Poison Creeper

[Crystalion]

I've only taken Poison Creeper as far as late Nightmare, can anyone attest to using it successfully in Hell?

btw: could the druid's own minions be considered as extra monsters by the program for the purposes of calculating the traffic over the vines?

Well, if I understand what I'm seeing here, then the basic damage potential is related to the #sub-vines you can get "adjacent" to two targets (enemy! so your own minions don't help, as the vines do not target friendlies and so will not "forget" an enemy target in order to zap them next frame)... this is a factor of slvl (until the cap max. #sub-vines) and of spamming (how many mats you can lay down on top of each other, either by creeper recast, or single creeper re-attack).

This ought to mean that less than 100x the normal stated damage is practical. The normal damage of creeper is so so low by Hell standards that I hesitate to endorse even 100x!! This is completely aside from the issues, ala Blessed Hammer, of positioning this "great attack" so that it actually connects.

I can not think of a related line of research, unless, perhaps, spamming Plague Javalins might experience a similar effect (I've not looked this up for plausibility nor tested it). Most AoE attacks are meant to hit every frame or have a NextDelay. That a poison based AoE would have this oddity is, of course, likely to be overlooked, due to "poison doesn't stack" being approximately correct. Certainly someone could examine every missile (missiles.txt) to see if there is another such quirk (perhaps MvP).

I do think it is clear that this oddity is powerful enough, when understood, to explain the rapid leveling in normal of obvious pre-Rabid builds, dispite the awful damage numbers for the Creeper. Since quickly leveling to 20 or 40 has some utility (non-Classic rune rushing) this is of some interest, being, like the FireBlast/WoF race build, essentially independent of equipment. (I do not mean to shaft other race to 20/40 builds here by not mentioning them, it is just that I've done FB/WoF a number of times myself and find it really easy the whole way).

One test I did not do, that should be done, is to verify that the mats succeed in delivering their damage even though they *never* overwrite a bigger rate of poison on the target (i.e. a confirmation of my theory that the "hit slice" of the mat poison is the key here, and not the duration poison). Should this prove to be true then the mat technique (pairs of monsters) doesn't offer or suffer interference with other poison techniques (Rabies or whatever) making it valuable supplementally, even if the verdict is that it is too weak for Hell.