Poison with Barrage Support?

A few things aren't clear.

Poison lasts for 2 seconds unless modified, so you have 2 seconds to apply as many poisons as you can. For a bow build, the Barrage Support causes 4 arrows to fire instead of 1. Does that stack per use or per hit? Meaning, are you getting four times the poison stacks? I did some searching and people claim it's per use but I question it because when you use Frenzy charges with Multistrike then you only get one charge per use, not per hit. Does Barrage and poison work different? I never found anything from GGG stating that it stacks per hit.

Also, if you combine Lesser Multiple Projectiles with a bow skill, does that give you more poison stacks as well in your 2 second duration? And what about the Dying Sun Ruby flask where it fire 2 additional projectiles during flask effect.

I noticed that combining Barrage Support + Lesser Multiple Projectiles doesn't make your bow attack spread out more. It still gives you a narrow attack, but it's hard to tell if it's actually shooting more arrows with the Multiple Projectiles Support.

Let's say an attack produces one projectile.

If you have +1 project from quiver, +2 from your bow, and lets say you have dying sun active for another +2, then you fire 6 projectiles.

These, for most skills, provide a spread that cannot hit a target more than once (exceptions of course).

Barrage support adds 3 projectiles, so 9 total, and then makes all of them fire sequentially into the target.

All 9 can hit. Barrage also makes them do 62% less damage.

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Poison lasts for 2 seconds unless modified, so you have 2 seconds to apply as many poisons as you can.

Im not sure what you mean here. Poison damage stacks, so you can apply as many as you can for as long as you want if the target is alive. Each instance, before mods, will last 2 seconds. But you can have anywhere from 1 to 500 instances of poison running on a target, each will do its damage over 2 seconds, and will not reduce damage of other poisons on the target.

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trixxar wrote:

Im not sure what you mean here. Poison damage stacks, so you can apply as many as you can for as long as you want if the target is alive. Each instance, before mods, will last 2 seconds. But you can have anywhere from 1 to 500 instances of poison running on a target, each will do its damage over 2 seconds, and will not reduce damage of other poisons on the target.

Meaning you can only build up stacks for 2 seconds, because after that your stacks from 2 seconds ago will disappear as fast as you are adding new stacks.

I did some experimenting, I ran the Cells map three different times and timed how long it took to kill the boss with different support gems in my chain. I used Frenzy, Chance to Poison, Vicious Projectiles, Barrage, and Energy Leech every time but changed around the sixth support gem and tracked how many seconds it took to kill the boss.

This is what I found:

Lesser Multiple Projectiles = 6 seconds
Empty socket, removed Lesser Multiple Projectiles = 5 seconds
Replaced Lesser Multiple Projectiles with Vile Toxins = 3 seconds

This would indicate to me that Lesser Multiple Projectiles isn't adding any poison stacks at all but it's hard to tell.

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0piate wrote:

A few things aren't clear.

Poison lasts for 2 seconds unless modified, so you have 2 seconds to apply as many poisons as you can. For a bow build, the Barrage Support causes 4 arrows to fire instead of 1. Does that stack per use or per hit? Meaning, are you getting four times the poison stacks?

Yes, per hit. To make sure you can use Herald of Agony, it tracks number of applied posions via Virulance stacks.

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0piate wrote:

Also, if you combine Lesser Multiple Projectiles with a bow skill, does that give you more poison stacks as well in your 2 second duration? And what about the Dying Sun Ruby flask where it fire 2 additional projectiles during flask effect.

Yes, more hits - more posion stacks.

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0piate wrote:

Meaning you can only build up stacks for 2 seconds, because after that your stacks from 2 seconds ago will disappear as fast as you are adding new stacks.

If by, "add as many in two seconds as you can" you mean "attacking faster directly increases damage" then you are correct.

But your new stacks arent forcing the old ones off.

Attack speed helps poison builds a lot, in the same way it helps normal attack builds.

Unlike Bleed or Ignite, where attack speed is almost completely irrelevant.

DPS is DPS, so if you attack every 0.5 seconds and PoB says your dps is 10 million, then thats better than every 0.1 seconds and PoB tells you your damage is 8 million (except for life gain on hit rate, that type of thing).

O.k well, you were kind of missing the point. I'm looking into which support gems benefit a poison build. After experimenting I found that when you combine Lesser Multiple Projectiles with Barrage Support then the Lesser Multiple Projectiles is basically disabled. You lose the spread projectiles so it's like hitting one target at a time. When the Barrage Support is being used, it looks like there is a slight spread but you can't hit multiple targets lined up side to side.

I find the best method is to use Lesser Multiple Projectile support while clearing mobs. Then if you want more DPS on a boss, swap out the Lesser Multiple Projectiles with Barrage Support.

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0piate wrote:

This would indicate to me that Lesser Multiple Projectiles isn't adding any poison stacks at all but it's hard to tell.

1. The damage penalty on LMP will reduce the hit damage.
2. 'Barrage Support' has a speed penalty per projectile - just read the description on the gem.

Due to those it depends whether LMP is helpful or not. You can precisely math the expected DPS if you want and have all the input variables.


Edit: Also Frenzy is not a good skill for a poison build. The 'more Attack damage' doesnt apply to poison.

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Zrevnur wrote:

Edit: Also Frenzy is not a good skill for a poison build. The 'more Attack damage' doesnt apply to poison.

Oh I know, the more attack speed applies to it though. I'm building attack damage as well with the way I'm doing it.

But you might be right, my build feels good the way it is, I can clear out monster level 83 areas without too much trouble. But messing around with the skill tree I can probably do a mixed elemental damage build, no damage over time with a 1300 dps bow. It would probably work better.

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0piate wrote:

Lesser Multiple Projectiles = 6 seconds
Empty socket, removed Lesser Multiple Projectiles = 5 seconds

After looking at your char these results do not look right though. LMP should be better than nothing I think.

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Zrevnur wrote:

After looking at your char these results do not look right though. LMP should be better than nothing I think.

That's what I would think, maybe it's a glitch but I've tried linking LMP with Barrage a bunch of different times and the damage is horrible. Got to use one or the other.