Viper Strike

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Incompetent wrote:

The new Viper Strike has a disgustingly high damage potential in a boss fight.

What?
Obscenely high DPS with crit daggers bosses atziri die in less than 2 seconds (for example
Frenzy.
Viper Strike starts to give out damage better than other skills for at least 4 seconds. What did you find indecent?

It is better to add the conversion of 50% of the total damage in the chaos. Or return to the old principle of viper strike.

And all this skill needed to shine were only 1-2 chaos pen nodes properly placed...

I'm making a shadow build using viper strike at beyond league...

I allready take some chaos dmg and dot nodes

My build http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgYAsNii2cgU9W9qjBa_D6uxsyaVbWxTNe1BYeK1SDY9m7Wmf1VL44SdqsM6doJirGyMieDKSrTRyCNvnlFMyAwFk4MJ8bOsR0kTS1d9W8DjKk0_JxUgSsgi4izpbqpH4t0NtfLQgVuv_MU1kqQ5Tip462eg2L0ppQqbh3bnCkp973rTfn11eK7-ukjuG6094rfT18ujiiP2TZKNfQ==

Should I try another skill?

Anyone knows the old Damage Values of Viper Strike before the changes?
Would like to compare it, but can't find it anymore.

I have a 40ish Viper Strike Scion built entirely on duration based skills (VS, TC, FW, SM, AA etc). I fully realize that I am not running end game maps and the change to VS was intended to improve the late game scaling. Keeping that in mind, my feedback is that VS lost what made it fun. VS was fun because it was different, both build wise and play style wise. It functioned more like a spell because it was so dependent on base damage, which made it very difficult to build around. I accepted that challenge and that was part of the fun for me. I like oddball builds. This is now more or less fixed. Not my cup of tea, but I can't argue the logic.

The main problem I have is that the play style old VS created is completely destroyed. It used to be a very guerrilla tactic play style. Get in, get stacks on your target and get out. More importantly this was a skill that had a massive damage per hit ratio which meant that ASp was more of a defensive stat than offensive; The quicker you got your stacks, the sooner you were able to get to safety. Now it's a very generic "damage scales off of attack speed" skill which means you have to stick around to keep your damage up. It's not very different than Puncture now and I'd argue that Puncture is better and I hardly ever see puncture used, especially on a melee build.

Here is my suggestion on how to change VS to still make it scale-able but give it back its old play style (which was fun... at least for me).

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Hits the enemy, adding some of your physical damage as Chaos damage. The enemy is afflicted with a toxin that converts some of your physical damage to chaos damage over time that can stack. Requires a claw, dagger or sword.

100% chance to debuff enemy
50% of physical damage converted into debuff damage
Debuff deals 75% of its damage per second as chaos damage
Debuff lasts 7 seconds
Debuff stacks are/are not limited (based on balance)
Adds (scaling % per gem level) physical damage as chaos damage
Increased (scaling % per gem level) physical damage
Quality gives increased attack speed

I do not expect these numbers to stick. I tried to keep them relatively close to my perception of "balanced" but they probably need tweaking. However, the key points here are that the debuff applies every attack and physical damage is converted into chaos damage over time for a larger amount of damage per hit.

I am not pitching the numbers so much as the concept but let's do some math with the numbers I suggested. If we took an attack that deals 100 physical damage and applied it to VS at level 1 (assume 0% scaling at level 1 gem) it would deal: 50 physical damage instantly and 37.5 chaos damage per second over 7 seconds for a grand total of 312.5 damage per hit. If this means that scaling wise there needs to be a cap on the number of debuffs somewhere between 5 and 20 that would be fine.

If these new mechanics scale too high with Melee Splash then make it so that the debuff is only applied to the "main target" with Melee Splash but the added chaos damage still splashes. Conceptually it may not be bad to let VS double dip and convert 50% of physical AND chaos damage into the debuff damage. Not sure how that would work for balance purposes.

I don't understand why they didn't go all the way with the chaosification of this skill. If they do want it to scale I feel they should've gone a bit more interesting than it currently is. I feel like making the skill more like other conversion skills would be alot more interesting.

Let's say something like this

Viper Strike
Skill deals 100% of Base damage
80% of Physical damage is converted into Chaos damage.
100% chance to apply debuff.
Debuff deals 25% of Chaos damage dealt per second.
7 Second Duration
Levels increase physical damage by 3% per level.
Quality increases conversion to Chaos damage by 0.5% per quality percent.

This would allow you to actually scale your Viper Strike to somewhat interesting amounts. Those chaos damage nodes that previously weren't all that good compared to increasing your Physical damage? Now they should be far far more efficient since they would double dip the same way Fire damage does for Igniting targets.

Maybe a change like this would be far too large an undertaking as of right now. If this is impossible maybe we could at the very least get rid of the RNG part of applying a debuff. This is the part that completely messes up this skill for me. Perhaps lowering the damage to 15% of the initial hit would be enough.

That's it for me, some ranting/suggestions before going off to bed is always nice.

Imo, splitting into 2 gems would be the way. I like new one, though its obviously gives nothing exept more defence against reflect than f.e. dual strike. But i love that stacks are infinite, love that. Some balance tweaks would be nice, though i didn't make it to endgame yet, maybe something will change till then.
Keep infinite stacks, it rocks!

Why lifesteal gem doesn't work from dot damage?(((


Poe wiki has an explanation that dot damage is based on physical damage portion of initial hit, though skill gem tells us about "Hit Damage" not the physical damage. Someone has clarifications about that?

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XpiH wrote:

Why lifesteal gem doesn't work from dot damage?

Lifesteal has never worked on degeneration. All DoT damage in PoE is considered degeneration. For example puncture deals damage on hit and procs a bleed (physical damage degeneration). Lifesteal works for the initial hit on puncture but not the bleed damage. The same applies for VS. Lifesteal works on the initial hit but not the degeneration.

Secondly, last I knew passives giving lifesteal and lifesteal on weapons only apply to physical damage. The lifesteal support gem will lifesteal all non-degeneration damage done by the linked skill(s).

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Zilquinn wrote:

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XpiH wrote:

Why lifesteal gem doesn't work from dot damage?

Lifesteal has never worked on degeneration. All DoT damage in PoE is considered degeneration. For example puncture deals damage on hit and procs a bleed (physical damage degeneration). Lifesteal works for the initial hit on puncture but not the bleed damage. The same applies for VS. Lifesteal works on the initial hit but not the degeneration.

Secondly, last I knew passives giving lifesteal and lifesteal on weapons only apply to physical damage. The lifesteal support gem will lifesteal all non-degeneration damage done by the linked skill(s).

Poe wiki has an explanation that dot damage is based on physical damage portion of initial hit, though skill gem tells us about "Hit Damage" not the physical damage, maybe you also know the way it works?

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XpiH wrote:

Poe wiki has an explanation that dot damage is based on physical damage portion of initial hit, though skill gem tells us about "Hit Damage" not the physical damage, maybe you also know the way it works?

The wiki is not always correct. The skill gem in game should always be correct. Basically, if you use VS with a weapon that also does lightning and cold damage, the lightning and cold damage also count towards the damage the degen is based on.

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Zilquinn wrote:

The main problem I have is that the play style old VS created is completely destroyed. It used to be a very guerrilla tactic play style. Get in, get stacks on your target and get out. More importantly this was a skill that had a massive damage per hit ratio

I thought about my previous post a bit more. I do realize that Puncture still has this play style, but I feel weird building puncture without a bow or two handed sword. VS made me feel good about using claws. I will probably try switching my VS build to puncture now... but it feels wrong.