Game Mechanics Full Poison Rework

Poison is in quite a bad state right now, which is evident by how it is only currently used for ingredient farming as well as being a tiny damage increase in a lot of builds that use single poison items like Contrast.

There are key problems with a poison rework, and I believe the proposed idea solves all of them:

1. Poison is too strong for AoE of weak enemies
2. Poison is too weak for single target DPS
3. A majority of poison items have STR requirements, but no STR scaling
4. Multiple sources mess up the total damage
5. Weird attack speed scaling
6. Poison feels useless if you dont build entirely around it

The solution I have is an infinitely scaling system following the harmonic series for poison stacks, with a scalar to every single attack/ability that applies poison ticks.


Melee stack application
The harmonic series follows the formula: 1+1/2+1/3+1/4+1/5+1/6.....+1/inf, which is technically divergent (infinitely scaling), however it scales on a factor of about 2.7x in additions per single number increase :

• ~1x damage = 1 stack
  
• ~2x damage 2.5% slow and 2.5% weaken= 4 stacks
  
• ~3x damage 5% slow and 5% weaken = 11 stacks
  
• ~4x damage 10% slow and 10% weaken = 31 stacks
  
• ~5x damage 15% slow and 15% weaken = 83 stacks
  
• ~6x damage 20% slow and 20% weaken = 227 stacks
  
• ~7x damage 25% slow and 25% weaken = 616 stacks
  
• ~8x damage 30% slow and 30% weaken = 1674 stacks
  
• ~9x damage 40% slow and 40% weaken = 4550 stacks
  
• ~10x damage 50% slow and 50% weaken = 12367 stacks
• ~11x damage 50% slow and 50% weaken = 33617 stacks

The reason why I wanted infinite scaling, was because I envision poison as something that can beat the strongest foes with enough preparation, kind of like death by 10.000 needles. This would mean that poison is great for soloing raid bosses, but very bad if you want to go for optimal speed, as poison needs enough time to build up to a high damage number. As suggested by igotyoursix., stacks also apply slowness and weaken enemy, to fit the theme of slowing and weakening a poisoned enemy until they run out of stamina and die. Weaken enemy is a very powerful stat, where 35% is currently the highest that can be achieved with very significant cost. However due to a full melee battle needing to take over 10 minutes to even hit close to those numbers, I think it is justifiable. Since all poison damage is individual, only the one with the highest amount of stacks can apply teamwide slow and weaken. Slow and weaken enemy stop at 50%, while the damage keeps scaling infinitely.

The proposed scaling I have for attack speed melees would be 5x the inverse of the standard attack speed scaling:

• Super Fast: 5/4.3=1.250
• Very Fast: 5/3.1=1.613
• Fast: 5/2.5=2.000
• Normal: 5/2.05=2.439
• Slow: 5/1.5=3.333
• Very Slow: 5/0.83=6.024
• Super Slow: 5/0.51=9.804

This would ensure that assuming you hit all your attacks perfectly, you apply 5 poison stacks per sec. This would mean you reach 2x damage in under 1 sec of application, which means that ALL poison items need number tweaking to make up for this. I envision that poison should be scaled around hitting 4-6x damage relatively consistently for raid bosses, which means all poison items would need to be nerfed to 1/4th-1/5th of the current values before playtesting even begins.

Poison Damage and Decay speed
While I would have wanted to scale everything to 1x perfectly, this causes issues with decay. In the current state of poison, the decay is equal to the poison damage dealt, therefore you will quite quickly reach 0 damage on enemies you applied poison to by accident. However if there was no decay, enemies you accidentally hit in cities would keep taking poison damage until they died or you despawned them.

The current poison damage system deals poison damage once every ~0.2sec. This has caused significant issues for the 5% per hit gambit making you take a forced 25% hp per sec, as well as lag issues of applying every poison tick, making every enemy take a damage animation at once. I therefore suggest that all poison damage is once per sec instead. This would slow down ing farming as nothing died until 1 sec, however I believe the upside of less lag and also less issues for people battling poison would be worth it.

The application and decay is once per sec. The poison damage would be the float value of how many application stacks you were at, leading to the poison ID multiplication number. The decay would be 1 stack per sec. This would mean under perfect melee conditions you apply 5-1=4 stacks per sec, meaning it takes 1sec to get 2x dmg, 3sec for 3x, 21sec for 4x, etc.

