Embrace the Darkness interaction with poisonous gas clouds

Hello, I have found that the poison damage from gas clouds are being taken in the order of 1) Energy shield, 2) Reserved as Darkness, 3) Health.

the worse issue is that the damage is reserved all at once from 100% to 0% like the ward mechanic.

A while back (not sure if it ever got resolved) players were reporting that Darkness failed to account for player resistance. Things like burning ground/Poison would chunk their Darkness layer as if the character wasn't wearing any gear.

What I am experiencing isn't even related to resistance though....

I was testing it by standing in the on-death gas clouds from zombie mobs, and I can see my ES drain. When that ends, the Darkness would go from full to 0 then my HP will start to go down.

With the ascendency class rework, I was trying to gauge the viability of this mechanic, but it's bugged or intended to function this way, then why even keep the Darkness reservation nodes...

Its possible some interaction is bugging the order of operations to make it eat ES before checking for unreserved Darkness. Idk your defense numbers, but are Darkness and ES degrading at the same rate (say, 100/second)? If not, then the resistance bug may still be in effect.

assuming this all gets fixed and Darkness stops being a bad meme, be sure to stock up on items like Original Sin to scale your Chaos Resist (and thus +%Maximum Darkness) sky-high!

I have 0 chaos res on that test character right now. 225 ES, 348 Darkness.
The ES would drain out in about 2~3 seconds, then the 348 darkness is full reserved in less than half a second.

I think the reserve mechanic being a facsimile of the leech instance with each "hit" being a reserve instance. The reserved darkness doesn't seem to recharge or regen like the other pools, but they become unreserved in chunks.

So when it considers the burning ground/gas cloud as a "hit", it reserves the x amount? Kinda spaghetti code there....=\

Here is a video of it: https://streamable.com/75pth9.

that's certainly aberrant behavior

I hope GGG investigates!