[2.4] Harvest Blade Vortex - 5L 660k shaper dps, 1.3m boss dps, 67% phys mitigation (no armour)

@SIQI

first off each tick is not 10% of your initial hit damage. its 10% of your physical and chaos damage. so immediately if you're doing things off 10% your initial hit damage you're already off the mark.

i understand how you're calculating the %age boost tho, that makes sense, but it makes more sense for me to put it into an application. theory is great, but this game tends to take a giant shit all over theory compared to application.
i like to test things out. when i test out socketing poison, im completely unimpressed. i do notice it finishes off mobs that i've knocked down to low hp but thats basically the only real effect i see.
damage against bosses, bosses *I* fight (i don't do tier15 maps or atziri) i don't notice a DPS increase in the least, even if i just stay at 20 stacks the entire fight. these are all personal things that i've noticed and tested for myself. for my build, my setup, poison definitely does not add much more, if more at all, than added fire. they are essentially equal from what i can tell in my applications, and in such i prefer added fire because it will be scaled with spell damage where as the poison will not.

you make a good point about the reflect damage though, and you're definitely right about each BV build needing to find the balance of blades to clear trash in order to optimize clear speeds. poison does accel in that regard because yes anything with a little left over HP you don't need to go back to, it will die.

i just personally have a problem with DoT in this game in general. All DoT damage in this game is based off a % of the initial hit damage. this causes a massive problem for me. it means that in order to gain the most damage from your DoT effect, you need to have the highest amount of initial hit damage. i understand this is slightly worked around with poison stacks, but its still a major factor.
in order to gain the highest initial hit damage to boost your DoT damage, its most effective to work in criticals, meaning you're going to be destroying 90% of the content with your initial hit, rendering your DoT useless. This is the same for poison, ignite and bleed.

speaking of ignite, you're comparing poison damage but don't forget with added fire (and most likely herald of ash buff to benefit 15% of physical added as fire) you will get the ignite status and bonus damage as well.
where as you don't need to worry about low hp mobs because of poison, nor do i because of ignite, which does 20% of the initial fire damage over 4 seconds (raised by inc duration as well).
not only that but ignite scales much easier than poison damage. ignite is scaled with, "+damage", "+elemental damage", "+fire damage", "+DoT damage", "+burning damage", and "+aoe damage if applied by an aoe skill" (which BV is).

in my build i do more than half my physical/chaos damage in fire damage, meaning i actually get a higher DoT proc from fire (with added fire/HoA) than i do on poison. i also scale it much better because of all the modifiers it has that poison does not, and that im not spec'ed into.


now my initial run with BV i tried to make it all about poison damage. i tried to run physical, chaos, poison and scale just chaos/poison. the damage was absolutely HORRIBLE. 100 hits of 10, plus 1000% inc damage, is still not a lot of damage since its all based off the initial hit

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xMustard wrote:

speaking of ignite, you're comparing poison damage but don't forget with added fire (and most likely herald of ash buff to benefit 15% of physical added as fire) you will get the ignite status and bonus damage as well.
where as you don't need to worry about low hp mobs because of poison, nor do i because of ignite, which does 20% of the initial fire damage over 4 seconds (raised by inc duration as well).
not only that but ignite scales much easier than poison damage. ignite is scaled with, "+damage", "+elemental damage", "+fire damage", "+DoT damage", "+burning damage", and "+aoe damage if applied by an aoe skill" (which BV is).

in my build i do more than half my physical/chaos damage in fire damage, meaning i actually get a higher DoT proc from fire (with added fire/HoA) than i do on poison. i also scale it much better because of all the modifiers it has that poison does not, and that im not spec'ed into.

A few things that I think should be clarified here:

- Poison, just like ignite, scales off of all modifiers that affect the initial hit. This includes %area damage, conc effect, %damage, etc. That's why it's really broken on poison focused builds right now.
- Ignite is not very good at all with Blade Vortex because it doesn't stack. Poison does. Just imagine this (we'll compare added fire to poison):

Let's say my blade vortex does 300 average physical damage per hit.

Added fire
With added fire socketed, we gain about 150 average fire damage per hit, with permanent ignite. However, if we hit an enemy with 20 blades, only one ignite will actually damage the enemy at once, dealing a measly 20% of the 150 damage hit per second (30 dps). In terms of dps, this is pretty negligible compared to the on hit dps of the blades themselves. Also, you might have additional sources of fire damage elsewhere, but the added fire gem itself only adds 30 dps to the ignite that you would have without added fire.

