Game Mechanics Make poison stacking a legitemate mechanic

Introduction
Using different weapons for poison stacking is something that has existed for a few months, but there are no bug reports or posts about it on the forums (except for a couple giving inaccurate or incomplete information), so I wanted to have a proper space to discuss it. I found it by myself in game almost by accident instead of seeing someone talk about it, which I think shows how little we as a community looked into it.

If you want some more information on the logic behind how the bug itself works or what on earth I'm talking about, you can find it in the youtube video “Wynncraft: We Broke Poison (sort of)”. It also has a build that has been proven to be good in raids, even competing with conventional mythic builds in the party (not suitable for min-maxers, but fun for meme build fans that don’t want to completely shoot themselves in the foot).
Proof of viability (2nd damage is Epoch that died at basically the end of the fight, 1st is Toxo)
Solo viability

In short, if your weapons have different poison ids, you can swap between them to apply multiple poisons at the same time, and that’s known as poison stacking. The main problem with it, as you might guess, is having to swap weapons – it’s janky, deactivates most spells, and multiplies the emerald cost due to needing 7 copies. However, if you count that out, it’s actually pretty fun to build and run like that.

Proposal
It seems to be a bug, and will probably be removed at some point, but I suggest making poison stacking a legitimate mechanic with this:

Major ID: Overdose – you can’t deal spell and main attack damage, but can apply a new poison stack every 0.2s for a maximum of 10 stacks.

Making it a major ID would keep the mechanic in the game and remove the need for multiple weapons, but since it’d be put only on specific items, it would allow precise control on the limitations a build could have.

The mechanic itself implies aiming for a very/super fast attack speed, ignoring burst damage spells, and completely ignoring damage ids.

By pairing the major id with negative healing efficiency, health/mana regen/steal, skill points, walk speed, and even poison itself, the item team could relatively easily impose limitations on what the strong and weak points of a potential build might be. Paired with adding high poison and -1/-2 attack speed items to the game, slower Overdose builds could also become viable, though that’s a lot harder to balance (One could imagine something like a Panic Zealot or Sequoia build with such items).

Alterative

Several people noted that a major ID might be too restrictive when building, so a minor ID could be used instead. It would probably be as common as Healing Efficiency, though a few more jewelery pieces compared to it would have it.

Minor id: poison stacks - defines the maximun number of stacks a player can apply to an enemy. 0.2s cooldown between applications.

It would be harder for the item team to balance, but the general stats you'd aim for are the same as for the major id.


Expected Outcome
All in all, it would do exactly what a major ID should do - make a new maximization problem for players to solve in building, with the added bonus of making poison matter. Let me elaborate on what kind of problem players would have to deal with:

Like in all builds, you’d have to care about health and mana sustain, but unlike in other dps builds, you’d want to spend as little skill points on strength and dexterity as possible, since they don’t increase your damage. At the same time, the problem isn’t trivialized into ignoring strength and dexterity completely, since many poison weapons require strength, and many attack speed gear pieces require dexterity. Also, unlike other dps builds, you could fully ignore regular damage ids. This would make gear with damage reductions and attack speed bonuses/high poison (like Necrosis) more useful. On top of that, if you wanted to combine Overdose with Plague, you’d have to deal with fitting 2 major id items on a build, which is not an unheard of type of task, but relatively rare.

If the minor id is used, the challenge of combining Overdose with Plague is removed, but you'd now have to balance having enough poison and poison stacks. It's somewhat similar to balancing spell raw and spell %, but it doesn't take elemental into account.

On the ability tree, you’d focus abilities that increase survivability and that apply damage gradually (like Totem) and provide maximum AoE. Burst damage spells, be it single hit (like Backstab) or a lot of hits (like Arrow Storm) would both be suboptimal (though Arrow Storm's AoE would partially compensate).

I don’t think this kind of building style exists right now, it’s just not viable, but it would be fun to make it a reality.

