Enhancing Poison

Our design team is always looking to find new ways to let players build and customise their characters. Along with a host of other changes and additions coming in the next major patch, we're enhancing Path of Exile's poison system.

Poison has been in the game for a long time, starting out on the Adder's Touch passive as a themed extra reward, granting 20% of the attack's damage as Chaos Damage over two seconds. We later introduced poison on a few unique items, and although it did offer a damage increase, it was never really a choice - more of an additional benefit for taking something that was already useful. Bino's Kitchen Knife made great use of the mechanic, though didn't care as much about dealing damage as it did healing using it.

We've decided to modify the poison mechanic in a few ways, and introduce tools to let dexterity-aligned attack characters use and specialize in poison without having to use daggers or a limited set of unique items. Here is a list of the changes we're trying out:

Poison can now stack! Rather than dealing the damage of the highest hit (as Ignite does), poison can now have multiple stacks. This means that every hit counts, rather than just the occasional big hit. This also lets it scale much better towards end-game, and differentiates it from other damage-over-time effects.

Poison can now only be applied by Chaos and Physical damage. This is for both thematic reasons, and to have it act as a reward for builds that have less of a focus on auras and elemental supports for damage boosts.

We're introducing a support gem that lets skills poison, and increases poison damage. This will also mean physical spells like Ethereal Knives can be supported to cause poison, giving that kind of build more options and reinforcing the Shadow's arcane assassin theme.

We're introducing passive skills in the tree for Chaos, Damage over Time, and specific increases to Poison. Here is the poison-specific notable passive:



Viper Strike now always applies poison instead of its own buff, with a much higher base duration. This lets players really enhance their damage in a big way by specializing in poison. We're also improving the power of Melee Splash, and this will give the skill more longevity. The skill also deals much more initial hit damage.

Poison Arrow will not be changed to use the new mechanics, and will be renamed to avoid confusion.

We'll continue to see new uniques, jewels, and more that let players use poison as a core component of their character, and more opportunities and rewards for damage-over-time characters in general. Keep an eye on pathofexile.com for more teasers to come!