Critical Strike Affliction Support

I have Poison linked to Ethereal Knives, can someone from GGG confirm if the follow scale the poison damage: Chaos Damage nodes, Damage Over Time nodes, Void Manipulation. The poison damage is kind of low and I'm having trouble telling if these things are properly scaling it or not. Also, is there any way to increase the duration of the poison aside from a quality Poison gem? So far it feels pretty lackluster. I want to like it, but I don't see builds built around this gem being anywhere close to top tier.

Level 40, EK + Poison + Controlled Destruction + Spell Echo

The gem really need a pvp counter somewhere.

we need a bloodgrip item type to counter this in pvp.


Coupled with bleed it is a little too strong. Probably should have a reduced effect when using bleed on the gem to push people to use the bleed/poison wheel instead.

In pve, it is very powerful. A crit build or very high melee phy 1 hit can just degen any bosses.

I can see being a way to cheese atziri and other bosses.

Super powerful on flicker crit for exemple.

I tried:

Spectral Throw->Faster Attacks->LMP->Poison

Reave->Faster Attacks->Multistrike->Poison

Frenzy->Faster Attacks->Multistrike->Poison

Passive focused on:
Attackspeed, Chaos/Phys/DOT


They all felt so bad, that i cried evritim.

I really wanted to love this gem or build around it, but
it currently feels worse than elemental hit. REALLY.

I like the idea, but it feels very underwhelming.

I'm using Bladefall + Spell Echo + Controlled Destruction + Void Manipulation + Poison.

Right now, it feels like I'm investing a lot (point-wise) in order to make this gem viable, yet it doesn't feel like it's doing anything at all. My damage is decent, but it seems to me that most of it is being dealt by the spell itself, not the poison.

One major gripe I have is that it only last 2 seconds. To me, the whole point of a DoT is to apply it and run. At 2 seconds, I constantly have to be re-applying it for it to really do anything. I may as well just continue to spam the skill. If it were at least 3-4 seconds, then maybe it might be useful to allow us to kite between casts, particularly against bosses.

Right now though, it seems like a lot of work for very little payoff.

If I had gone the elemental route, I wouldn't necessarily need to invest so many points to make it effective. I'd just have to slap on Added Fire, Herald of Ash (which I am using, by the way), and possibly Hatred. I would even be able to both ignite and freeze my targets this way.

Similar feedback. Poison takes quite a bit of nodes investment to be numerically effective. After all that, my poison should be about 45% of phys/chaos damage per hit. Yet it blows in most situations.

Most white/blue mobs are dead before the poison really stacks and kicks in. It kinda works on mobs that take longer to kill like rares and bosses, after 2 seconds of attacks you'll see their hp bar drop significantly from the DoT... but not for long!

Overall, I feel like I'd be better off using any other DPS support, enjoy instant damage and reclaim the 7 or so extra points I specced to make the poison work.

Is there any benefit to stacking the poison support gem with the Snakebite unique gloves' ability to poison with attacks on max frenzy charges? (or the 10% on the tree)

I was hoping that considering poison now stacks both (or all three) sources can apply a poison resulting in up to three dots from a single attack. Or is it the case that i now simply have a 210% chance to poison that doesnt really help me with anything?

Am I correct in assuming area-effects can't apply Poison? For example, the cloud from Caustic Arrow?

Oh right, of course! :)

Feel free to remove my posts in this thread to keep it uncluttered (I just realised it's probably not the best place to ask questions).