Poison Creeper

[Crystalion]

highest poison rate is applied for its duration if another source exists.

thnx crystallion for the research. One important point that should be searched (which I can not do) is this if you can:

what happens when 2 or more guys enter into the layered mats exactly at the same time.

Given what you've said about Hell play, it seems pretty clear to me that PC is an uber skill for norm/nm, when "properly exploited".

If dumping all the charges of Carrion Wind at once, vs. a nasty pack, isn't too spendy to repair, then that's certainly an interesting toy for high level players (probably more effective than the "Returned" effect).

But if you can't get enemies close together, it just isn't going to fly. In that sense the skill is probably weaker than slvl 1 (i.e. low radius) CE or Static Field in the "balance" department.

While I note many people looking to use CTC SF equipment, I've not heard of anyone trying to make good use of runeword Black (for CE), for instance. So I suspect your interesting discovery won't get used very much. OTOH a Fury werewolf build certainly can spare 19 points if it helps the kill rate in general (ala PMH) and vs. physically resistant or immunes in particular.

...

I was in "research"/mumble mode, so perhaps I should be a little clearer in what I believe to be true (as opposed to mixing my reports of observations and hypotheses chronologically)...

Poison is applied in an odd manner.

First off, the LCS (Lying Character Screen™) is misleading, because poison really is always in a per frame scale.

Although I don't recall that Jarulf made it clear one way or the other, I believe that "per frame" poison value (after resist) is summed into the total damage calc for an attack. (Since I'm not going to dig up his most recent relevant post nor find the code in question, you'll have to suffer along with my educated guesses...)

*Later* in special processing, that value will be compared to the target's existing I-am-poisoned-this-much-per-frame value, and overwrite it (and the frames length, appropo) if the new stuff is "better" (stronger per frame). In the case that they are exactly equal I do not know if the new length always overwrites, never overwrites, or overwrites only when the length is longer than the existing remaining length (I suspect that it is this latter). I also expect that either at this point, or via aura-like "pulse" the length will be zero'ed if the target is under the influence of a Poison Resist shrine.

The point of all this is that the initial contribution of poison to the total attack damage is usually pretty small compared to this latter effect of ongoing poison. This leads people to the simplification that "poison doesn't stack" (because the latter effect does not--mathematically it would be quite easy for it to stack "properly" in some sense, but earlier versions of D2 goofed up here and Blizzard simply stopped poison from stacking instead of getting it right).

However, if we had a zero duration poison attack to toy with (i.e. like Holy Freeze adds zero duration chill with the added cold damage) then there would be no question that poison does indeed stack (i.e. the initial single frame damage).

Now things get interesting. Because, basically, you've found a case where a poison attack will be repeated every frame, afaik.

More than that, you've found a case where a "stackable" (aka spammable) *cluster* of poison attacks will be repeated every frame.

Now these are all of the same magnitude, so if it wasn't for the tiny single frame slice of the poison damage that is applied immediately as "part" of the total damage of an attack, none of them would do anything effective, other than to keep the poison duration up (which, e.g. I believe the Rabies aura does, but, iirc, the aura applies a length which is decrementing, so it doesn't seem like it--you can discover it, however, by "curing" yourself with an antidote potion and observing your re-poisoning).

The reason, afaik, for your unusual case, is that preventing some stationary missiles from hitting the same target every frame is done by an imperfect hack (kissing cousin to the NextDelay hack). This simple and efficient hack appears to be simply storing in the missile the information of what its last collision was (possibly where and with what) so that future answers to the question "what have I collided with now?" that are the same can be discarded (in order to avoid repeatedly hitting a stationary (?) target).

There are flags for the missiles that either use this hack, or the NextDelay hack, or some other collision decision process depending on what the designer intended the effect of the missile to be. But, for example, although firewalls, shockwebs and poison mats all lay in one place on the ground to zap those upon them, the designer had a different goal (and flags therefore) in mind for each of them vis a vis their repeat hit behavior.

If I changed the damage type of a Firewall to poison, you might guess, since everyone knows "poison doesn't stack" that standing in it vs. passing through (and being poisoned by it) would have no difference in net damage. I believe such a guess would be wrong. (The reason, again, is that one frame of damage is simple applied with the attack, and a firewall attacks every frame).

So these missiles that don't move that make up a poison mat don't do much more damage than expected to a single stationary target, because the hack flagged causes them to remember to not hit that target again (jRND thot: I should have tried tiny teleports).

However these particular missiles have a very large collision radius (size 3). This means a given missile can readily hit a number of nearby targets (given the typical size of targets). When this situation occurs, the hack fails to perform as intended (i.e. implementaion obviously falls short of design intent).

So the answer to your question:

what happens when 2 or more guys enter into the layered mats exactly at the same time.

is that any time a missile finds itself in range of multiple valid targets (i.e. enemy) the hack will fail. Since I don't know the exact coding details, I'm guessing that this results in either 12.5 or 25 attacks per second per missile per target (assuming two targets in range).

Each Mat has a lot of missiles (apparently 3 at slvl 1 and another per slvl up to some max #). Knowing of the situation you're arranging to spam mats. Conceivably many dozens of missiles could be in range of a particular target (and another target).

Maybe at one time they ran into this "bug" with Shock Web and that's why they slapped such a ghastly NextDelay factor on it.

Since Blizzard has a history of balancing games "bugs" included (the ARx4 thing being a famous example) I'm sure the pathetic ramp up of damage for Poison Creeper vis a vis nm/hell is as it is because vs. crowds it is still somewhat effective (though I doubt Blizzard understood why and so I doubt they realized it was much more effective spammed).