Viper Strike

So, been away a while.
Is Viper Strike still the lame duck it was before?
Because, at a first glance, it sure looks the part.
I guess hit-and-Run dots are now purple instead of green. :P

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UnDeaD_CyBorG wrote:

So, been away a while.
Is Viper Strike still the lame duck it was before?
Because, at a first glance, it sure looks the part.
I guess hit-and-Run dots are now purple instead of green. :P

Can't tell you personally if it's changed, as I didn't start working with VS until the latest league. But I can tell you that it makes boss fights drastically easier, especially those with lots of stuff you have to move around and dodge.

I WB through the boss as they start they're big swing, hit with VS a few times, WB back, VS a few more times. the 8 second duration means that the boss is continuing to take damage while I dodge, and hitting him again a few times refreshes the duration and stacks. I'm really enjoying it as a single target attack. it makes Labrynth bosses a walk in the park. This is the first build I've had that I could cruise through Lab at level with little to no issues. most my other builds (my spark included) had to over-level the lab to make it.

NOTE: It's not my cover-all ability. My AoE is Sunder, so I use this for single target only. VS - Melee Phys damage - faster attacks - Void manipulation.

still not sure if I should be using VM in that setup or added chaos damage. input on that appreciated!

EDIT: nevermind, answered my own question. with my build (no bonus chaos damage from passives) VM exceeds ACD at around 650 chaos damage (both @ 20). so since I'm already past that, VM it is.

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Temjiu wrote:

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UnDeaD_CyBorG wrote:

So, been away a while.
Is Viper Strike still the lame duck it was before?
Because, at a first glance, it sure looks the part.
I guess hit-and-Run dots are now purple instead of green. :P

Can't tell you personally if it's changed, as I didn't start working with VS until the latest league. But I can tell you that it makes boss fights drastically easier, especially those with lots of stuff you have to move around and dodge.

I WB through the boss as they start they're big swing, hit with VS a few times, WB back, VS a few more times. the 8 second duration means that the boss is continuing to take damage while I dodge, and hitting him again a few times refreshes the duration and stacks. I'm really enjoying it as a single target attack. it makes Labrynth bosses a walk in the park. This is the first build I've had that I could cruise through Lab at level with little to no issues. most my other builds (my spark included) had to over-level the lab to make it.

NOTE: It's not my cover-all ability. My AoE is Sunder, so I use this for single target only. VS - Melee Phys damage - faster attacks - Void manipulation.

still not sure if I should be using VM in that setup or added chaos damage. input on that appreciated!

EDIT: nevermind, answered my own question. with my build (no bonus chaos damage from passives) VM exceeds ACD at around 650 chaos damage (both @ 20). so since I'm already past that, VM it is.

How are you doing 650 chaos damage per hit without any chaos passives? In most cases unless you went glass cannon SC build ACD is a bigger contributor than VM. If you're using a mirrored weapon or went extremely high-dps low-tank then you might get VM to contribute more.

Also, VS doesn't work the way you described. It doesn't "refresh stacks", it applies the poison debuff every time you hit, at a timer of 8s instead of the normal 2s for regular poison hits. So very good for boss monsters yes, but there's no need for you to worry about refreshing stacks or anything like that - just hit him when you can.

And to answer the guy's question up top, no, it looks like they are content to let viper strike rot in the gutter as a garbage tier skill forever. It has absurdly poor clear speed no matter how you build it, only being good at bosses with certain setups (think flame totem + vaal skellies + faster casting + poison with 3 growing agony jewels) - setups which requre too much investment and still only return mediocre payoffs on bosses and don't pay off at all during regular clears of areas. At some point you'd think GGG would look at the skill as there probably aren't more than a few people using the skill regularly in game at any given time. It's kind of upsetting.

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Legatus1982 wrote:

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Temjiu wrote:

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UnDeaD_CyBorG wrote:

So, been away a while.
Is Viper Strike still the lame duck it was before?
Because, at a first glance, it sure looks the part.
I guess hit-and-Run dots are now purple instead of green. :P

Can't tell you personally if it's changed, as I didn't start working with VS until the latest league. But I can tell you that it makes boss fights drastically easier, especially those with lots of stuff you have to move around and dodge.

I WB through the boss as they start they're big swing, hit with VS a few times, WB back, VS a few more times. the 8 second duration means that the boss is continuing to take damage while I dodge, and hitting him again a few times refreshes the duration and stacks. I'm really enjoying it as a single target attack. it makes Labrynth bosses a walk in the park. This is the first build I've had that I could cruise through Lab at level with little to no issues. most my other builds (my spark included) had to over-level the lab to make it.

NOTE: It's not my cover-all ability. My AoE is Sunder, so I use this for single target only. VS - Melee Phys damage - faster attacks - Void manipulation.

still not sure if I should be using VM in that setup or added chaos damage. input on that appreciated!

EDIT: nevermind, answered my own question. with my build (no bonus chaos damage from passives) VM exceeds ACD at around 650 chaos damage (both @ 20). so since I'm already past that, VM it is.

How are you doing 650 chaos damage per hit without any chaos passives? In most cases unless you went glass cannon SC build ACD is a bigger contributor than VM. If you're using a mirrored weapon or went extremely high-dps low-tank then you might get VM to contribute more.

Also, VS doesn't work the way you described. It doesn't "refresh stacks", it applies the poison debuff every time you hit, at a timer of 8s instead of the normal 2s for regular poison hits. So very good for boss monsters yes, but there's no need for you to worry about refreshing stacks or anything like that - just hit him when you can.

