PoE2 Early Access : Poison damage clarification

"

pyrocyborg#0256 wrote:

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.