Oddities with Rabies

[Crystalion]

I like the direction taken in v1.10 with Rabies, don't get me wrong, but the way it works is very odd and can be exploited in at least two significant ways. First, some background...

(I'm tired so I had to cut my testing short and, thus, I'll try to be brief)

Rabies has been changed to be a "normal" attack, requiring AR to hit and delivering normal damage (and presumably effects and triggering LEBs--no time to test any of that, sorry). The poison done ramps up quite strongly now, increasing also in duration. The poison creeper vine acts as a passive synergy for poison damage bonus (and Rabies gets an AR boost, iirc).

So far, so good. Now it starts to get weird...

The mana cost for the skill isn't charged when you miss.

The skill "infects" the target with some sort of effect (ala Inner Sight) or perhaps its a curse or maybe an evil aura (unlike Hurricane, which seems to be just an Aura in disguise, I'm not at all sure what this thing is). Periodically other enemies next to the infected target get infected (no AR needed and probably they don't get a chance to block, but, again, no time for testing).

It seems likely the new infectee gets infected only with the remaining duration (note that I didn't say "and damage" as clearly things are more complicated than that), but I've not tested tightly enough to verify this idea. I did observe (most of these tests were PvP multiplayer tcp/ip) one case where the sound/anim of infection appeared to be re-applied to the lone target. This oddity might explain why the damage done is higher than stated on the lying character screen™ (by more than measurement fuzz).

The stated duration for the skill seems to be both the poison time length and infection duration. I didn't have time to test if curse duration reducers or poison length reduction affect one or both. I did, however, observe that poison immune targets can be infected and will pass the infection along. This is a very important factoid.

This means that highly poison resistant (or immune) entities can be useful carriers. Asymetric PvP can thus be used so the druid doesn't have to be on the front lines to deliver his rabies. One can even carry this to an extreme and team with a Necro (non-partied, Necro friendly, Druid Hostile) who Bone Prisons monsters that the druid infects, transmiting the infection, of course, to the poor monsters trapped within the prisons. Please note that Bone walls/prisons are not "unattackable" in v1.10 as some people have claimed--some skills ignore them, true, and other skills don't target them unless you shift click, but they are definitely attackable (unlike, say, Ravens, afaik).

I particularly like the idea of an Enchanted Rabid army of (poison immune) Revives. :D

But wait, there's more!...

If you are evil PK scum and have a partner and you get your Rabies duration way up, you can go PvP vs. your partner and both of you can get near your intended victim. You then infect your partner in crime (who naturally has very high poison resist, like 95%, and is braced for the onslaught. He then stays glued to the victim (who has time to wonder, briefly: "why is this guy glowing all sickly looking like that?!"). The Rabid wolf then TPs to town and declares hostility.

Yep, you guessed it.. at the moment of declared hostility the infection goes live vs. the victim. You can die from this "poison" even if you take no other damage (i.e. no "poison can't kill you" grace). Maxed Rabies and syngery does do enough damage now, after PvP penalty, to be a threat. Fortunately before griefers have time to build these characters on Ladder (e.g. Hardcore) Blizzard has time to fix things (I hear there are some other serious problems, so I trust we'll be seeing 1.10++ soon).

In any event, Rabies is a complex and interesting skill now, worthy of more research.

Gotta sleep.