Viper Strike

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Sinzeek wrote:

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Vipermagi wrote:

Poison Arrow.

Haven't been on for weeks, saw the Verdant armor skin (which is absolutely amazing, well done GGG!), knew I wanted a ranger build with that armor so I thought of Viper Strike for single target, poison arrow for AoE and bear trap to keep them in poison arrow cloud. Amazing I thought, this might be the build I'll play to 90+.

To my dismay, Viper Strike don't work with bows.. The 'fun-as-hell' build I saw in my mind doesn't work :(

Spoiler

And no, I don't want to use sword and board for viper strike and swap to bow for Poison Arrow

Or you could run 2 versions of Poison: one for AoE, one for Single Target (perhaps with supports like Conc effect

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Sinzeek wrote:

And no, I don't want to use sword and board for viper strike and swap to bow for Poison Arrow

Then just use poison arrow.

An annoyance is that the duration of Poison Dagger tops out at ~20 seconds, which is 96,435 damage or 48,217 after resistance. Per hit that's ~12k damage. Maybe consider increasing its base duration about 50%. Classic Poison Javelin had 46 seconds of wonderful degeneration fun.

That still leaves the damage source issue, that this isn't Diablo 2. You can't spam Bone Spirits while you wait. In melee the only thing you've got is the Added Chaos Damage support gem; the only real option to weapon swap and pelt with Poison Arrows (Plague Javelin) or AFK and eat a taco while a boss slowly dies.

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LimitedRooster wrote:

An annoyance is that the duration of Poison Dagger tops out at ~20 seconds, which is 96,435 damage or 48,217 after resistance. Per hit that's ~12k damage. Maybe consider increasing its base duration about 50%. Classic Poison Javelin had 46 seconds of wonderful degeneration fun.

That still leaves the damage source issue, that this isn't Diablo 2. You can't spam Bone Spirits while you wait. In melee the only thing you've got is the Added Chaos Damage support gem; the only real option to weapon swap and pelt with Poison Arrows (Plague Javelin) or AFK and eat a taco while a boss slowly dies.

Ming's Hearts ftw?

Just need a couple more chaos damage sources.

Well the added damage from Ming's Heart is Physical% source. Spending a billion points for 73% increased chaos damage (+69.2% added damage with two hearts, ~35% after resistance), when five Physical% nodes at just about any start would yield far more damage...

Death's Oath, Soul Strike and Alberon's Warpath are the only significant base +chaos damage there is (besides the support gem). Voltaxic Rift is Lightning% source of course.

73% chaos damage on the tree is pretty anemic; is why I keep suggesting converting the DoT nodes over to chaos.

I think better options for chaos gear would be better than having more possible skill tree specialization.

Stuff like "+% Chaos Damage" and "+X-Y chaos damage" as basic affixes would go a long way to making a chaos damage build more viable. Also giving chaos damage a status effect.

I'll also say that the chaos attacks scale pretty much like spells, and do gain significant benefit from +Gem Level compared to other attacks. Which I think is an important tuning point.

One thing I could really see happening to Viper Strike is giving it chaos damage conversion.

Viper Strike
Converts 40% of physical damage to chaos damage
Each attack applies Viper's Kiss dealing X-Y Chaos Damage per second stacking up to 4 times.
For each Viper's Kiss stack on your target convert an additional 10% physical damage to chaos damage.

Now Viper strike has an interesting unique mehcanic, scales to some degree with physical damage bonus, has base damage scaling with +Chaos Damage nodes and retains its unique ability to scale with gem level.

Is it perfect? No. Are there other options? Yes.

As for changing DoT to Chaos bonus.... How about "X% Increased DoT and Chaos Damage" for the nodes. There are a couple non-Chaos DoT sources (or at least there could be in the future).

That's unfortunately one of the downsides of using Diablo 2's outdated affix system. Anyone who plays self found can tell you, it's like an anti-miracle when you see a weapon with just two decent physical prefixes drop, along with rolling on a base weapon type with significant base level.

If there were multiple pools, like say knife types that can't roll elemental damage, only chaos, or a firey sword thing that has fire damage as the highest power affix it can roll (instead of Tyrannical), there would be room for an infinite number of affixes without diluting the existing pool even further. It'd do away with the feeling that unique items are the only items in the game a bit, at least.

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"X% Increased DoT and Chaos Damage"

I like that.

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LimitedRooster wrote:

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"X% Increased DoT and Chaos Damage"

I like that.

But not the more poisonous Viper Strike QQ

I figured you'd like the flexible nodes though. We need more hybridized nodes IMO

There are several problems with Viper Strike.

• Requires a Claw, Dagger or Sword. With only swords being 6l at 2h, Viper Strike can't be supported in a +1 all gems 2+ melee gems environment properly.
• The lack of support gems. While PA can be supported by traps/mines and the DoT getting a great buff by the "more" multi, while being safe with traps from range, VS needs to be applied in melee range (where 2h suffers more from lacking defence again if using a 2h Sword) and doesn't have the options of PA.
• The lack of supportgems 2.0. While PA has more then enough support possibilities to fill a 6L, VS has not nearly as much as PA. Melee Splash being nearly must to spread VS fast enough, while Conc.eff buff the dmg, also renders the splashradius nearly useless.
• No additional on-hit-effects. While PA gets an phys-> chaos convertation, VS gets nothing on hit.
  

Wish some of those facts would be reflected onto the base dmg of VS.