Poison Creeper

[Crystalion]

Do poison creeper and rabies work in tandem? That is, if a monster is standing on the ivy matt of the PC and getting poisoned and then is given rabies, will both rabies and poison from PC affect the monster or will only the highest source of damage apply?

iirc (no time to double check) Rabies is implemented as an aurastate (but with a couple of "missiles" involved). Perhaps re-infection is attempted at 4 frame intervals (give yourself a mess of antidote potions and try to see for yourself how fast you get re-infected).

*If* the re-infection is done as an attack regardless of whether you currently have the Rabies aurastate, then I believe you'll take a (one frame) slice of poison damage from the attack, even if, as far as the duration goes, "poison doesn't stack".

The RabiesContagion missile does the LastCollide hack (but not NextDelay) and has a size of only 1, so unless we're overlapping ghost type monsters I don't see much opportunity for it to be even possible for Rabies to have a "stacking with itself" oddity like Poison Creeper mats can.

To answer your other question, since you used the " highest source of damage" phrase that simplified "poison doesn't stack" people use as a mantra, I will reiterate:

When an attack "succeeds" part of the "immediate" damage dealt will be one frames worth of whatever Poison damage is part of the attack. No issue of stacking or not exists to qualify this statement.

Yes, this means that if a target has a high damage long lasting poison on it and you dink it repeatedly with your pathetic poison damage attack that you are, in fact, doing (a little bit of) damage.

This also means that the "weak" poison from the Mats, when in overdrive mode (monsters close enough together) will do it's magic (at full force, because the effect is due to repeated attacks every frame) even if some other stonger poison (rabies, in your question) is in force.

However, in case it also wasn't clear, the Poison Creeper mats are pretty lame, even at super high slvls, in Hell, if you don't have the victims in close proximity on mat(s). In normal, however, they are pretty decent even then, if you have a little patience (and do something absurd, like my experimental build, who, at clvl 19, has slvl 19 Poison Creeper... in act 4 atm).

So, if you want to build a Rabies Druid, without using the Carrion Wind synergy cheese, you can certainly start life untwinked by pumping Poison Creeper a lot. Eventually, though PC and Rabies will help, you're going to need a decent weapon and Fury or some other use for your remaining (limited) skill points to cope with Hell (and Poison Immunes even sooner).

...

But I've played with a Rabies Druid before (I didn't know about mat mechanics and the value of bunched victims and stacking mats though)... so if I continue my clvl 19 experiment, it will be to put 1 pt. into Bear, prereqs, Shock Wave, get some +skills gear, and do an Armageddon build. The theory there being that the Bear (with some HP boost) is allowed to cast: Shock Wave, Poison Creeper, Armageddon at will, and that these latter two both wish for tame stationary targets (courtesy of SW).