Poison from different attacks

[Butch27]

I thought this had been addressed before, but I couldn't find it by searching...

If I throw a plague javelin with high poison rate and duration, then switch to a bow with a lower rate and duration, will the timer completely reset, or does the higher damage take precedence? I don't want to short-change myself.

thanks

[adeyke]

The poison with a higher rate will take precedence. So your bow poison damage would simply be ignored.

[Wyrm]

Was there ever a time when newer poison damage would simply override (and subsequently negate the rest of) pre-existing poison? I thought I remember that being the case sometime.

[adeyke]

I don't know about old versions, but in 1.09 and 1.10, that only happens when the new poison has a higher rate. This can still be a bad thing, though. If you had a 100 damage per second poison over 10 seconds and a 101 damage per second poison over 1 second, the second one would replace the first and thus drastically reduce the total amount of damage.

[Griselda]

It was bugging me, because I knew I used to know the answer, so I just had to look it up. I did some tests in a very early version of D2 here. A second poison attack with a lower rate of damage was ignored, but a second attack with the same rate and duration as the first seemed to replace the first poison attack.

People talked about the second attack negating the first, but I think what they meant was that, with poison, they could never increase the rate of damage that was done to the monster.

That is, you could have an attack that did 1 damage/frame to the monster for 200 frames (8 seconds). If you hit the monster again with the same attack after 100 frames, you would still be doing only 1 damage per frame to the monster, not 2/frame. But, the poison would last until 200 frames after the second attack, not the first. So, the first attack only mattered until you made the second attack.

The way that multiple sources of poison stacked in the same attack changed in a later patch, but I don't think that a lower rate poison ever replaced a higher rate one.

-Griselda

[Butch27]

I was worried that a couple of charms would negate my precious PJ. I feel better now.