otherwise you'd need to consider what other equipment and your level of venom skill you're wearing to decide which is more important, boosted duration or boosted damage rate) IMHO, a slvl 20+ venom and the 6 Perf bow gets you enough rate that you should mostly look for boosted duration on your other gear.

My Venom-sin Lolth is doing pretty well right now with:

Triple Socketed Superior Ring Mail(60 PD over 2 seconds from Envy, one had cold or lightning resist on it as well)
Triple Envy Socketed Short Bow(recently switched to a Short War Bow of Anthrax(100 damage over six seconds)
Snakecord Unique Light Belt
A buttload of 6/3 sec poison based charms of various sizes(most prized being a septic grand of blight doing 21/6)

The listed damage is somewhere in the high 200s(300+ now that I switched bows), but we all know that missile-based poison damage is buggy(estimated about 40 seconds duration on my poison, using Griswold and Andariel as early level tests)

She still needs about 4 shots to kill Normal Diablo though :/

My venom/traps-sin did pretty well using a 6 p.emerald bow, two rings of blight, and some low-quality poison charms, but never managed to achieve the fabled one-hit kill on any bosses (unless you count the summoner). There's something going on besides the listed hp and resistence of bosses in the arreat summit, becuase by doing the math mine should have been able to take hell nihlithak in one hit, but it actually took several. Is there global poision duration reduction in hell, like there is for cold? Or maybe Arreat Summit doesn't include the 8x Unique hp bonus for the nihlithak.

- frink