PoE2 Early Access : Poison damage clarification
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The chaos damage nodes do not appear to have much of an impact unless you are using chaos damage as your primary means of damage (eg: Cultist Bow), and only appears to scale off of the initial damage. It is hard to tell if Despair or Wither has any impact at all, as the difference with or without them is negligible.
My testing has been with a Poison Bow Witch that went for chaos damage nodes (before I realized poison had been changed from how it worked in PoE1). Getting through Cruel has been a slog, since there is no way to increase my damage until I next the next tier of Cultist Bow, and bows can't roll chaos damage. IMO, investing into chaos damage is not worth it. It seems like they wanted Poison to be its own thing, but also didn't want to introduce a 5th resistance type so they made it into this weird hybrid of physical-to-chaos-but-not-really-chaos damage. :) |
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Yes, indeed. Chaos damage only affects poison if your attack/skill that triggers the poison does chaos damage by itself, or with the weapon used (e.g. Cultist bow, as you said).
Sadly, chaos damage-based poison attacks do not seem to be in a good place as the Cultist bow is such a low-power base. In many cases, as supported by some unique items, it's preferable to stack physical damage over chaos damage. Maybe it will change with the Shadow and daggers/traps skills. I have not logged on my Pathfinder in over a month though, so I didn't see if there were any changes to poison damage as a whole. Last edited by pyrocyborg#0256 on Jan 24, 2025, 12:55:00 PM
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Chaos damage modifiers still affect poison concoction if that's the way you go with it
Apparently the cultist bow even increases it's damage when equipped though I'm pretty sure that's a bug, not that it matters the widowhail build is the only really decent at to scale pconc anyway |
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simple the only thing to effect the dot damage other than a larger base skill hit of phy/+chaos is poison damage flat / chaos damage over time multi for one and 2 though in 1 there is no cap so you can apply as many as you can before the timer on the first ends. for 2 if you have multi stacks via items skill points all timers running separate with the highest always taking precedent over lower new stacks but still the same formula P/+C=dot+dot% increases+ dot multi mods=end dot
(edit dot time increase i do believe is best in 2 but in 1 depends heavily on the build theory your following. any chaos or phys in tree will only apply to hit damage and may not be the best points spent depending if you are spell or attack based poison) Last edited by hippieballz240#0709 on Jan 24, 2025, 5:53:03 PM
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" Nothing of the above actually works. To damage something with poison/bleed/ignite, you need to hit it hard. And if you hit hard, you no longer need the ailment, because the thing just dies. (Poison concoction left aside, of course.) I tried to poison enemies high damage crossbow shots, combined with "100% extra chaos gamble" from the dark monk. The truth is - if it triggers, the rare monster dies anyway. And if it doesn't trigger - the poison deals no damage. Logical non-sense from GGG part. |
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Tying ailment damage or magnitude to the initial/base hit damage is just plain odd and doesn't work that well outside of some very specific skills, even with high magnitude stat. I get that it's to go against high-speed stacking builds (i.e. if an ailment does 1000 dmg per stack per second regardless of how hard you hit, it's better to attack fast), but limiting the number of ailments stacks just make many ailments builds or skills fall flat compared to raw damage ones.
The only Bow skill I feel was "fine" when it comes to poison stacking is Gas arrow, as it could stack multiple times and kill almost anything that came in contact with the gas cloud, whether on impact or a few seconds after that. Worked fine up to T14 maps or so, didn't try anything over that frequently enough with that character to have an opinion on the matter, but with a better bow than my crappy one, it would probably be better. Anyway, the rest of the time, I totally agree : If you hit the enemy hard enough for the ailment to be actually strong enough, it's probably already dead. With one stack only, Ignite usually makes no sense, and unless I'm mistaken, neither does Bleed as it pretty much does damage according to the the strongest bleed stack value/magnitude, then extend the duration if a new/lower bleed happens. Last edited by pyrocyborg#0256 on Jan 31, 2025, 3:26:24 PM
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" Poison is an ailment which inflicts Chaos Damage over Time. Ailments are a family of common debuffs. Contagion spreads all stacks of poison, as they are chaos damage over time debuffs. Both based on the description, and based on practical knowledge; my Poison Ranger was using it to spread 4 stacks of poison consistently and without issue. Worth noting that it also spreads the secondary effects associated with said poison - I ran gas cloud with corrosion (the armor shred doesn't help the poison damage but does help the physical damage dealt by other skills like toxic growth) and poisonburst arrow with bursting plague, and as long as both stacks were on enemies both effects were spread via contagion without issue. Easiest way to guarantee that was to have comorbidity on the poisonburst arrow and lead with the gas cloud. As a note Curses (a debuff) with Decaying Hex (enemy takes chaos damage over time while under the curse) also then qualify for and are spread by contagion, despite not natively qualifying without Decaying Hex. And it's the curse itself that spreads, not just the decay effect. Though also a note, chaos resistance reductions such as via Despair do not seem to impact poison damage. If you have two identical enemies, afflict one with despair, but not the other, and poison both at the same time via Gas Cloud or a similar effect they'll have taken the same damage once the poison runs its course. |
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