Caustic Arrow

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mazul wrote:

I think the way to buff Poison Arrow while still re-introducing an old playstyle, is to revert how poison arrow mechanically works to how it did a long time ago.

What I mean is: Poison arrow used to poison enemies and then if those enemies left the poison cloud, they would still be poisoned for a limited amount of time.

Currently, if I understand correctly, poisoned enemies only take damage while in the cloud.
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If you were to change to how it worked before mechanically, people would be able to use this to do the "one shot of Poison, then run to next pack and forget about picking up loot the first time around" strategy which we don't see for other skills.

I like the idea, as currently PA makes little sense, you leave a POISON cloud, and suddenly your no longer coughing up blood? It would take a bit for poison to wear off.

However, I am hesitant have the old fellshrine farm method (shot and forget) re-introduced. It would certainly buff PA VS faster mobs, but I think that kind of AFK farming is something GGG doesn't want, as to why the removed it in the first place. Although, with how bad PA currently scales, I'm not sure it would matter that much, you have to stick around to kill blue mobs / rares anyway.

Anyway, copying over my post from the Poison Arrow Theorycrafting thread:

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There is an issue with poison arrow. A mob MUST be in the cloud to take poison arrow. Most of the mobs in the game are fast enough to exit the cloud before its full duration, or even half of its duration is up. This causes major sustainability issues as you must re-cast a ridiculously expensive skill either

A) Costing huge amounts of HP if you went blood magic/blood magic gem
B) Going OOM as you cant mana leech off the cloud, it would be unsustainable. I have doubts that even an EB build could sustain poison arrow's costs.

With my 5 link listed below, its at 153 health cost per sec with the passive blood magic... that is WELL above my HP regen even with 3 hp regen clusters. I'm chugging HP potions just to keep up with kite and shoot poison arrow, let alone monster damage. I am constantly around 500 health (I haave 3421 hp, roughly 2700 with grace HP reserved) at lvl 63, my survivability is utter sheeeet. I'm trying evasion because you know, kite and shoot you shouldn't get hit alot. But, when my health is already low from poison arrow... it doesn't work out to well.

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In summary:

1) Extreme mana cost is the #1 limiter of this skill using it as a dot, blood magic is absolutely forced upon the player.
2) Mediocre damage that takes more time to kill white trash mobs then most other skills.
3) Unrealistic kill times on bosses and rare monsters even when fully spec'd into it.
4) Impossible to kill situations with enemies with Chaos resistance and life regen/curse immunity.
5) Absolutely forced to take vulnerability over say a defensive curse. It also makes curse immunity maps a basic no go unless you want to take forever, maybe even an hour+ on a map with a chaos resistant boss.
6) To make PA even do somewhat reasonable damage you have to go traps or mines, and at that point its not a PA build, its a mediocre trap/mine build, as other trapped/mined skills would do far more damage. Why would I want to use poison ARROW in a trap? I want to shoot if off my bow!
7) Forced into a kite and shoot playstyle compared to other builds with higher stopping power. Extreme mana costs also punishes the player for this playstyle if they are blood magic, heck, even if they somehow are using PA with mana.
8) Chaos damage has no inherit benefit over elemental damage. Ele crits have additional effects, and ele dmg can pierce resistances with gems. Chaos damage has no additional effect and CANNOT pierce Chaos resistance. Very few enemies have enough raw energy shield to make the ES bypass worthwhile, most skills can clear out monster/boss ES very quickly. Saying that fewer mobs have chaos resistance is flat out wrong, damn near every other zone has chaos resistant mobs.
9) Cannot offscreen as you can with other projectiles, PA explodes wherever you target it. (Minor)

My 2 cents.

