Poison Creeper

[Crystalion]

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.

v1.10 release, modded skills.txt Poison Creeper skill to 250 for both Emin and Emax and 0 for all the elvl increments (in other words, I don't up the poison via slvl, but I do affect the #sub-vines). Changed E duration to 25 (one second)

-act 5 pvp test with

victim: vit pumped clvl 33 zon with slvl 10 Decoy
attacker: druid with slvl 1 (modded) poison creeper

procedural note: since Unsummon on vines doesn't seem to work, I put a point in the next vine (the life reclaimer) so I could "unsummon" that way.

I tested by summoning a Creeper at the feet of the target and waiting for the mat/attack, then immediately unsummoning (as noted above).

For the non-Decoy test this resulted, as expected, in a single ~second green zon who took very little damage (note the mat lasts for several seconds, but clearly did not re-poison the stationary zon).

For the Decoy test this resulted, not surprisingly, in effects contrary to "normal" understanding but similar to expected from the hypotheses posted above... the zon and decoy were green for the whole duration of the mat's existance, they grunted a lot, and the zon took huge amounts of damage (greatly over 10x the prior case).

Note that this is, I believe, a "3 mat" case (slvl 1 Creeper) with no stacking of mats involved.

If, when I test the higher slvl (more sub-vines) or stacking (casting multiple creepers) I see anything other than expected (i.e. correspondingly more damage with Decoy, but modest additional damage sans Decoy) I'll report back.

edit: well, at slvl 20 the duration of the mat is quite long, so the Decoy is oblitered in a few seconds and then the zon stops taking damage. To rectify this impediment to testing I brought in a 2nd zon, also clvl 33 with 100 vit (iirc 354 HPs, both zons naked) and stood them by each other (Druid hostile to both). No grunting (must have been the decoy) but both zons then die in only a few seconds (much shorter than the duration of the mat).

Interestingly this suggests yet another possible entry in my "faux PvP trivia" file: using a poison immune minion (recast as needed) next to a big boss (act boss, e.g.) you'd have two targets for the mats (aka sub-vines) and would therefore trigger the massive poison damage anomaly (the enabling minion would not actually care about the mat, being poison immune, but I suspect the mat would still attack them and thus be enabled to hyper-attack the boss).

Coincidentally I'd been considering building (another) rabies druid for fun (seque to fury, in order to be viable in Hell)... my thinking had been that Poison Creeper was ultimately a waste (i.e. post normal) other than as synergy, but now I'm thinking that Rabies is somewhat of a waste, given spammed maxed mats. Note that the number of sub-vines caps and the ramp up of creeper damage is slow, so once one gets a good duration, it seems (at first intuition, ymmv) far more important to control mat placement and "stacking" than to burn effort getting super high slvls for the skill.

If my hypotheses are indeed the underlying explanation for this observed phenomenon, then the "size 3" is a key constraint, essentially requiring monster crowd (i.e. pair) placement within that radius for each sub-vine you want to (repetively) hit.

To position enemies exactly in "the zone of death" (i.e. bunched very close, pair-wise, on existing spammed mats) seems to me a task that would bias Druid behavior significantly (e.g. Grizzley = bad, because of knockback; Druid = sole tank perhaps good, due to melee-type enemies clustering around him in the sweet spot). If even seems reasonable to me that a druid might forego wereform just to legally be able to cast charges of Attract (a great cluster tool).

Naturally, in party play, this cluster desire is not unknown (CE, Meteor, etc. etc.), but largely I don't think people think much about it (as clusters happen naturally and frequently for most party M.O.s that I've seen in any event).

Since 20 points in Poison Creeper isn't a huge investment, perhaps a Wind Druid build might consider it as a second form of damage.

Of course, given that slvl 1 charges recharge fees are low, I suppose this means that the Carrion Wind unique ring is situationally quite useful (the problem being, like items with charges of CE, that the number of charges is inconveniently low, and few people enjoy TPing to town often).

I suppose I should make a test barb with Carrion Wind and have him Taunt and play tease to check if a monster walking through the vines (i.e. alone, no pair in size 3 range) moves fast enough to receive a lot of damage (as per hypothesis--or if this part of my musings is off-base). I'm too lazy to do that atm, however.

edit2: making the Decoy poison immune made no difference to the effect (other than the decoy never taking damage, of course); I played a bit with spacing between the zon and decoy and the "size 3" theory certainly looks like a good fit; the creeper appears to be willing to lay a new mat as frequently as every couple of seconds (I see a 15 frame factor in the mpq, so perhaps the AI takes a 15/25ths second rest after an attack)... with the duration of the mat up (slvl) I could clearly see these had "stacked" on me (once I cast a decoy to activate the evil)--I would think the creeper is frail enough and it's AI fickle and slow enough that spamming new creepers at the feet of the target to stack mats upon is probably a far better idea.

Naturally critters like ghosts and cows that bunch up in herds would be very good candidate targets for this effect.