Adder's Touch

I feel like I don't see this going off much. With the added crit damage from the talent, in a crit build, things seems to melt so quickly off of crit strikes that the dot it procs is irrelevant.

Maybe have it proc critical weakness or enfeeble?

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h_ninja wrote:

I feel like I don't see this going off much. With the added crit damage from the talent, in a crit build, things seems to melt so quickly off of crit strikes that the dot it procs is irrelevant.

Maybe have it proc critical weakness or enfeeble?

Agreed. After reading this thread, it's apparent the passive's effect just isn't worth the points.

But you get +66% crit damage, which is pretty good, right? That's really high for a single node, and it's still pretty good when divided by 5 (the amount of points necessary to get it),

It's not "stellar" but it's a decent node.

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anubite wrote:

But you get +66% crit damage, which is pretty good, right? That's really high for a single node, and it's still pretty good when divided by 5 (the amount of points necessary to get it),

It's not "stellar" but it's a decent node.

Yes and no. If you are critting hard (like a crit build should) then you will probably kill things just with damage. If you don't crit, you don't kill things. And you also don't proc the Chaos damage. Which means the Keystone is insignificant either way.

The only big thing I could see it being useful for is a massively shielded, high physical and elemental damage resisting enemy. You ignore the shield, and you ignore the resistance, and those crits that aren't hurting this guy are quickly slicing through his health pool instead.**

This problem reminds me of a few cases in League of Legends. There are some characters with scaling on-hit effects that you can build off of. But in most cases, just getting AD and crit does infinitely better damage, and that passive damage is almost completely ignored.



Some math, perhaps:
The DoT is 10% of the crit damage. Lets say you hit for 100 damage, with 200% crit damage. You have a slow 1.0 attack speed. Lets just assume 20% crit chance. Honestly, these are just arbitrary numbers, I don't know what an end-game crit build ends up with.

Your crits are hitting for 200 damage.
Over 10 seconds, you hit 10 times, 2 of those on average are crits.
Your raw damage from attacks is 1200. Your 4 seconds of DoT from crits is (200*.1*2)*2, or 80 chaos damage. 6.25% of the damage is chaos.

So one more attack overall does more damage then all your DoT combined for that 10 seconds. The higher the crit chance, the more crits (and DoTs) you will do. Of course, the higher the crit multiplier, the more damage it (and your DoT) will do. More attack speed may end up just refreshing the DoT because you proc crits faster.


One thing not taken into account is resistance. If your enemy has 90% resistance (oh man, good luck killing that) then that 1200 is cut to 120. Now, here is the catch. Is the Adder's Touch damage calculated before armor or after? Because if it is before, then you end with 200 damage, 40% being chaos. Now that is significant. If it is after, then you still get the weak 6.25%. But heavy resistance enemies could be much easier to kill if the passive doesn't count resistance first. Then again, Viper Strike.

**I wasn't thinking about how the passive calculates at this time. If before resistance, then I guess the statement is right. If after, then I guess not.

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How do my posts always end up so long? Anyway, hope I got the math right. Honestly, I've not played far enough with any sort of crit build to make too many guesses. Most of my longer-living characters involve the complete opposite, with Resolute Technique. I don't like missing attacks.

Afaik, chaos damage is like true damage in LoL.
Armor only mitigates physical damage.
So you would have to stack chaos resistance in order to mitigate the chaos damage.
Also, chaos damage does not count as elemental damage, so elemental resist increase does not apply.
In the skill tree there are only 3 skills, that raise chaos resistance. 2 of them raise it by 3% and one makes immune.

So under normal circumstances, the enemy is pretty much naked when you calculate how much chaos damage you will do.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

No that's right. That's also how Chaos Damage works in Warcraft 3, it ignores armor type and does 100% damage.

I think it's an okay passive - it's not amazing or anything, but you get 66% crit damage and a 10% damage debuff. I suppose you're right - if you crit something with a dagger and don't kill it, you have serious problems with your crit build - but this passive would be fairly decent in PVP and against bosses and rare monsters (who you can't really... one shot on a crit at all). Against normal enemies it is fairly useless.

As for crticial builds - I'm currently doing a Shadow critical build. Only, it's with two handed axes/swords. You can easily get 10% crit chance by level 40 with the +crit strike nodes near the Shadow's beginning. Throw in critical weakness curse (+6-7 flat% at around gem level 8 or 9) and +critical strike chance support gem (+72% crit chance at level 1) - and I could EASILY see a person able to acquire 30-35% crit chance on a two-handed weapon at level 60 or so, let alone on a dagger, which can have up to +80% base crit chance on it (and if you're dual wielding, then you're pretty much "doubling" your crit chance).

I imagine, in the future, at level 70 Shadow with the right gear and build could amass 50% critical strike chance on a two handed weapon. As well as probably around 300% critical damage, which would equate to having +150% damage in passives.

My strategy with such a build is blood rage + flicker strike, crit as hard as you can on a flicker strike and keep your frenzy charges up, spamming flicker strike infinitely. So far, this is working pretty well, at level 35, with less than 20% crit chance and around 220% critical damage.

Has anyone check adder's touch with whirling blades? I have been using whirling blades for 25 levels with adder's touch. I have never seen anything to make me think a mob has been poisoned. I have seen shocks and burning but when I check a mob that has been shocked he doesn't seem to be losing health ie poisoned.

At the very least if it IS working, it might need a better visual. Maybe something like a viper strike orb or something.

With adder's touch, crits you deals, on the initial damage, still count as physical damage, right?

Because really who cares about the poison, the rest dealing physical is the best part :D

Hi all, quick question regarding the usefulness of this passive for my lightning strike shadow: can the DoT be applied to MULTIPLE mobs (e.g. from the PROJECTILE of my lightning strike attack)?

I think this is a very important question --> if not, then the passive's probably not even worth considering.

Thanks!