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Waves_blade wrote:

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In summary:

1) Extreme mana cost is the #1 limiter of this skill using it as a dot, blood magic is absolutely forced upon the player.
2) Mediocre damage that takes more time to kill white trash mobs then most other skills.
3) Unrealistic kill times on bosses and rare monsters even when fully spec'd into it.
4) Impossible to kill situations with enemies with Chaos resistance and life regen/curse immunity.
5) Absolutely forced to take vulnerability over say a defensive curse. It also makes curse immunity maps a basic no go unless you want to take forever, maybe even an hour+ on a map with a chaos resistant boss.
6) To make PA even do somewhat reasonable damage you have to go traps or mines, and at that point its not a PA build, its a mediocre trap/mine build, as other trapped/mined skills would do far more damage. Why would I want to use poison ARROW in a trap? I want to shoot if off my bow!
7) Forced into a kite and shoot playstyle compared to other builds with higher stopping power. Extreme mana costs also punishes the player for this playstyle if they are blood magic, heck, even if they somehow are using PA with mana.
8) Chaos damage has no inherit benefit over elemental damage. Ele crits have additional effects, and ele dmg can pierce resistances with gems. Chaos damage has no additional effect and CANNOT pierce Chaos resistance. Very few enemies have enough raw energy shield to make the ES bypass worthwhile, most skills can clear out monster/boss ES very quickly. Saying that fewer mobs have chaos resistance is flat out wrong, damn near every other zone has chaos resistant mobs.
9) Cannot offscreen as you can with other projectiles, PA explodes wherever you target it. (Minor)

My 2 cents.

1) I'm level 51 and use PA without being blood magic and have since level 2. Proof that blood magic is not forced on this skill.
2) My PA clouds dps is equal to that of my split arrow dps and greater when PA hit is factored in, therefore there is no real downside to using PA in tight locations where split arrows range does not give it an advantage.
3) I've had no issues killing any bosses up to cruel piety with PA and actually more effect than some other skills I've tried.
4) I've killed many chaos resist life regen rares. Just today I killed a soul eater chaos resist with regen that I buffed from a large pack kill with PA
5) I leveled mainly with enfeeble and only use vulnerability when farming places I don't feel the need to worry like docks.
6) I am not a PA trap build. My damage is more than reasonable.
7) If you don't like the play-style of a skill I'm not sure how that is a design flaw but rather personal preference? I don't mind kiting and it proves most effective on certain maps.
8) Chaos damage can not be reflect and bypasses ES. It has 2 effect for having no "real" critical effect. Not being able to be reflected is a very strong ability that I quite enjoy and the ES bypass is a nice added bonus. The issue against chaos penetration is yet to see if they deal with. You are forced to do considerably less damage against chaos resist mobs but for the most part I don't mind so far. This is subject to change.
9) You can off-screen PA very easy. Shoot PA at the edge of your screen and then move so cloud is no longer on your screen. Congratulations, you've off-screen PA.

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Clocksimus wrote:

1) I'm level 51 and use PA without being blood magic and have since level 2. Proof that blood magic is not forced on this skill.

Care to share how exactly you are sustaining its ridiculous mana costs when fully linked? Not to mention, PA ramps up its cost with levels.

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2) My PA clouds dps is equal to that of my split arrow dps and greater when PA hit is factored in, therefore there is no real downside to using PA in tight locations where split arrows range does not give it an advantage.

Whats your split arrow linked to? Nothing? Using a no phys damage bow?
No phys damage passives? If your spec'd for poison arrow, and not for anything else, of course the damage is comparable. The hit portion of PA is mediocre if you are specing to maximize the poison cloud damage with +gems.

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3) I've had no issues killing any bosses up to cruel piety with PA and actually more effect than some other skills I've tried.

Cruel difficulty, and not having an issue killing bosses doesnt = not taking longer than most other skills.

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4) I've killed many chaos resist life regen rares. Just today I killed a soul eater chaos resist with regen that I buffed from a large pack kill with PA.

And how long exactly did it take to kill it?

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7) If you don't like the play-style of a skill I'm not sure how that is a design flaw but rather personal preference? I don't mind kiting and it proves most effective on certain maps.

