Poisonburst Arrow has no clear role

Skill-specific feedback here, but poisonburst arrow just feels awful. The damage numbers are just ridiculously low for the fact that as a baseline it's a single target skill. It has incidental AoE, but the base area is quite low and unless you're targets mobs that are almost literally adjacent to one another it's not hitting more than a single target. The most unique thing about it is the poison duration both scales with duration on the tree and has a 3 second base duration instead of 2. Both have some potential, but it has pretty big problems serving as a first skill for the poison-bow archetype as well as a couple additional problems being part of the poison arrow kit as a whole.

Feedback mostly centered on early-game here just to be transparent, the way the duration scaling and gemscaling get lategame I'm sure it's probably mostly fine but getting there is the ballache I want to talk about.

#1: Poisonburst arrow is enemy targeted. I can't target the ground with it which might honestly be desirable (see caustic arrow from PoE1 for reasons and use cases). This is deceptive in how bad it feels because your plant-based skills don't blow up or get empowered without poisoning them, and you can't target them without a ground-based explosion of some kind. This leads to having to have the enemy literally right on top of the plant to poison it to get the synergistic benefits, and between positioning it and actually doing the attack you often are wasting a good chunk of the duration of the plants to begin with to get this to go off. It feels anti-synergistic and makes me want to use a different skill as soon as I'm able because it just outright isn't working well with my other skills.

#2: Base damage numbers are almost insultingly low. Problem honestly shared with mace skills as well, but at level 1 poisonburst arrow has a 95% damage coefficient... I have to pay mana to do less damage than a base attack. Early game scaling goes up fairly linearly by about 5% per level til you get access to gas arrow at which point it's roughly the same damage efficiency (156% vs 150 for gas arrow), but has the drawback of needing external factors to help it perform as an AoE skill and simply doesn't have a large enough advantage to serve as a single target skill either. Frankly it should start out at as a 150-200% damage skill at level 1. It's a single-target focused skill that can't do single target better than an AoE skill.

#3: Poisonburst arrow might have the worst quality bonus out of all the main skill gems out there. 20% increase magnitude of poisons vs 20% more or even a bonus flat duration feels like someone forgot to update this skill when they were doing a balance pass of what gem quality does in the game. It's the equivilant of 2 small nodes on the passive tree and just honestly isn't worth spending GCPs on to get it.

PB Arrow probably has a decent time in endgame. Level 27 PB arrow is a 417% damage efficiency with a 2.8 meter radius, and by the time you have that you've got access to herald of plague or the poison prolif from pathfinder and I imagine you're just shmoving right along. The buildup to get there is real bumpy and there's no reason for it to be that way. PB Arrow is the introductory skill to the poison bow archetype and it just is mechanically inferior to lightning arrow in every way at the point you get it. The fact it auto poisons is a point in its favor, but that's not really an upside with how low early game poison damage is. It doesn't interact easily with the other support skills you want to use as a poison bow user and it just doesn't keep up numerically until way way later on.

At this point, I'm expecting they'll just nerf gas arrow until we look at poisonburst arrow and say "well, it's really good now!"

"

battle12232#5041 wrote:

herald of plague or the poison prolif from pathfinder and I imagine you're just shmoving right along.

i really wonder if that is actually possible with current poison mechanics.
poison prolif, even with a higher level poisonburst than gas arrow setup just isn't doing much in those 2 seconds you get baseline.

poison is 20% of the base hit, so at most you get like 2 seconds of a fifth of your attack damage with poison skill shenanigans like 'hitting for 200% even though it does not hit' added which you then get to scale via talents.

that does not sound like a great baseline for scaling a dot that is supposed to kill things by spreading, it looks like a softening tool which is allowed to do maybe 30% of the enemy's life and i find it massively disappointing.

using envenom to turn higher attack damage skills into a plague does not seem to work well either. you lose a gem slot, have to get 40% poison chance ( 8 nodes without traveling) and lose the special effects that poison gems usually have.

i tried it with a fresh pathfinder with poison prolif, used a 90% phys damage crossbow and couldn't even kill enemies 6 level below me with poisoning high velocity rounds without needing multiple shots. the spread poison didn't clear much either

"

dragomob#6624 wrote:

"

battle12232#5041 wrote:

herald of plague or the poison prolif from pathfinder and I imagine you're just shmoving right along.

i really wonder if that is actually possible with current poison mechanics.
poison prolif, even with a higher level poisonburst than gas arrow setup just isn't doing much in those 2 seconds you get baseline.

poison is 20% of the base hit, so at most you get like 2 seconds of a fifth of your attack damage with poison skill shenanigans like 'hitting for 200% even though it does not hit' added which you then get to scale via talents.

that does not sound like a great baseline for scaling a dot that is supposed to kill things by spreading, it looks like a softening tool which is allowed to do maybe 30% of the enemy's life and i find it massively disappointing.

using envenom to turn higher attack damage skills into a plague does not seem to work well either. you lose a gem slot, have to get 40% poison chance ( 8 nodes without traveling) and lose the special effects that poison gems usually have.

i tried it with a fresh pathfinder with poison prolif, used a 90% phys damage crossbow and couldn't even kill enemies 6 level below me with poisoning high velocity rounds without needing multiple shots. the spread poison didn't clear much either

That admittedly does bring up a fairly valid point of criticism which is that since you have to scale the base hit then why are you even bothering with the DoT portion? IMO feels odd that DoT skills don't really feel like DoT skills.

To your point though, most of my experience in poison prolif comes from endgame PoE1. It's not great early on but when you are overkilling white mobs fairly heavily and focusing on single-stack poisons you clear quite quickly when the poisons just kind of leapfrog from one enemy to the next. At the point you're scaling heavy poison damage you legit attack a pack once, have them die to the poison proliferation and move on rinse and repeat. Admittedly PoE2 has an issue in that you'll have to actually fight rare mobs. PoE1 has infinite poison stacking so if you surround a rare with a bunch of weak enemies then when they die to poison they prolif it to the other who then prolif it to the rare and all of a sudden you've got dozens of poisons on a rare mobs and they just kind of fall over.

Hi, I know this is almost a dead thread but I thought I would chime in as a PBA ranger with 150+ hours on this char in POE2 and thought I would share my experience, sorry that I dont know all the in depth numbers.

I am running PBA left click and gas arrow right click build (which definitely can be optimised further). It does feel pretty good endgame and I pretty much 1-2 PBA clear all t15 pack mobs with 36% delerious and 3-4 PBA kill rares. I do have a 500dps phys only bow though.

The main key to this build is obviously magnitude stacking with jewel slots and attack speed. Feathered Passive that turns projectile and arrow speed into damage is essential. My quiver alone due to that gives me 120%+ flat damage boost (bow skill dmg, projectile speeed and arrow speed from quiver) but even with all of this boss killing was terrible and slow!

Until, I started running withering touch and using the withering touch passive tree nodes. That really is going to be the key to any PBA build / poison build. I got 1 or 2 wither effect +15 jewels to help it along and yeah, it melts bosses pretty well now, not excellent but enough that I only spend 15-20 secs in a fight instead of 1 minute which essentially improves survivability by 2x as I will screw up less dodging of attacks lol.

Thought I would post here if someone using PBA stumbles across it like I did. There is hope but you need to grind and will need to get some pretty good gear but honestly, all my experience as PBA ranger sounds exactly how the devs said they wanted the game to play.

(EDIT: and i also do all this with 0+ projectile skills equipment, if you are rich enough to afford that stuff you will dominate)