Are You *SURE* Poison is Working Correctly?

For that matter, are you *sure* the Maim Support gem is working correctly?

But getting to Poison first.

GreenBallsOfPoison was designed to use Infractem as an endgame bow. I thought it would initially be cool to combine Drillneck along with Poison and Frenzy Charges to deal out poison stacks quickly. While I was leveling, I was using Split Arrow.

Even after I got into Merciless (so this was before 3.0) and had 6 Frenzy Charges up, Split Arrow was killing faster than Frenzy + GMP. I asked about it in the forums and they explained the double dipping issue.

Fine, so I ripped out the Bow and Frenzy Charge nodes and picked up Projectile Nodes.

With the advent of 3.0, I had to reassign my skill points. Just to test, I first redid the build basically the way I had it previously. This turned out to be less than ideal, so I redid the tree.

(As an aside, how about letting us freely reassign points for about 24 hours after we have to deal with a reset?)

I picked up the Bow specific nodes. The current tree should be about as you see below:

https://www.pathofexile.com/fullscreen-passive-skill-tree/3.0.0/AAAABAYCAQBeAx4FLQW1BnAIiQ2NDkgRLxR1FSAWvxjbGbQfQSP2JJ0lPyaIKgsrCi2DLiMuUzBxMHwx-jKUM9k2PTfUOSU51DpCPLY_bEMxR35KfUt4TINNklFHWrlbr11oXfJiWmKsZU1qjGyMcFJw1HGhcsN0gXTtdct2gnb3en99dX8CfyuAIoTZh3aLDo19jX6Nv49PlQWa8Z2qoJ-i2aOKpuCrC7DYsTC0xbTRtQi1SLcwt7a9Nr6nwuzIDMgUyqnMBtNv037UI9nG2jvawd0N3ajoWul26mLrY-0_7g7vevVv-aT8xf66

I also changed some gear around to try to squeeze out more damage (bye bye nerfed Drillneck, hello Rare quiver). I've also made some drastic changes to my 6L setup.

(As another aside, is there a reason we can't update our 6L Infractems to the new version?)

What used to be:

Split Arrow + Faster Attacks + Slower Projectiles + Poison + Added Chaos Damage + Void Manipulation

Is now:

Split Arrow + Faster Attacks + Phys Proj Attack + Poison + Vile Toxins + Maim

(That's the result of experimentation, btw, and has the fastest kill rate.)

Even with all the tweaking, it seemed that I wasn't dealing all that much Damage over Time. Well, I recently was doing a gem leveling run and shot a monster (which I watched turn green indicating it was poisoned) for half of its life in a single shot. And the DoT barely moved the life bar while I delayed killing it.

By my estimate I should have:

From Gems:

115% More Poison/30% Increased Poison

From Trickster:

30% Increased DoT

From Skill Tree:

75% Increased DoT
76% Increased Chaos
240% Increased Damage with Poison
237% Increased Damage with Status Ailments
40% Increased Poison Duration


I would expect to see a single stack of poison inflicted by a hit which caused a loss of 50% of the monster's life actually kill the monster.

I was wondering why it seemed like most of my damage was being done by direct damage and it turns out because it was.

Am I missing something here? Shouldn't a poison focused character actually be able to kill things using poison?



Maim:

Yeah, the extra physical damage seems to be working but I'm not so sure about the Maim. Slow monsters are obviously slower but it seems to have no noticeable effect on fast monsters. When GreenBallsOfPoison, who is FrenzyBarb fast (D2 reference), gets hit with a slowing issue, he slows to a crawl. Maimed fast monsters, not so much.

With maim it's probably because it is movement speed reduced by 30%, so if something gives it increased the 30% reduced will matter less.

You know poison was nerfed to absolute oblivion and is as close to worthless as can be in 3.0, right?

Crackmonster:

I figured that was probably the issue. The question is, of course, whether that was what they intended. You would think that you don't really need to slow down the slow monsters but it would be nice to slow down the fast monsters.


PrimordialDarkness:

My understanding was that their intent was to nerf double-dipping and not poison. However, your statement seems to be accurate.

How about it, GGG, is poison supposed to still be viable?

I'm having better kill rates with all my other 6L characters and I have a 5L bow using character which has a faster kill rate (semi-Crit Triple-Herald Frenzy Raider using Lioneye's for the curious) and more life at a lower level.



(Of course, my Bitterdream Frostbolt character technically only has no more than a 4L and also has a faster kill rate than GreenBallsOfPoison but we won't mention that.)

Poison is no longer viable in anyway shape or form.

Feel free to browse my post and bumb if you feel like it.

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1960734/page/1

But yes, all DoT's are in a less then desired state at the moment.

Peace,

-Boem-

Hey guys remember when they nerfed poison cuz apparently it does like 1m dps or some shit? yeah yep

beta wise lul

Poison is plenty viable right now, check the shadow section of the forum if you don't believe me.

One hit won't do as much, poison isn't like Bleed, it has to stack to get the most out of it. That could be a big part of it.

As per the suggestion, I did check out the Shadow section. I did find the following:

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1956844

1. As a mostly solo self-found player, I'm not going to be using the suggested gear.

2. However, it did clarify a point for me that I should pull out skill gems which improve the hit damage (kind of a stupid way to nerf double-dipping, but fine). I'll play around with this:

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Tornado Shot - Greater Multiple Projectiles - Deadly Ailments - Unbound Ailments - Physical Projectile Attack Damage - Swift Affliction

Swap Swift Affliction for Vile Toxins before boss fights for optimal DPS.


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and see if it makes a difference.