Known Issues

• Can be seen as just an weird alternative to tierstacking/rawstacking, though it would interact quite differently with raid buffs and status effects, since poison values aren't affected by any other ids or effects.
  Edit: that might be untrue, it looks like in some cases poison is infliuenced by +/- % damage, and in others it isn't.
  Not affected by: damage tomes, cavalryman, shaman masks, chant of the lunatic, vengeful spirit
  Affected by:
  
  
• Issues could arise with 0.2s cd, max 10 stacking. The limits of buffs and debuffs in this idea could be moved around to better fit the game. For example, in the proposed version, a 10 stacks maximum acts like a 10x multiplier, which might be too strong. We could, in theory, lower the cap, but it would make slower attack speeds just as viable as 2 highest ones, which would remove some tradeoffs and simplify the problem. It really depends on which problem we want the players to solve and which playstyle to elicit.

• I've seen statements that poison is too passive to be allowed to be a good damage option, hence the nerf of making it independent from strength, but I would say that in a configuration like this, it's not nearly as passive as some existing meta builds. I'd still keep it inependent from other damage ids though, for the ease of balancing.

• Too few items having the major ID would limit the viability of this, in my mind it should be at least 4 different gear pieces, likely a few more. That still might not be enough though, which is why the minor id alternative is mentioned.

This is a very raw idea right now since I want to see what people think about it, but that means I’ll edit this post to incorporate suggestions!

Part of this post's ideas has been done with Cashisgr8.

 

Oh hey it's me. Guess I am at least famous enough around here to get some of my findings mentioned in a video about a niche mechanic.
I intend to reply a bit more in depth in a bit but placing this message here to remind later me its existence.

 

very cool idea
personally, i think limiting the damage potential of a specific type of build to one or two items is a bad idea (using major ids to make smaller ids matter more, like fission and explosive impact) rather than fixing the issue with the idea itself.
i would make all damage scaling apply to poison to fix its issues in areas of the game like lootruns. raids have poison add-ons, but they aren't much.

still a nice idea, i think it would work and definitely make poison a lot more viable than it is now

 

Really awkward, but I have no idea who you are (Edit: aaand this is what one calls a 'brainfart')
I only really lurk in "suggestions" part of the community, so I found the mechanic independently while testing poison to see if new shadestepper abilities could be based on it.
Guess it just shows that it's not one overly invested person spearheading poison buffs, the playerbase as a whole wants the return of poison.
Looking forward to your feedback!

 

Thank you!

I was thinking 4 or maybe 5 items, like Plague, that should give quite a bit more flexibility.

For lootruns, they could just add a poison boon, and from testing the current janky version in raids with Toxo, the damage keeps up even in TNA, even though it's 7 stacks max. In terms of damage scaling, I know that it was removed on purpose because of difficulties with balancing, so I see it as a closed door and am looking for an open window right now. (I also may or may not want to keep the cheese of not being affected by negative damage buffs in raids, Hollowed III is peak for this). I wouldn't really mind them adding it either, it is pretty unintuitive for players to have poison damage not affected by damage changes.

An alternative idea you might like more is instead of adding a major ID, add a minor ID called "poison stacks" - defines the maximum number of poison stacks a player can have applied to an enemy at the same time. That keeps it an independent scaling system, so it shouldn't be that problematic to add, but gives a lot more wiggle room for item variety compared to a major ID. It's harder to balance, so it scares me a bit, but it could work.

What do you think?

 

lootrun poison boon feels extremely niche, but sure
i didn't know that %damage scaling ever existed for poison
so it works in raids
interesting
well as long as there are options like plague this seems like a Certified Good IDea.

 

I fumbled the phrasing, my bad
There's no scaling for it in raids, but that actually makes it stronger. All increases to your damage are either spell or main attack, so poison wouldn't be affected by them anyway. Generic damage effects are only negative, in Shattered Mortal's gambit and Hollowed III, but right now they don't affect poison either.

Poison right now isn't affected by anything really. I tried Cavalryman, Shaman masks, etc., it's purely dependent on the poison id the player has.

Edit: it might actually be affected by some raid stuff. We're not sure, since it's harder to test, but I'll update the main post once there's more data.