That's not what i'm saying. I'm saying that the playstyle punishes you for using it. If your kiting, then the mobs are A) Moving out of the cloud, and B) forcing you to keep recasting.

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8) Chaos damage can not be reflect and bypasses ES. It has 2 effect for having no "real" critical effect. Not being able to be reflected is a very strong ability that I quite enjoy and the ES bypass is a nice added bonus. The issue against chaos penetration is yet to see if they deal with. You are forced to do considerably less damage against chaos resist mobs but for the most part I don't mind so far. This is subject to change.

I will give you not being reflectable, that's something I forgot and is a bonus. Other builds can however circumvent it with Vaal Pact. The ES bypass I have found to be mediocre at best, the only mobs I actually see it make an actual difference is the Vaal Constructs.

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9) You can off-screen PA very easy. Shoot PA at the edge of your screen and then move so cloud is no longer on your screen. Congratulations, you've off-screen PA.

Ha ha ha very funny. As I said, it was a minor thing, however it is still something to account for.

To maintain PA I simply picked up a couple mana/regen nodes and run clarity. If i felt to do a little less damage with PA i could link it to mana leech and completely sustain it's cost to lose no mana per cast while still linked to conc effect and slower projectiles. Even without it I sustain it's cost for a fair duration while standing still and spamming the skill before i need to use a flask to balance and positively regen mana. While kiting I basically have no need for a mana flask.

Most of my damage nodes are projectile damage which also scales split arrow along with poison arrow. I don't want this to be confusing though because yes split arrow still in practice does more damage than my PA cloud because I have it linked to chain which effectively multiplies your dps by 1.5 in packs greater than 3. People however seem to love tool-tips so I compared tool-tip to tool-tip. My split arrow with chain has a dps of ~220 and my PA cloud has a dps of ~200. (this is ignoring conc effect not displaying)

Not sure what you mean with boss kill speed. The only boss that is annoying to kill seems to be Vaal because I'm not sure how much chaos resist that thing has but I deal much less damage. I breeze through just about all other act bosses. I can't speak for merciless because i haven't gotten the time to get there yet.

The chaos resist soul eater regen didn't take much longer than any extra HP rare would to kill. Once I change my bow to something more suitable for my level my PA dps will be easily over 1k. PA dps with a Death's Harp is currently ~720 and note that to my knowledge PA dps tooltip does not factor into account cloud damage. The rare was in cruel docks so he was level 52 to my level 51. (I actually might have been 50 at the time)

Increased area of effect and increased duration are by far the two most powerful support gems for PA. You do not want to use PA for it's cloud damage with a slow bow. A Quill might be best if you are focusing purely on cloud damage and kiting. + gem level bows were directly nerfed and inferior to just about all other damage options for PA now because of the lowered scaling per level. Unless you can get a +3 bow with 1.6+ attack speed I personally wouldn't bother. The damage increase from the extra 3 levels, while significant, isn't anything close to what it used to be.


Make your cloud have a radius of 36 and lost for 10 seconds and no matter where you kite the whole map dies. Just don't get pinned into a corner PA is a degen and has no burst so pathing is key to successfully kiting with PA.

Poison Arrow has never been genuinely improved since early early beta. It appears to be at times on paper, but the nerfs always trump the additions in practice. Not complaining, just stating a fact.

I focused on PA builds and MF for the better part of 2 years, so I have an interest in where this is going. But again it's historically been down and down some more -- I'm not seeing any reason to put faith in it by my theorycrafting view.

Poison Arrow is still basically useless post patch 1.0.3, even with DoT and Chaos damage nodes taken and inc. proj dmg. In order to get the DPS to a reasonable level just to clear Docks you'll need to take most of the DoT/Chaos dmg nodes and a bunch of proj. dmg nodes, but then you won't have anything left for survivability; completely not viable for maps and/or party play.

I really wish GGG would fix this skill because it's really fun to use but it is currently broken.