Poison STR/DEX scaling
To uphold the spirit of STR scaling on poison gear, I want to implement the STR scaling on top of the stack scaling. This would mean with 150 str, you would get an additive scaling of 1.808 damage on top of the scaling from the amount of stacks you are on. Assuming 83 stacks 150STR vs 0STR would be a damage difference of +36%. This might not seem very significant, however it would save you almost 4x the amount of time to scale up to said damage without the STR, therefore still making STR the primary scaling method for poison outside of having better IDs on armor.

DEX scaling would be a 80.8% chance of applying 2x the stacks of your current hit at 150DEX, be that melee or spell. This is significantly weaker than STR due to how the increase in stacks scale, but has to be added to avoid every poison build being ETx/Rainbow. This also allows for interesting combinations with INT, as less spell cost means more applications, which also can be combined with STR and DEX for either more damage per poison tick, or even faster scaling.

Spell stack application
I want to keep spells being strong for poison application. The simplest way I can think of upholding this is to add 5 poison stacks for every 100%DPS scaling a spell has, however I am not entirely confident in this overly simple number and I would be very open for suggestions on what is a fair number for this.

Current poison damage numbers and proposed changes

I am currently unable to show the link, however I will post it in the comments. It was the top poison non-crafted build I could make (however I don't claim it is in any way optimal):

Current damage
Poison damage: 106565/3s = 35521.7/s
STR: 150 = +80.8% damage
DEX: 76 = 54.3% crit
Attack speed = Super Slow

Final damage: 35521.7 DPS ~ 35.5k DPS

Damage with current poison IDs and suggested scaling
Poison damage: 35521.7/s
STR: 150 = +80.8% damage
DEX: 76 = 54.3% crit
Attack speed = Super Slow = 9.804/hit

Stack formula = RoundDown(Stacks/hit * Hits * (1+DEX crit chance))
Stack multiplier = Harmonic(Stack formula+STR)
Poison damage formula: (Stack multipiler) * Poison ID

First hit average DPS:
Stack formula = 9.804 * 1 * 1.543 = 15.127572 = 15
Stack multiplier = Harmonic(15)+0.808 ~ 4.126x
Poison damage formula: (4.126) * 35521.7 = 146562 DPS ~ 146.k DPS

Stack/sec formula: (5-1)*1.543*1=6.172. The x is the harmonic multiplier without STR, but the DPS shown is after STR.
DPS after 1s: ~2.47x = 116440 ~ 116k DPS
DPS after 5s: ~4.02x = 171498 ~ 171k DPS
DPS after 10s: ~4.7x = 195653 ~ 196k DPS
DPS after 30s: ~5.8x = 234727 ~ 235k DPS
DPS after 1min: ~6.5x = 259592 ~ 260k DPS
DPS after 2min: ~7.19x = 284102 ~ 284k DPS
DPS after 3min: ~7.59x = 298311 ~ 298k DPS
DPS after 5min: ~8.10x = 316427 ~ 316k DPS
DPS after 10min: ~8.80x = 341292 ~ 341k DPS
DPS after 15min: ~9.19x = 355145 ~ 355k DPS
DPS after 30min: ~9.89x = 380011 ~ 380k DPS
DPS after 60min: ~10.58x = 404521 ~ 405k DPS

Without any changes, these numbers are definitely overtuned. Which is why I am proposing a reduction in all poison IDs by a factor of 4, giving these numbers:

Damage with suggested poison IDs and new scaling
Poison damage: 8880.425/s (1/4th the current base)
STR: 150 = +80.8% damage
DEX: 76 = 54.3% crit
Attack speed = Super Slow = 9.804/hit

Stack formula = RoundDown(Stacks/hit * Hits * (1+DEX crit chance))
Stack multiplier = Harmonic(Stack formula+STR)
Poison damage formula: (Stack multipiler) * Poison ID

First hit average DPS:
Stack formula = 9.804 * 1 * 1.543 = 15.127572 = 15
Stack multiplier = Harmonic(15)+0.808 ~ 4.126x
Poison damage formula: (4.126) * 8880.4 = 27760 DPS ~ 27.8k DPS

Stack/sec formula: (5-1)*1.543*1=6.172. The x is the harmonic multiplier without STR, but the DPS shown is after STR.
DPS after 1s: ~2.47x = 29110 ~ 29k DPS
DPS after 5s: ~4.02x = 42874 ~ 43k DPS (already more than current value)
DPS after 10s: ~4.7x = 48913 ~ 48k DPS
DPS after 30s: ~5.8x = 58681 ~ 59k DPS
DPS after 1min: ~6.5x = 64898 ~ 65k DPS
DPS after 2min: ~7.19x = 71025 ~ 71k DPS (~2x current value)
DPS after 3min: ~7.59x = 74577 ~ 75k DPS
DPS after 5min: ~8.10x = 79106 ~ 79k DPS
DPS after 10min: ~8.80x = 85323 ~ 85k DPS
DPS after 15min: ~9.19x = 88786 ~ 88k DPS
DPS after 30min: ~9.89x = 95002 ~ 95k DPS
DPS after 60min: ~10.58x = 101130 ~ 101k DPS (~3x current value)

