Recent Community Questions Answered!

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Now, this is VERY unintuitive to me, is this intentional? Could you clarify this a bit?
- 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.
- is this true for other degeneration effects? Does increase projectile/spell damage affect not only initial hit, but also degeneration effect of bleed/burn?

This is a result of the Degen Refactor made a while ago. Many of the modifiers that apply to one and not the other will need to be reviewed to make the system easier to understand.

Spell damage and Projectile damage, despite sounding similar, are fundamentally very different things, and need to be.

There are four "categories" of damage - the different kinds of damage calculation can happen. They can't overlap and all damage has to be exactly one of them. Those are Spell, Attack, Secondary and Damage Over Time.

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 possible for a special stat to cause some modifiers to apply to multiple "categories" of damage - such as Crown of Eyes. Contagion and Essence Drain have a stat that makes "spell damage" modifiers behave as "spell damage or damage over time" modifiers. This means for those specific skills, poison applied by their hits will benefit from those modifiers, because the skill has that stat.

In contrast, "projectile damage" doesn't refer to a strict category of damage, but anything that deals damage and results from a projectile hitting something (or some special cases that are explicitly flagged, like Rain of Arrows). "projectile damage" is shorthand for "projectile spell, attack, secondary or over time damage". It applies to all the categories, but has a restriction on the specific circumstances that caused the damage. Since it applies to all four, we use the shorthand.

In response to the specific questions:

- 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.

- Correct, none of this is specific to poison, this is how any degen created by a skill would work (such as ignite, etc). It will be affected by projectile damage if it's caused as a result of a projectile hitting something (for example, the bleed from Puncture), will be area damage if (and only if) the damage over time effect itself has an area (Fire Trap's burning ground), and will not be affected by spell damage modifiers unless a stat changes those to also apply to damage over time.

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Bex_GGG wrote:

Is it possible to use Item Rarity support gem with the Contagion + Essence Drain combo? If so, are you supposed to link it to Contagion or Essence Drain?

There is no way to decide which degeneration effect killed an enemy, so it picks the one that has been on the monster the longest. If an enemy is affected by Essence Drain, Contagion and Righteous Fire, it will pick whichever one was applied first and check the Rarity of that skill. In other words, if you want to link a degen skill with Item Rarity, ensure you use that skill first.

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Qarl wrote:

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Do the monsters gain every single attribute from the talisman equipped, or just the implicit ?

Just the power that the implicit grants.

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Sheriff_K wrote:

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Bex_GGG wrote:

Does the level of the area where I use a Stone Circle matter?

Only if the talismans you are using result in a talisman lower than the level of the area. In this case, the monsters summoned from the stone circle will match the level of the area, rather than the level of the talisman. This does not cause them to drop higher level Talismans than they otherwise would have.

Doesn't this mean that using low itemlevel Tier 3 Talismans in a level 80+ Zone would summon a Level 80+ Rigwald? A lot of people have conflicting answers to this, but according to this post it should be the case... (But it doesn't seem like it is..)