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Clocksimus wrote:

I can't speak for merciless because i haven't gotten the time to get there yet.

We are talking about endgame viability here. Any build can do fine before merc difficulty. Please don't clutter up the thread.

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Clocksimus wrote:

My PA clouds dps is equal to that of my split arrow dps

You do understand that the poison cloud doesn't stack, right? While you are doing your pitiful flat poison cloud damage per second, you could be doing X DPS with any other skill as fast as your weapon lets you attack. And if you are using the actual projectile of poison arrow to do your damage you are doing it wrong because any other ability will give you better DPS.

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Clocksimus wrote:

You do not want to use PA for it's cloud damage with a slow bow. A Quill might be best if you are focusing purely on cloud damage and kiting.

Please stop, you don't know what you are talking about.


The fact of the matter is that the poison cloud damage of the gem does not scale properly at higher levels and the introduction of chaos and damage over time scaling through passives didn't do enough to counteract the huge ~67% nerf to its base damage the gem received previously. That means you need at least 200% in damage modifiers to get it back to where it was, and it wasn't even OP in the first place. I don't expect it to do anywhere near the damage of say, something like lightning arrow, but at the moment the skill is useless unless buffed.

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Clocksimus wrote:

To maintain PA I simply picked up a couple mana/regen nodes and run clarity. If i felt to do a little less damage with PA i could link it to mana leech and completely sustain it's cost to lose no mana per cast while still linked to conc effect and slower projectiles. Even without it I sustain it's cost for a fair duration while standing still and spamming the skill before i need to use a flask to balance and positively regen mana. While kiting I basically have no need for a mana flask.

So, rather than argue back and forth I decided to burn my regret quests and test it for myself, because I really really hated the blood magic route for Poison arrow. I did some basic maths and saw that even with mana regen nodes + clarity there was no way I could hope to sustain poison arrow at a moderate spam.

Then I noticed 'Reduced Mana Cost of Skills" clusters. I grabbed Arcane Efficiancy, and the 2 5%s near the scion's HP wheel in addition to Primal Spirit and Mana Gyser + I started to level clarity. I ALSO grabbed my 20% concentrated effect off another character for an extra 15% reduced. I also swapped LMP for culling strike to reduce mana cost and add more damage, as the % damage increase from culling affects the cloud.

I went from 153 mana cost with PA - LMP - Conc - Empower - Increased Duration to 62 mana cost per shot with culling instead of LMP. HUUUUGEEEEE mana cost difference and is now much more sustainable, assuming I don't hold down the right-click button. As I level up clarity, I might be able to take off the 2 5% reduced mana cost nodes for some spare points.

I'm unsure I like not having LMP, but thus far I haven't had to negative of an impact. With culling instead of LMP's damage decrease I deal almost 200 more damage per second which does help out. LMP is jack shit for bosses, so more dmg is better for that at least.

I will concede that there is an alternate, and probably much better route by going mana over BM. I also don't have to fricken reserve all my HP on huge auras. I am unsure however that I like spending 10+ points just to sustain its mana cost though. That is a lot of points that could be put into HP...

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Most of my damage nodes are projectile damage which also scales split arrow along with poison arrow. I don't want this to be confusing though because yes split arrow still in practice does more damage than my PA cloud because I have it linked to chain which effectively multiplies your dps by 1.5 in packs greater than 3. People however seem to love tool-tips so I compared tool-tip to tool-tip. My split arrow with chain has a dps of ~220 and my PA cloud has a dps of ~200. (this is ignoring conc effect not displaying)

I am not talking about the hit damage of poison arrow, my entire post(s) are about using the cloud soley as your main source of damage. Hitting is irrelevant.

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Not sure what you mean with boss kill speed. The only boss that is annoying to kill seems to be Vaal because I'm not sure how much chaos resist that thing has but I deal much less damage. I breeze through just about all other act bosses. I can't speak for merciless because i haven't gotten the time to get there yet.