While 62k DPS in a TCC battle might sound relatively weak, this is without taking into account the spell multiplier, where a lot of classes have significant base spell multipliers. This means that a hybrid build with both melee and spells to apply poison (ideally heavy melee with passive spells), would then be able to scale at around 2x the speed of these numbers under optimal conditions. This means that poison applications from items that have free poison on them like contrast, will still be able to give you a lot of free poison stacks on an enemy, even if the damage is very small. Poison does NOT work with powder specials, and is not meant as a meta defining damage source.

Changelog/edit
Changed STR to be from multiplicative to additive, as due to how harmonic scaling works, 1.81x damage is also t^(1.81)x amount of time, which would completely break the entire point of the suggestion, forcing all poison builds to build 150STR. With the additive poison damage, it is significantly less important, and should be stronger than DEX very quickly.
Added the damage formulas to show how strong it would be with the current poison damage.
Slightly tuned my suggested nerf numbers.
Removed the suggested nerf numbers
Removed powder scaling
Added suggested damage numbers
Added weaken/slow scaling

TL;DR
Poison is infinitely scaling with very diminishing returns, meant to be strong for both AoE of weak enemies and Raid bosses, as well as giving a purpose for poison items in non-poison builds. This would make poison scale insanely well with STR, and also with DEX/INT through extra poison application stacks, however not force poison builds to build rainbow. It would allow both melee and spell playstyles, but due to the focus on STR, the majority of playstyles would probably be melee or hybrid with poison as a main stat. It would also lessen lag, lessen the annoyance of poison of enemies in the game and also not make poison be OP in PvP.

 

I dont know anything about class building, so this might be op, but sounds cool I guess

 

I'm not sure if this is too powerful, but it would certainly make poison a lot more interesting. I'd add some -poison to more tanky gear, to prevent people from easily making unkillable giga tanks that can infinitely stack damage. That said, even using a pretty dedicated poison weapon, I think it would be pretty hard to achieve anything near as powerful as some builds already in-game, so I don't know if that matters.

 

I agree with this, -poison should be on more gear if a suggestion like this got implemented. Poison is not on a lot of gear in general, and I think a change like this to poison would be an incentive to have more of it be in the game. One of my primary reasons for wanting STR to buff poison damage again, is so people would not run a fully defensive build and just win raids and world events for free by simply sitting there for x amount of time until they won the war of attrition. This would be difficult to balance correctly, but I believe the item team would be capable of doing it.

I did not want to change the way STR worked, however the more I think about it, the more it makes sense that STR is additive instead of multiplicative. Lets assume that you are able to get to 5x damage in 1min. This would mean that 150 STR is the same increase in damage as hitting the boss for 55min with 0 STR. That is silly, and I will change it to become additive so that 150str is merely a 1/3.5 time reduction to scale up stacks compared to 1/55 time reduction (70% vs 98%). This will make it so poison builds dont need to hit the 150sp cap in STR every time, but can be a lot more free to go in the 60-120 range of STR.

I appreciate the feedback :)

 

The precise numbers might not be exactly correct, but this seems like a good idea to me.

 

Added damage calculations to better explain how it would look right now without any changes to poison IDs, using this example build:

/builder?v=8#9_0zx0jD07n0xf00h00h0BF0XM0Qy2M1C000w001g000010009I0z0z1s1s1s1s0-1TldFsEsj7
WynnBuilder build:
> Nuclear Emesis
> Coal Duster
> Caterpillar
> Cytotoxic Striders
> Acid
> Acid
> Dying Lobelia
> Planet Healer
> Toxoplasmosis [w6w6]
> (Has Tomes)

 

Bump

I settled on a 1/4 poison scaling to force numbers to be within the 100k dps range, and instead making poison application more reliant on buffing teammates and slowing/weakening enemies.
A slow TNA battle will take 5 minutes, and 85k DPS is a respectable number for a build that does not need to hit many attacks to still do damage. If the player decides to go for a more slow playstyle they should instead go 150 DEX+ DEF/AGI to scale up faster, while higher STR is more of a "nuke" playstyle with fast additive scaling that falls off later.