Question on Poison and Chaos Damage
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I've got a bit of an odd build, a Poison Bow Witch. The idea was to boost the Chaos damage with all of the Chaos nodes, but then I found out that the Poison/Gas Arrow damage is based on the base damage (typically physical) and isn't affected by +Chaos Damage even though its chaos damage (insert Jackie Chan confused meme here). So then I got a Cultist Bow (which has base chaos damage) and my DPS went way up. Of course, since bows can't roll extra chaos damage, it also has all sorts of other damage rolls on it (go figure): 36-59 Chaos, 2-5 Physical, 14-28 Fire, 6-10 Cold, 1-35 Lightning (plus some Accuracy and Light Radius because of course they're rolled).
I also picked up Dark Effigy (with Withering Touch), Despair, and Withering Presence, but I can't tell if they're doing anything. It seems that the +Chaos Damage nodes are improving the Gas Arrow damage, but it does not appear that these abilities are increasing the damage dealt. However, the Chaos Infusion support in Gas Arrow does seem to be affecting it. I also picked up a few Increased Magnitude of Poison you inflict nodes, but those didn't seem to affect the tooltips. Could be a bug? I'm currently working towards Building Toxins for a +1 Poison, and my plan is to snake down to Stacking Toxins as well, for another +1. Its like Poison is Chaos but its also not Chaos? Its a bit confusing. Its like GGG wanted to make Poison its own thing, but also didn't want to make a 5th Resistance, so enemy poison is Chaos, but player poison is its own thing? So, I guess my question is, If I'm using a Cultist Bow with +Chaos Damage nodes on the Tree, shouldn't Wither and Despair be affecting my damage by a noticeable amount? Or since Poison is but isn't Chaos damage these wont affect it? Last bumped on Jan 18, 2025, 7:14:51 AM
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Bump. Hoping someone smarter than me knows how all this is working. :)
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Poison does chaos damage.
Nothing directly boosts damage of poison. Poison's damage is derived from the physical and chaos damage of the hit that applied the poison. It cannot be altered afterward. More poison magnitude means more damage transferred, more regular hit damage means more damage to transfer. For a poison bow build, projectile damage, attack damage, and physical damage nodes are as important for raising poison damage as you may have expected poison and chaos nodes to be. Things that affect how much damage an enemy takes still work. They aren't affecting the poison, they're affecting the enemy. So Wither and Shock are both helpful. Despair only helps in that it makes the hit applying the poison bigger, presuming the hit does chaos damage, not by boosting the poison. Withering presence is nice, if you're actually going to be next to enemies. Might only be worth using for melee builds. The withering support gem, only applies wither from hits that deal chaos damage. It won't do anything on an attack (or spell) with no chaos damage. The cultist bow is a joke. it can't roll any mods that can boost its chaos, and still rolls the mods that boost phys. You will easily trump the chaos bow with a phys bow. |
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Tooltip dps is most likely just how much your attack hits the enemy, and not poison dps at all.
Poison works a bit different here than in PoE 1: The poison damage is based of how much physical and or chaos damage you hit your enemy for, so if you increase how hard you hit a enemy, the poison will be stronger. The poison damage over time itself is not affected by any damage increases. By default 20% of how much physical and chaos damage you hit your enemy for is used for the damage of the poison, increases to poison magnitude increases this base 20% higher. Wither and curses that lower the enemy chaos resistance will increase the damage the poison does to a target. I believe the formula is something like this: 1 stack of Poison damage: (hit damage from weapon * (0.2 * (1 + magnitude))) * wither * ( 1 - enemy chaos res) Example: you have a base weapon that does 150 physical damage, 30% increased physical damage on tree. 1 passive that gives 10% magnitude and 1 passive that gives 20%, 10 stacks of wither and -20 chaos res curse, hit damage is 150 * (1+0.3) = 195 base physical damage. (According to poison description, things that affect how much damage the target takes is not included in the calculation, that means for example that the enemies armor or chaos resistance if you where doing chaos instead has no effect on the base hit damage used for poison calculation). magnitude is (1 + 0.1 + 0.2) = 1.3 wither is 5% * 10 = 50% enemy has 50% chaos res and you curse -20% = 30% chaos res. so your poison damage will be: "base hit damage" * base 20% of that damage * magnitude * 10 wither stacks * chaos res 195 * 0.2 * 1.3 * 5 * (1-0.3) = 177.45 poison DPS from 1 hit. |
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" Incorrect according to the games tooltip, things that effect how much damage an enemy takes from the hit itself does not help or work against poison, like armor. Shock does help poison but not because it makes enemies take more damage from the hit, but makes them take more damage from the poison itself. Scenario 1: The enemy is shocked, you hit him and right after you hit him the shock ends, your hit damage was higher but the next 10 seconds your poison is ticking hes no longer shocked and takes less damage from poison than if he was shocked for those 10 seconds. (takes the same damage from poison as he would have if he was never shocked) Scenario 2: The enemy is not shocked, you hit him, then afterwards he gets shocked and your poison now does more damage to the enemy for as long as hes shocked. Last edited by Tumulten#3988 on Jan 17, 2025, 8:59:09 PM
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" The tooltip is confusing but despair and resist reduction DOES affect ailment DoT (ignite and poison) but resist penetration does not (it affects the hit which causes the poison though). Despair, Wither, and Shock are all viable vectors for scaling both poison and ignite damage that was converted to chaos. Flammability, and Shock are the vectors for unconverted ignite. Chaos Penetration scales the chaos hit for poison, not sure about armor breaking but I would expect it to be the same. Fire Penetration scales the fire hit for ignite even if converted to chaos. This system is in place to avoid 'double dipping' of modifiers so that each one is only applied once to each DoT. |
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Lets say the enemy has 20% shock on him so he takes 20% increased damage
Your weapon normal hits for 100, so the shock makes you hit the enemy for 120 damage. But the game calculates the base damage from poison without those modifiers so it uses the 100 damage, then every time the poison "ticks" whatever modifiers the enemy has gets calculated in, so +20% from shock so the damage ends up being 120. I believe that is how the game works. It prevents double-dipping, makes players have to keep their de-buffs on the target and also means you don't have to worry about things like the enemy's armor in a poison build (only chaos res). Last edited by Tumulten#3988 on Jan 17, 2025, 9:05:23 PM
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Interesting. I really appreciate all of the responses.
Like I said, its an odd build using the Witch. Its still somewhat effective, but I have a feeling its nowhere near as strong as a Ranger, since you can use the better physical damage bows and you get all of the +Projectile damage nodes. To leverage the +Chaos damage nodes, you're pretty much limited to a Cultist Bow (going from a 36-59 Chaos bow to a 71-107 Physical bow, lowers my DPS by 130). I'll try to keep and eye on Wither and Despair, but its hard to determine if they're contributing much. |
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For poison build you really want to be a pathfinder,
The ascendancy node that says number of poisons on a target is doubled, doubles the maximum number of poisons you can have after all the other increases. So with + to number of poisons on passive tree and support gems you would end up at 4 i think. With the pathfinder ascendancy that +4 gets doublet to +8 poisons at the same time doubling your dps. |
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" Welcome to PoE2, where element damage means jack all and you stack phys on every non caster because every skill is %phys convert. |
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