And to answer the guy's question up top, no, it looks like they are content to let viper strike rot in the gutter as a garbage tier skill forever. It has absurdly poor clear speed no matter how you build it, only being good at bosses with certain setups (think flame totem + vaal skellies + faster casting + poison with 3 growing agony jewels) - setups which requre too much investment and still only return mediocre payoffs on bosses and don't pay off at all during regular clears of areas. At some point you'd think GGG would look at the skill as there probably aren't more than a few people using the skill regularly in game at any given time. It's kind of upsetting.

Thanks for the info. I probably should have taken a closer look at my tree. I meant that I didn't specifically take the chaos hub...but in building my shadow I took the chaos passives at the start of his tree (was thinking of them as physical passives only for some reason). So I do have 56% increased chaos damage from my tree. add to that the controlled destruction gem as part of the skill setup. and it all added up to some nice chaos damage on my tooltip.

The times I see it being productive is in places like lab, where I need to spend time avoiding lots of bad stuff. Yes, it's SC and moderate glass cannon build (mostly avoidance and movement as defenses. moderate evasion and dodge passives).

whats ACD? still don't have all the acronyms down yet.
EDIT: Disregard. Figured it out.

And I would like them to take a slightly closer look at single target skills. They need a bigger punch to take into account that they are severely limited. It's just far to easy to buff AoE skills right now, and w/o available gem slots, AoE skills take preference over single target in your bigger gem setups.

So is it true that viper strike doesn't stack with adder's touch or Noxious strike? What's the interaction between these if you have those passives and use viper strike?

Gave this skill another try in hardcore prophecy using the threshold jewels. No idea WHY I gave it another try, but no lack of effort on my part to make another melee skill abomination useable. I recently deleted the character after dying to random traps in uber lab (my own fault), but if I thought the skill was good I'd reroll and keep playing. Unfortunately it's not.

Here's the problems with it as it stands now:
1. Threshold jewel is ebola + aids + black death, inflicted on the user.
1A- Placement is poor - only two of the four possible locations are anywhere near a place you're likely to path on the tree. The other two will typically require a 5-9 point extra investment due to the placement of the needed dex nodes - you have to travel ALL THE WAY INTO DUELIST START to activate the bottom one, which typically means at least 9 points investment even if you're down there nearby. Horrifying.
1B- Scales with time on target, which is the last thing you want in POE.

2. 8s of dot damage - Again, time on target is bad. Also I recall someone from GGG saying that a mob that is more than 2 screens away (roughly) is no longer "active" and will not die even if it was going to, meaning playing in the most efficient way with the gem is counter to the way the game is meant to be played, or if not that - counter to the software limitations of the game engine. You would want to apply some poison stacks then move onto another pack and let the poison do the work, but you can't because you'll leave range. Scaling duration is not the most efficient use of scaling for this skill, but if you happen to have it this situation is only EXACERBATED, not improved, and you simply are no longer playing the game efficiently. It's almost as if duration nodes are BAD for viper strike.

3. Scaling the skill is difficult - ideally you'd get frenzy charges, then attack speed, then crit, then phys/chaos. Problem is frenzy charges are scattered throughout the tree, threshold jewels are scattered throughout the tree, and attack speed nodes are scattered throughout the tree. No centralized nodes exist for this skill outside the phys/chaos hybrid nodes at shadow start, and these are THE LEAST EFFICIENT nodes to pick up for the build once you've added growing agony. The amount of skillgrimmage required to scale the gem is insane. And if you use growing agony and some poison-stacking gimmick - well again, that requires time on target, which is bad.

There's more but I'm too tired. I'd like to see someone from GGG playing this skill and compare their clear speed to the current meta - flameblast, CoC discharge, etc. I'd like to see what GGG is doing that everyone else is apparently missing, because this gem looks terribad no matter how I try to scale it. Obviously the entire community is missing something here, because nobody has even bothered to look at a growing agony gem since it was introduced. Or at viper strike, for that matter.

This gem has a threshold jewel and still nobody is even giving it a quick second look. And I realize the damage potential of the gem, especially in parties where multiple people are stacking poisons using multiple abused methods. The gem is designed to be slow and that is a problem in this game. Instead of the threshold jewel scaling attack damage per stack, what it should be doing is applying a portion of the poison damage instantly instead of over time. And even then it wouldn't be worth slotting over just using bladefall or blade vortex with poison support, even on a growing agony build.

I have to agree that VS is very overlooked in terms of its viability, I'm not one for long rants so I'll keep this short.
Growing agony is the most underwhelming threshold jewel in POE and needs to be changed for it to become useful in any way.
VS needs to be changed in some manner, personally I would change the poison for VS to deal %50 physical damage over time and %50 chaos over time. I'm suggesting this because it would focus the skill tree pathing to the duelist area which is where most VS builds actually head toward (with the exception of assassins who, in my experience, just focus on power/frenzy charges to support VS).

By doing these small changes it would make the skill more unique in its usefullness (particularly in pvp) and increase its intended effectiveness without having the skill be abused and overpowered.

I liked the old version of Viper Strike so much more than the current version. Sure, it was weak, but it at least scaled damage in a unique way.

Now it is the same as most other melee skills. Use a dagger, max critical strike chance and critical damage multiplier, and that is it.

Surely GGG could have made it a viable skill without turning it into the same as any other melee dagger skill.

So with Atlas, Viper Strike gets a damage buff, but a poison nerf. Atlas brings us more map bosses with gated health, which nullifies all damage over time at certain points. The cherry on top are the Guardians who are immune to poison.

I would like for GGG to take another look at poison/bleed immunity, because that just totally shuts down this skill.