Venom and added Poison

[Mavfin]

How does Venom's new duration interact with other poison damager? I mean, with a 0.4 sec duration, 240 damage would give a rate of 240/0.4 or 600/sec damage. You could get xome incredible rates combining this with longer duration poison charms, etc. Is it that simple, or does it work some other way...

[lemekim]

How does Venom's new duration interact with other poison damager?  I mean, with a 0.4 sec duration, 240 damage would give a rate of 240/0.4 or 600/sec damage.  You could get xome incredible rates combining this with longer duration poison charms, etc.  Is it that simple, or does it work some other way...

From what I've seen, heard from others, and experienced in the game, venom sets the duration to 0.4 regardless of your other sources durations. So the only thing that matters is damage per second. An example would be, taking your 600 damage per second venom, or 240 over 0.4 seconds:

Charm - 100 poison damage over 5 seconds; or 20 damage per second. That adds 20 damage per second on top of 600:

600+20 = 620 damage per second.

So your actual poison damage would be 248 now (over 0.4 seconds)

At least this is the way I understand it, if anyone has better information, feel free to jump in.

There IS a way to increase duration, and the only way to do it is through "% increased poison damage" items, since they increase duration of the poison skills along with damage per second.

[Brista]

Before I attempt an answer could I ask something:

In the mpq's poison is listed in a somewhat opaque way:

For instance, chipped emerald (10 damage over 3 seconds)
pois-min 35
pois-max 35
pois-len 75

Now I can see that pois-len is the poison duration in frames. What do the damage numbers mean. Do you just divide by 10 to get the damage per second?

[Professor Frink]

damage numbers should be 1/256ths of a hit point per frame, so you divide by 10.24 to be exact.

[Mavfin]

I believe poison damage is in 256ths. So, it is 35/256ths damage per frame for 75 frames. Which equals 2625/256 or ~10.25 damage over 75 frames, which is 3 seconds at 25 frames/sec.

At least I think that's it.

[Brista]

That makes sense :)

OK, I'll be back in due course :)

[Tub]

From what I've seen, heard from others, and experienced in the game, venom sets the duration to 0.4 regardless of your other sources durations.

I can confirm that, although I think this is a bug. A skill is not meant to reduce your poison damage when you have lots of poison charms equipped. And Poison Dagger for example still uses the 1.09-formula (adding the skill-duration to the sum of item-durations before dividing through the number of poison-items)

Well, either a bug or a "feature" by someone who didn't really understand poison. Let's wait what blizzard does for 1.10 final. I want my Sniper back :angry:

[Dagni]

Well, either a bug or a "feature" by someone who didn't really understand poison.

Or a feature by someone who DID understand poison. :P

I mean, I disagree. :)

Since Venom is the only source of high poison damage that has a tiny duration, if it's duration were averaged with poison charms then one could massively improve Venom's damage with charms that did *0* damage over 2+ seconds. That would defeat the whole point of having the short duration. It would simply become an added poison charm requirement for best use.

A skill is not meant to reduce your poison damage when you have lots of poison charms equipped.

Even if it did work like before, it might still lower your total damage, at least at slvl 1, since it would still lower the total duration a little. And it does increase your poison damage a lot, it just has to be reapplied much more frequently.

- Dagni

[Brista]

From the new readme:

Assassin - Shadow Disciplines

Venom - Fixed duration at 0.4 seconds regardless of poison items equipped.

Necromancer - Poison and Bone Spells

Poison Dagger - Increased Attack Rating. Increased Duration. Added skill synergy bonuses.

As Dagni says, Venom now works well if applied often. Poison Dagger is the hit them once and run away skill now :)