PoE2 Early Access : Poison damage clarification

Hi there!

I'm trying to figure out what affects poison damage at a whole or not. Long text, sorry, and I really could help from people who tested/experimented or even someone at GGG, which I know aren't really available right now for such petty questions.

The topic probably has been discussed before, but I the forum search is kind of basic and Google only shows theorycrafting that was discussed before the release, and thus, untested.

What is clear is that any physical or chaos damage value before the "Hit" is transformed into Poison damage, as long as your attack or weapon does that kind of damage beforehand. Then the different modifiers (poison duration, poison magnitude, faster ailments) kicks in.

What happens after that? If you hit an enemy with a full physical attack, let's say, 1000 damage: If you have + Chaos damage nodes on your tree, does it increase poison damage accordingly despite hiting with a physical skill initially? Poison doesn't seem to be chaos damage per se, so it shouldn't... right? On the other hand, if you socket the Brutality gem in, which removes Chaos damage from your skills, you no longer do any kind of poison DoT... so Poison triggered by a 100% physical skill does chaos damage?

What about the Added Chaos Damage gem : Would it increase a poison DoT by 25% or would the 50% "less" non-chaos damage reduce the initial physical hit by 50%, gimping your damage?

There's a lot of testing to be done, and no target dummy at all. Testing said skills in endgame maps mean potential death and lost of a map and Experience, so it's not exactly fun to do especially on a very squishy class like Ranger.


What works :

1) Physical damage nodes + flat Physical damage on gear if you're using a physical-based attack to trigger the poison (i.e. Bow/Crossbow skills). Nodes increasing the potency of a damaging skill does seems to increase poison damage too

2) Any specific damage nodes related to your attack type as long as this damage affects the skill that triggers the poison (e.g. Projectile damage in the case of a projectile skill). At least, it seems to work.

3) + Level to Chaos skills does increase Poison related gems, as they're Chaos skills. It's more impactful on "spells" type of gems like Plague Bearer than it is on Attack skills.

4) Generic "all damage" nodes, if those exist.


What doesn't work :

1) Armour breaking : I thought it worked, as damage would ramp up over time, but it does not work with poison.


What could work, but I didn't/cannot test :

1) Critical hits increase the damage of the initial hit, which should trigger a more potent poison. This is supported by the fact that the "Increased Ailments/poison magnitude on critical hit" affixes exists.

2) Chaos damage nodes + flat chaos damage on gear if you're using a Chaos skill to trigger the poison like the Hand of Chayula skill, or any similar Chaos damage skill that could poison with Envenom (if it does work with Envenom)?.

3) Chaos resistance reduction like Despair? I think it should work as "Resistant to Chaos damage" mobs are way harder to kill with poison, so Chaos resistance reduction could do the contrary.

4) Wither as it increases chaos damage done?

5a) Poison on hit and Gas arrow : It does seem to trigger an additional stack with Gas arrow for each tick (meaning at 100% it could potentially increase 2 stacks per second per gas cloud), but I can't say for sure.

5b) Can Poison on hit go beyond 100% (e.g. 110%) and potentially trigger twice?

6) Chance to inflict Ailments : Does it increase chance of poisoning up until 100%?


EDIT : Typos and clarifications.
EDIT 2 : Some stuff here and there.

Poison damage is scaled by the amount of damage of the initial hit in physical/chaos damage as well as increases to chaos damage. And no you cant 110% for 2 poisons. You can only have one posion active at a time unless you have modifiers that increase the amount of poisons you can inflict. And decreasing the enemies chaos resist does increase poison dmg because poison is purely chaos damage

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pyrocyborg#0256 wrote:

I'm trying to figure out what affects poison damage at a whole or not.

Well, read the in-game description then.

"

Poison
Poison is an Ailment that deals Chaos damage over time, and lasts 2 seconds by default. Damage from Poison bypasses Energy Shield.

Physical and Chaos damage from Hits Contribute to Poison Magnitude.

Damage does not Contribute to Poison chance, so it cannot be inflicted without an explicit source of Poison chance.

The base Magnitude of Poison is Chaos damage per second equal to 20% of the Physical and Chaos damage dealt by the Hit that inflicted it. This is calculated using the final damage dealt by the Hit, but not any modifiers on the target that affect how much damage they will take from the Hit. This magnitude is not further affected by any modifiers to the damage you deal.

Modifiers and Debuffs that affect the enemy's ability to mitigate damage (such as Shock) can affect the damage the enemy takes from Poison, but any such modifiers that specifically apply to Hit damage (such as Penetration) do not affect Poison damage.

Broken Armour does not increase poison damage, before or after damage conversion.

+% Increased Chaos damage does not work, unless using the Cultist Bow. But it only applies to the chaos hit damage on the bow, before damage conversion. This could be a fun way to scale poison damage, but the Cultist Bow does not have any +% Chaos Damage or Adds # to # Chaos Damage prefix modifiers. This prevents the Cultist Bow from scaling late game poison damage in any impactful way. unless perhaps you spend all skill tree points scaling +% Chaos Damage. I'll leave that theory to the mad scientists with more time and currency than I.

it says the poison will bypass the energy shields, but many times i poison enemies with the ranger's poison arrow or gas arrow and it drains their energy shield over time instead of going straight to hp. bugged or only bypasses under the right conditions?

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Xeph_OS#3730 wrote:

it says the poison will bypass the energy shields, but many times i poison enemies with the ranger's poison arrow or gas arrow and it drains their energy shield over time instead of going straight to hp. bugged or only bypasses under the right conditions?

As far as I know, the damage of the shot will do whatever damage your weapon does, which means it will damage the energy shield first. As such, the base damage of the shot (e.g. physical) will target the shield first. The poison will then be applied.

However, each poison stack isn't supposed to damage the shield directly. At least, the poison part of the damage should bypass it.

What is "most damaging poison" exactly?

If i have comorbidity, wich increases number of poison on target, doest it mean there are two poisons (two stack on target) or is it just one big poison made of two smaller?

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misapan#1493 wrote:

What is "most damaging poison" exactly?

If i have comorbidity, wich increases number of poison on target, doest it mean there are two poisons (two stack on target) or is it just one big poison made of two smaller?

With comorbidity and nothing else, you end up with two stacks of that particular's skill poison. You can see the number of active stacks under the eneny life bar. Even if you use that skill 6 or 7 times against an enemy, only two poison stacks will damage the enemy, unless you have some notable passives or the Pathfinder ascendancy. The others all lost.

Let's say you hit while buffed for 1000 damage, and the next two attacks hit for 500. The enemy will have one stack from the most damaging attack (here, the 1000 damage) with its own duration, and another one from the last 500 damage attack you hit it with. The stack from the other 500 damage attack is lost.

Thank you for your answer.

So if do undrestand corectly herald of plague spreads only one "stack", but contagion spreads all stacks?

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misapan#1493 wrote:

Thank you for your answer.

So if do undrestand corectly herald of plague spreads only one "stack", but contagion spreads all stacks?

I cannot say for contagion, but Herald of Plague seems to only spread the most damaging poison stack indeed. From what I can read, Contagion spreads the other chaos damage over time debuffs (maybe not poison, as it's probably not considered as a chaos over time debuff). As such, it can spread multiple spells/debuffs with the chaos damage over time tags and refresh their duration.