Poison Creeper

[Crystalion]

Now that is VERY interesting

Generally in this game poison from different sources doesn't stack. If a Venom assassin hits a monster poisoned by a team-mate then the strongest poison effect will take place and the lesser will be cancelled. (Highest damage per second)

What you're saying (and I think you're possibly right) is that the poison mats DO stack
...
Have you tested whether the creepers stack with other Poison effects such as Rabies?

Ah, but technically poison *does* stack, on the slice of poison delivered with the initial attack. You would normally do just fine ignoring this effect because it is unusual for large numbers of attacks with poison to connect in a small number of frames. But if I made a mod with an aura, like Rabies, delivering (aka "renewing") poison every frame or something like a Blade Sentinel minion without a nextDelay then clearly I would see the significant possibility of "stacking" poison attacks.

I've often noted that the Poison Resist Shrine is my favorite, because, by forcing poison durations to nada, it *almost* makes you immune to poison. A reason it does not, is that initial slice of poison (when you are first "hit"). If we made stacking+every_frame poison applicators then the Poison Resist Shrine would be effectively bypassed.

Thus my reaction, upon seeing this thread when first posted, was that it seems possible the "mat" is an entity that frequently reapplies poison to the victim. In previous Creeper strat guides I'd seen the suggestion that monsters needed to be in motion to trigger the mat effectively... I strongly suspect the circumstances (aka multiple monsters, or monsters moving) interact in some way with the application process to result in "stacked" repetitive "initial hit" poison application.

To test this I would suggest lowering the duration from 4 seconds to one frame but upping the damage 100x. This, in some (mathematical) sense, should "preserve" the net damage, but I bet the actual damage patterns and visual (green victim) would be more readily apparent (as you fool around with monster movement, multiple monsters, or whatever else might be a factor).

edit: the Creeper skill creates a minion (the plague poppy vine) who fires missiles (which fire missiles... aka the mat, of which the "plague vines trail" appear to do the dirty work). These things appear to have quite a range (size "3") and at high slvl there appear to be a lot of them per mat (I'm unclear on the number as I see two different places apparently defining it). At the very least these dozen (more?) dirty work vines are possibly each attacking the same target (the duration poison would not stack, but being hit 12 times for 1%, i.e. one frames worth of the 4 sec. x 25 fps poison nut, would be measurable I'm sure).

My recollection (deserves testing) is that if a poison cloud (and probably mat) hits you and you don't move, the duration will end after X (i.e. 4 for mat) seconds. That is to say, there appears to be some game mechanism recalling if you've been hit and not hitting you again. My naive guess would be that missiles flagged "LastCollide" cause a simple hack whereby the missile records the entity ID and x,y of a collision, and grants "immunity" if it's next (and subsequent ad infinitum) hit attempts are to the (exact) same. This would probably be a single bucket, so a missile that does not self-destruct (most of them CollideKill, ergo collide and cease to exist) faced with persistant multiple targets would be able to repetively hit (either alternating frames or doing both each frame depending on the implementation logic).

My present inclination for a "good" test to probe these hypotheses would be to use a stationary PvP victim, a zon with her side-by-side decoy (an no decoy, of course, for comparision), and throw Poison Creepers of various slvls at her feet (more sub-vine missiles per slvl, up to some max, you see). Given PvP reduction, bumping the skills.txt poison str by, say, 10x might be expedient.

p.s. other "oddities" recently on my mind... a posted claim (in passing) that Blessed Hammer benefits from Might and Fanaticism *if* the user is being affected by Concentration; my claims, that I've never seen follow up on: that straight elemental absorb seems to be granted life both before *and* after damage dealt; that lifetap with thrown weapons seems to grant absurd multiples or overage of stealing.