Poison
With poison, on the other hand, we don't get the 150 extra fire damage per hit, instead getting 10% of the original hit per second for 4 seconds, scaled by a 120% modifier from the poison gem alone. That around doubles the damage of the poison, bumping it to 20% per second for 4 seconds, a net total of 240 chaos damage (216 after spell echo reduction). But this applies per blade, meaning that if an enemy is hit by 20 blades, all 20 of them will apply their own 216 chaos damage, making it similar to adding a flat amount of damage to each blade. 216 is way larger than the 150 damage that added fire grants, and the extra 66 damage per blade easily outdps's the ignite damage.

Note that generic %area and %damage modifiers apply to both the ignite and poison, so I haven't included them here.

If you swap in concentrated effect to kill bosses, the effect will become even more clear since the 1.6x more modifier applies to the poison damage as well. That 216 chaos damage becomes 345 chaos, making the poison support gem equivalent to a 115% of physical damage added as chaos damage support gem. Pretty good, if you ask me.

Bottom line

I play using added fire, and it works fine. I haven't bothered to recolor my coil for poison, and I don't know when I will.

With enough damage, you'd probably be able to do fine with or without either (I've been doing t14's with added fire on a 5L). Poison will be better against those super tough end game bosses, though it might take some time to get used to playing it against normal mobs. Honestly, neither of these gems are spectacular compared to controlled destruction or ICD, it's just coloring restraints that force us to use them.

you're wrong about the poison modifiers. it is only scaled with DoT, chaos and poison damage (well, and +damage). it is not scaled with conc effect or area damage.

i know ignite doesn't stack, and i know poison does, but visit my quote earlier where i calculated for my own build the difference between added fire and poison damage.

i personally will not use poison with my BV build as i don't notice a difference, and that was after spending 6 more passives to spec fatal toxins as well.

you can give me an absolutely unrealistic figure of BV doing 300 physical damage per hit, and only adding in added fire, but in reality you'll have additional damage linked to that BV per hit which doesn't scale with poison at all, which affects the total DPS done with added fire linked. cold damage from hatred, fire damage already from HoA, and possibly some lightning damage/cold/fire damage from daggers or whatever you use (x-x damage to spells). so while your BV may hit for say 1,000 damage per hit on average, the poison will only scale for say...600 out of that damage.

it may be better for other builds depending on how you have it setup, but i'd say you have to go kinda out of your way to scale specifically poison damage in order for it to be worth while. and going out of your way to make it BETTER doesn't seem worth while since its a DoT. i already explained the main downfall to DoT in general.

the only case i can really see poison doing more damage is to high ES targets.

also increased crit damage isn't as good as added fire in damage added...again, in my setup. added fire gives me about 100 damage more per hit per blade than ICD (10k more DPS)

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xMustard wrote:

you can give me an absolutely unrealistic figure of BV doing 300 physical damage per hit, and only adding in added fire, but in reality you'll have additional damage linked to that BV per hit which doesn't scale with poison at all, which affects the total DPS done with added fire linked. cold damage from hatred, fire damage already from HoA, and possibly some lightning damage/cold/fire damage from daggers or whatever you use (x-x damage to spells). so while your BV may hit for say 1,000 damage per hit on average, the poison will only scale for say...600 out of that damage.

So this is getting pretty drawn out and it's not terribly important stuff, but for all the kids at home: added fire only converts physical damage to fire and poison only scales off physical damage. So both added fire and poison only scale off of your physical hit - they care nothing about the added elemental damage you get from the rest of your gear. Having 600 cold damage is not going to affect the amount of fire damage you get from added fire.

Also, while the wiki page only says that poison scales off of DoT, chaos, and poison damage, in reality it scales with any modifiers that affect the skill that is being used to apply poison. Any build that focuses on poison will agree with this (example: see https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1541692 under math). So conc effect, spell echo, shock (from Vessel of Vinktar, I forgot to mention this earlier), all double dip. It's exactly the same as ignite in that respect.

sigh

i didn't imply that the cold damage you get scales with added fire, but i calculate total DPS, as per my example before.

also, i'll trust the wiki over another player assuming poison scales with everything, just as you are doing. until i see a post from mark saying otherwise, i'll assume the wiki is true.
he also says his bino's heal is consistent with what his poison DPS is, giving him 14,000 hp regen per second, but that doesn't sound right to me at all.

i have a screenshot of a bino heal giving me over 19,000 hp per second and yet i have nowhere near the damage he apparently has. that would imply his poison is actually less than he thinks it is by quite a lot.


