Poison, missiles, 1.10

[Brista]

There's a fairly common myth that certain combinations of high damage long duration poison sources and low damage short duration sources are a way of maximising your effectiveness

Maximizing in what way?



Fairly accurate. But you may want to to go for some of the items that have the highest rates as it may take 2 or 3 items with a medium rate to equal one with a highe rate (saving you inventory space or equipment slots).

If you want to increase damage per shot then with melee weapons, and in 1.10 missile weapons too, the min/maxing I described is effective

??
If I am just using a character that is using a fast form of attack, I just use a little poison to help stop the monster from regenerating their life since I will usually be hitting them again for more damage well before the duration runs out. Even if I am using a slower weapon, it is typically not worth it to me to be using any of the low rate poison damage items, better to use those slots or the space for other better equipment. If you are not going to let the poison run through its entire duration, then the only thing you should worry about to increase your poison damage is to use the highest rate items that you can.

If you do intend to let the poison run its entire duration, then you would want to arrange your items to try to maximize the duration in most cases. Typically by having the poison run for a longer duration you will do more damage than a slightly higher rate and somewhat shorter duration.

Example:
Tal rune will do ~15.039 damage/second for 5 seconds
Perfect Emerald will do ~14.355 damage/second for 7 seconds

While the Tal rune has a higher rate of damage, if you extend the damage out to when they have both finished the perfect emrerald will have done more (Tal rune= 75 damage and PEmerald ~100 damage). You would have needed to reapply the damage from the Tal again for it to do more damage over the 6th and 7th seconds; taking away from potentionaly apply poison to other targets.

Ah, I hadn't understood correctly. I plead Not Responsible on the grounds of the amount of rubbish people have talked to me about poison ;)


So it's quite simple really.

For damage per second use the highest rate damage which you can calculate by dividing the damage given on the item by the duration in seconds then dividing again by 25 for the bite rate. This might be the choice of a daggermancer or a hand to hand venom assassin

(Spirea's has the bite rates for the charm affixes some of which the game lists incorrectly as we discussed some while ago)

For cancelling monster regen just one source is fine since you will usually hit them again before the poison runs its course (even 3 seconds is a rather long time to a high level melee character). A character Zealing for a thousand per hit doesn't need to waste an inventory space on an extra poison charm. If Lavcat's pally dropped the Toxic charm and added in a 20 average damage elemental one his damage per second would increase by 20 * his number of attacks per second less the 20 poison he gets now. AND his poison length would improve to 6 seconds

And for maximising damage per shot you are going to try to get sources with either or both of high damage and long duration. A hypothetical 1 damage over 1000 seconds would be a great addition to a character using, say, several high damage sources, multishot and fear. On the other hand low level poison damage charms with short durations may well bring your damage down when added. The 6 poison over 3 seconds small charms that many of us have assiduously collected on our mules are really rather useless once the 1.10 change is implemented