Game Design Allow Multiple People's Poison Dots On One Mob

Poison got some great improvements with the 1.20 item changes, giving many more items high poison values and matching skill points to support them. However, for it to be usable in endgame content, it needs to do damage in a multiplayer setting. Raids were added this update, along with changes to make the forgery worth running and let 4 people enter on 1 dungeon key; the new content is highly focused on multiplayer groups.

Currently, only one person can put poison on a mob at a time. If 2 people both attack a mob with a poison item, only one poison tick happens at one of the player's poison values. At a glance this is a problem because your party has to only allow one person to bring in a poison build; 2 poison builds cannot work together without one of them dealing literally 0 damage to the boss. It becomes a more serious problem when players come into the mix with normal builds that have poison items equipped, such as the commonly used contrast.

I'm not sure exactly how the game decides which poison tick takes effect (is it the first player to hit, the most recent hit before the poison tick, or something else?), but from my testing it seems that the faster hitting player generally gets to have all the poison ticks. When I combined a toxo user's totem applying poison vs a relatively fast hitting melee user with poison equipped, every poison tick went to the melee user. The toxo user did no damage to the target dummy that the melee user was attacking, meanwhile the neighboring target dummy also in the totem AOE lost a large amount of health.

Here is a video demonstration and explanation from last January; I've tested in 1.20 too and the mechanic is still exactly the same.



Most of the new poison items have -attack speed for the archetype of heavy poison. This means that a heavy poison user in a party with a spell or fast melee user who has equipped any poison item will almost never get their poison ticks to apply.

This mechanic alone keeps me from regularly using poison. I would love to use poison in PvE if not for this design. I still try to use poison when I play alone, but I often end up running into other players who have contrast or something similar equipped and completely negate my damage. I've been forced to watch as a lvl 75 that I caught up to in a forgery run deletes my poison damage and does 5k dps to the dungeon boss many times. Having to sit back and have my perfectly normal heavy poison build deal 0 damage for 2 minutes as the other player fights just makes me want to use a build that actually works instead.

There are a number of ways that this could be changed, depending on how poison is coded.

• Mobs could allow each player to place their own poison DOT on them. This is the most obvious improvement, but I don't know how possible it is.
• If individual poison DOTs aren't possible, then the one poison DOT could be the sum of all currently applied poison ticks. Ideally each player's poison would have its own timer and the sum would update as they expired individually.
• If a sum is not possible, then at least the highest poison tick should always overwrite weaker ones. This would probably be a much easier solution, but it would still prevent multiple fully poison focused builds from playing in the same party. However, it would stop other players wearing contrast from deleting all the damage of the heavy poison user.

I've reported this as a bug with clear video evidence multiple times in the past, and tried as I could to bring it to the attention of the community and the staff. It's been over a year since I first brought it up and I have never received any responses, nor has it ever been added to the issue tracker spreadsheet. Therefore, I am making this thread under the assumption that it's a part of the game design rather than a bug. I also want to make more of the community aware of the downside of poison builds, and give an explanation as to why they sometimes don't seem to be doing any damage (it took me awhile to figure out that my observations were accurate and this was the cause). If this is a bug, I would love if someone could confirm whether or not it's a known issue or will be looked at in the future. If it's intended, I hope that poison can be changed for the better.

 

i just want to be able to use poison with other people

bump

 

It's a serious problem in raid that i never thought of.I support you +1

 

i added the video from my bug reports to clarify the problem; I still see people going around not knowing why their poison isn't working