Viper Strike

New skill idea : viper shot

Guess it's unlikely given the presence of poison arrow, but still think it would be cool to have since it would pair with the poison cloud very nicely

Well, this skill is useless starting at around lvl 6x. At least as a main skill.

That's most unfortunate because you lured me(and prolly many others) into trying a build around it by having all those DoT and chaos damage passives. Made me waste my time and currency.

Does not make sense to have so many chaos resistant mobs running around without having anything to penetrate that.

The problem with this skill is its damage sources: your skill tree has Chaos and DoT%. The only other skills that share both of those sources are... Desecrate and Poison Arrow. You basically have to weapon swap if you want to dedicate your character to this.

And that's a downer. Viper Strike can't be a primary skill, you need an additional damage source (sword dagger or claw%) and only splash into half of the available Chaos and DoT% and use Viper Strike as an accessory.

Basically it needs a buddy skill that overlaps its damage sources somewhat. Direct damage chaos stab maybe, or have Viper Strike deal an additional flat +chaos damage to targets with four or more poison charges on them.

This isn't like the fluidity we had in Diablo 2 where you can pick nearly any two skills and max them - when I'm using Double Strike with Viper Strike, I'm making one of them weaker to make the other one stronger.

And when the amount of damage gained from half-way speccing Viper Strike caps out at around +9,000 damage over 8 seconds, and a single 10% physical damage node nets around +3,800 damage (with a mediocre weapon) over 8 seconds which counts toward leech, you can't really justify it.

So 0 spec Viper Strike is like 7000 dps on chaos resistance bosses. Only worthwhile if your main skill's under 7k damage (while walking around with max level 20 skill gems apparantly) and isn't keeping you alive with its leech. Not feeling it.

Things might be a little different if there were more Chaos% on the tree for Added Chaos Damage. Instead of DoT% nodes. Really the DoT% seems... spurious. Puncture, Searing Bond, Ignite, all have better source% options that already exist.

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dyneol wrote:

Well, this skill is useless starting at around lvl 6x. At least as a main skill.

You are using Melee Splash with Concentrated Effect of course?

Should be ~2500 a second to 50% resistant mooks. Around 3300 if you have a +3 to it from the weapon or Empower. +40% on white mooks with the Vulnerability curse.

That's still over 25,000 damage a second vs 0 regen guys. If we didn't have to stand around and wait for things to die before collecting the lewt, it would be perfectly fine.

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LimitedRooster wrote:

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dyneol wrote:

Well, this skill is useless starting at around lvl 6x. At least as a main skill.

You are using Melee Splash with Concentrated Effect of course?

Should be ~2500 a second to 50% resistant mooks. Around 3300 if you have a +3 to it from the weapon or Empower. +40% on white mooks with the Vulnerability curse.

That's still over 25,000 damage a second vs 0 regen guys. If we didn't have to stand around and wait for things to die before collecting the lewt, it would be perfectly fine.

As others already stated, even if you get all the proper items and passives, the damage simply does not cut it in late game due to tons of NPC having high chaos resistance.

give chaos damage in general an effect similar to elemental effects, that reduces chaos resistance on the target hit, then give viper strike the ability to proliferate that effect to all targets with viper strike charges on them

should make chaos damage a bit more viable in general, and give viper strike an additional advantage, to offset the penalty of being melee

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Oaken wrote:

give chaos damage in general an effect similar to elemental effects, that reduces chaos resistance on the target hit, then give viper strike the ability to proliferate that effect to all targets with viper strike charges on them

should make chaos damage a bit more viable in general, and give viper strike an additional advantage, to offset the penalty of being melee

That would be nice. Also how about passives that add +1 to max viper charges ?

This skill should work with bows, I don't see why it has to be melee only.

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Vipermagi wrote:

Poison Arrow.

Haven't been on for weeks, saw the Verdant armor skin (which is absolutely amazing, well done GGG!), knew I wanted a ranger build with that armor so I thought of Viper Strike for single target, poison arrow for AoE and bear trap to keep them in poison arrow cloud. Amazing I thought, this might be the build I'll play to 90+.

To my dismay, Viper Strike don't work with bows.. The 'fun-as-hell' build I saw in my mind doesn't work :(