You will most likely notice a steep increase in kill time if you were using the cloud only. You however seem to be using a hybrid of hit dmg and cloud damage, you might be better off that way.

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Increased area of effect and increased duration are by far the two most powerful support gems for PA. You do not want to use PA for it's cloud damage with a slow bow. A Quill might be best if you are focusing purely on cloud damage and kiting. + gem level bows were directly nerfed and inferior to just about all other damage options for PA now because of the lowered scaling per level. Unless you can get a +3 bow with 1.6+ attack speed I personally wouldn't bother. The damage increase from the extra 3 levels, while significant, isn't anything close to what it used to be.

? the bows speed is irrelevant, they only need to be under one cloud, doesn't matter how fast I shoot them as long as they are in one. Getting +5 to poison arrows gem level will far outdo anything else, eventually it will be +6 with lvl 2 empower. Im using a level 20 (15+5) poison arrow at the moment.

To compare, taking out culling (lvl 15 atm, so +20% dmg) I lose roughly 50 damage per sec off the cloud, taking off empower loses me 130 damage per sec off the cloud.

The thing about AoE is, that's another offcolor on the bow... it took me god damn 200 chromies just to get GGRRB, I couldn't imagine trying GRRBB. Not to mention, huge mana cost increase. I do agree with increased duration, which is why I use it.

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Anyway, I'm currently farming catacombs to level up for maps. I needa get a hell of a lot more HP before I head into maps, only at 2990 HP at the moment after the change from BM. I want at least 3500, so 5~ more levels of nothing but HP.

Once I have a decent HP pool, I'll go see how PA does in actual map settings. I'm hoping it can at least do standard 66-72 maps.

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Waves_blade wrote:

? the bows speed is irrelevant, they only need to be under one cloud, doesn't matter how fast I shoot them as long as they are in one. Getting +5 to poison arrows gem level will far outdo anything else, eventually it will be +6 with lvl 2 empower. Im using a level 20 (15+5) poison arrow at the moment.

To compare, taking out culling (lvl 15 atm, so +20% dmg) I lose roughly 50 damage per sec off the cloud, taking off empower loses me 130 damage per sec off the cloud.

The thing about AoE is, that's another offcolor on the bow... it took me god damn 200 chromies just to get GGRRB, I couldn't imagine trying GRRBB. Not to mention, huge mana cost increase. I do agree with increased duration, which is why I use it.

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Anyway, I'm currently farming catacombs to level up for maps. I needa get a hell of a lot more HP before I head into maps, only at 2990 HP at the moment after the change from BM. I want at least 3500, so 5~ more levels of nothing but HP.

Once I have a decent HP pool, I'll go see how PA does in actual map settings. I'm hoping it can at least do standard 66-72 maps.

Will retract statement about levels after looking at my dps with my +2 bow turns out it isn't as bad as I had originally thought. While I try to remain objective the overly negative comments about how the skill does less damage and is useless skews some of my notes.

As for attack speed being irrelevant, it really isn't. The main issue with people not adepting to PA change is that they try to use support gems to spread the cloud damage and suffer harsh damage multipliers of .7 or .5. That couple with their lack of damage nodes tailored to PA, would make the skill seem like complete and utter crap.

A fast bow to quickly drop large clouds of PA would work far better than trying to link it to chain/LMP/GMP. Not only can you replace that support gem with another damage increasing gem, you can manage the clouds better to not overlap too much, lowering efficiency.

Yes I don't primarily in this build use only the cloud damage because I think that is about as cool as only using the projectiles from lightning strike, when the melee hit does an large amount of damage.

That being said I have killed monsters purely with my cloud so I do believe someone can make a cloud build work if it isn't my focus and I still manage to get away with it.


I'm off to farm some gear now so I can go clear merciless and make my opinion valid to some people. So that I can prove that a skill that has been used for 2/3's of the game doesn't become completely useless by entering the final stage of the game.

I like how there is always a guy without a single high level character defending an awful skill that no one uses.