Flesh Binder dealing no damage - possible overflow (?) bug?

Hello,

Apologies for the long post, I will try to provide as much information as I can to help track down this issue.

I am playing a Necromancer using the Flesh Binder ascendancy skill recently buffed in content update 3.2. I summon zombies whose life is boosted using Mon'tregul's Grasp and minion life modifiers, then I kill them by summoning more zombies over the maximum allowed limit. On death the ascendancy skill makes the zombies spread a caustic cloud, which deals chaos damage over time further scaled by minion damage modifiers.

The character is Die_And_Be_Reborn in the softcore Bestiary league, viewable in my profile. For convenience here is a Path of Building link as well:

https://pastebin.com/ALqJUvns

I have removed all unnecessary jewels from the passive tree and all skill gems other than Desecrate and Raise Zombie and linked supports to isolate a minimum test case.

Here are the relevant stats as reported by Path of Building:





My problems started when I bought an Elder helmet:



This allowed me to make a pseudo-7L Raise Zombie, with six "more" multipliers applying to the damage of the caustic cloud. However, to my surprise, after trying it out, the caustic cloud ceased to do any damage at all.

After testing various things, I have isolated the issue to simply doing too much damage. I will describe some of the tests which lead me to this conclusion.



Here is my testing methodology:

I would enter an area towards the end of the main game (I tried this in various zones of Act 9 and 10 to make sure it was not location- or monster-specific). I would engage a pack of monsters and Desecrate several corpses under their feet. I would summon one zombie, and immediately kill it by unequipping my helmet. The zombie would spread a caustic cloud, and I observed its effect on the monsters. I made sure to kill the zombie before it got a chance to attack, so all damage dealt to the monsters comes only from the caustic cloud. Blood Offering from the Bloodbond armor was not used for this test.

Expected behavior: Monsters in the caustic cloud die, nearly instantly.
Faulty behavior: Monsters in the caustic cloud take no damage.

With the character as in the above linked PoB build, the "faulty behavior" was invoked every time. I repeated the test several times to make sure it is not just a case of "missing" the mobs with the cloud. I was able to restore the "expected behavior" by doing any one of the following:

* Removing any one of the support gems linked to Raise Zombie.
* Removing the Sidhebreath amulet (15% minion life, 15% minion damage)
* Removing Mon'tregul's Grasp.
* Removing both Bloodbond armor (29% minion life) and Maligaro's Lens (20% maximum life granted to zombies through Necromantic Aegis). Removing only one of these two items still resulted in "faulty behavior".
* Replacing the Raise Zombie gem with a level 17, 20% quality one. Using a level 18 (20%q) gem still resulted in "faulty behavior".



In all cases, the caustic cloud started dealing damage if I lowered my damage output sufficiently. This leads me to speculate that I am hitting a numerical overflow somewhere in the damage calculation. This is surprising, however, as the expected damage of the cloud is only 377,000/second according to PoB. This number is nowhere near large enough to be causing this kind of problems.

I have, however, noticed something that might or might not be a coincidence.

2^31 / 100 / 60 = 357,913.

Bringing my PoB DPS of the cloud below this value results in "expected behavior". Above this value, "faulty behavior" is observed. Obviously I don't have that many data points so I can't pinpoint precisely when the skill breaks, so I can't be sure one way or the other. But it is suspicious.



I know that GGG usually don't respond to these threads, and I well understand the reasons why. But I would appreciate at least a "we're looking into it". One of the main draws of Path of Exile is optimizing your character's performance. If the game stops working once your character is too good, I believe it is a serious problem.

If there is any other information I can give to help track this down, I am more than willing to provide it.

Thank you very much for the quick answer, Adam!

Is there any possible workaround currently? Other than... "deal less damage"?

Just wanted to say that this is still a problem in 3.2.1.