edit: let me rephrase from above. you're calculating that poison does 10% of your physical and chaos damage as chaos damage for 2 seconds, that means its 20%. that is only true if the physical/chaos damage is 100% of your damage. but if you have other sources of damage that poison doesn't scale with, like added fire/cold/lightning damage than your poison does not scale to 20% of the initial hit damage because it doesn't scale with all the damage sources.

so if you do 500 physical damage, 100 chaos damage, 300 cold damage 300 lightning damage and 200 fire damage...you do a total of 1400 damage per hit but your poison only scales with 600, doing 60 damage per hit over 2 seconds (120 damage) which is only 8.5% effective DPS boost and not 20% as assumed.

From Bex's Poison Q&A:

If Poison is linked to a Projectile attack does "increased projectile damage" also increase poison damage?

In this case, the Projectile Damage will also increase the Poison damage, meaning the bonus will apply twice if the poison is applied by a projectile.

yea...thats projectile damage. i went to the support gem forums and straight up asked for a direct reply.

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Vipermagi wrote:

From the poison Q&A:

"

- if Poison is linked to a Spell, does "increased spell damage" also increase poison damage? (double dipping on degeneration)?
- same question about Area of Effect.
[..]
- No, unless the skill has a modifier that makes "spell damage" modifiers apply as "spell damage or damage over time" modifiers, such as Essence Drain
- No. A poison is inherently single target (each poison debuff is only on the one enemy, after all), so isn't area damage, even if the original source of the damage was.

Trap should apply similar to Projectile, but god only knows at this point. Poison is filled to the brim with exceptions and specific rulings :/
(I do suggest reading the whole block for this question by the way! It explains Spell Damage further)

i also read the Q&A and Bex confirms that poison damage does not scale with spell or AoE damage at all. above is just a quote/exurb of the explanation. its the same way Contagion doesn't scale with AoE damage

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If I get Area Damage nodes, do these increase the damage of my contagion?

This should not be the case. Contagion puts a separate effect on each enemy, the damage effects do not have an area, they're single-target. The equivalent non-degen case is ball lightning. Area damage degen would be an aura type effect, like burning ground.

Projectile damage was intentionally extended to affect anything caused by a projectile, even indirectly (for things like quill rain, etc, so proj damage penalties couldn't be gotten around. If it resulted from a projectile hitting an object, obstacle or location and does damage, that's projectile damage. So things like the Caustic Arrow cloud or Explosive Arrows explosions count as projectile damage.

Something is considered to be "Area Damage" when one source is dealing one "set" of damage to everything in an area - skills where regardless of how it works under the hood we can think of them as dealing the "same" hit to each thing.

Thus, Flameblast, which effectively does one "hit" event that simultaneously hits everything in an area, is area damage. Ball lightning also affects all things in an area, but it tracks each one individually with it's own timer, and puts separate single-target beams to each of them. Thus it is not area damage.

heres the explanation of the spell damage

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Spell damage does not mean "damage dealt by a spell", it means damage which uses the "spell damage" pipeline. It is not possible for something to be both spell damage and damage over time.

it is unclear if it reacts the same as projectile damage towards traps. i'd say probably. so traps are the efficient way to double dip damage, but conc effect has no affect on poison other than boosting the initial damage for it to be scaled from.

Good catch, Mustard. Was looking for the part on area damage in the Q&A but I was on the wrong one. I'll try to do some careful tests on my bladefall char in talisman just to confirm, but I retract my case.

Edit:
Timed two Voll kills with Blade Vortex - Poison - Void Manip - (Gem) with the last link either being a Lvl 1 Concentrated Effect (40% more) or a Lvl 18 Controlled Destruction (42% more). This was on a build with both duration clusters, so poison is a significant portion of the overall damage.

Controlled destruction: 17.72 seconds
Concentrated effect: 15.83 seconds

Not enough of a difference to say that concentrated effect is actually double dipping, the concentrated effect setup may have gotten lucky with a crit. Pretty sure Mustard is right on this one.

hmm. im reading some other threads (mainly reddit) that is stating what GGG said about poison not being affected by AoE damage is wrong.
however its all based upon the heal amount from bino's and not actual DPS calculating/tests. so im hesitant to say its accurate enough. i had a build that used bino's and my heal could vary as large as from 2k hp per sec to over 10k hp per sec

Added an Atziri video. A pretty terrible run in general, as my links were messed up for a good portion of the run, but I manage to escape alive.