 

No worries about it. I wouldn't have expected much especially since I've mainly been lurking myself with a last post/message being nearly 3 years ago... Within that video you linked they made mention to a thread I made on poison mechanics from back then prior to 1.20 hence my comment.


Regarding this post itself. Funny enough the "bug"/feature/idk i dunno at this point has actually been a thing since one of the Hero betas for 2.0. At least whenever they finally opened it up to the broke non Hero players including myself. sometime around September 3rd 2022 is when I first had the chance to document it and maybe send a bug report? I forget. [Here if curious]

Since I figured it was a bug at the time my time using it was brief but sometime around Rekindled I believe I had given up and figured "its been years" it hasn't been fixed or such yet and barely is viable if not low end outside of extreme 7 toxo cases where it's sorta viable and "I want to use poison dang it" so I've caved and been using it quite a bit on mage in raids mainly NoL

In concept I am a fan of the idea of turning this "bug" into a mechanic of some sort. Since using it primarily as a main build I've gotten used to and actually enjoy using poison in this manner being the most damage viable instance of poison (outside of pvp and toxo itself) since whatever 1.20.x update where courage and curse buffed poison midway.

As a feature... I don't believe a major ID or any additive ID in general is a good means to accomplish this goal primarily due to 2-ish reasons:

If we assume the current state of poison now (excluding the stacking "bug") assuming my memory is correct of the item list even with the highest available damage poison build you are looking at 36k poison ticks with toxo being a mythic tier the highest damage poison weapon in a meta where most builds even non meta can on a bad day out dps that and given our current state of mob balance such as in raids, world events, . . . qira . . . sure poison has never been meta (outside of pvp, like 2014-15 wynn cactus builds, and maybe 1.20 TCC toxo) heck that at least is what I've heard was part of the reason poison in 2.0 was nerfed to begin with saying they wanted it to be relegated to more passive additive dps (to which I argue why have poison items with high values to begin with).

Tangents aside the reason I bring this up is because if making poison "good" was relegated to just a major ID or even an additive ID those builds with the capabilities of being able to use those pieces would be living in sorta viable glory while equally viable and usable builds that now lack that capability will be stuck with no hope but to take 10 minutes longer during a boss fight. For the system to produce a variety of builds to suit the various needs of the player these IDs would have to be on all these frequently used weapons/armors/accessories. Say for example this ID was only given to a few items including say toxo, a relevant but hard to build for req helmet, some level 40 piece with basically nothing stats and an accessory that has intelligence or agility for some confusing reason. Sure toxo users are chilling but now every other player that wants to build into heavy poison is forced to use these few pieces just to stay pushing viable. What would you do with the snail set if you are a mage and all the items with the ID are locked to other classes/pieces of armor which obviously doesn't work with snail.

You'd also have the case of depending on how that set of specific equipment is arranged and how it ends up being implemented an item with said ID could just straight up outclass all the other armors in that tier. (I know this kinda already happens with heavy poison cause bigger number is better but hear me out) For instance say this major ID adds a flat 10 stacks to poison and within your build your only applicable item with it is on a lvl 40 chest piece with minimal poison. Why choose any higher leveled better other stats chestplate with 3x the poison value damage etc. when this single chest plate multiplies your damage 10 fold basically invalidating that whole category of equipment for poison builds.


In a vacuum I'm for the idea of an ID but given the current state of the game I feel the only means to both keep the concept of this mechanic while also not butchering every variant of the non meta build is if stacking was applied to the core of the poison mechanic as a whole. (Sorry if this is derailing a thread or something but someone made this forum post a while back and I feel this is probably something a bit more reasonable keeping the concept of stacking while not alienating builds. I am still very interested in hearing how this suggestion progresses. Any further ideas/brainstorming and all that sort. It's been good to make a meaningful comment on a suggestion again after a while.

 

Ah, I made a fool of myself
I forgot that you made that post :skull:
It's been a long few days

This I've actually tested on main attack, you can apply poison even if your dps is 0 and main attack doesn't do a damage tick itself, not sure about spells.

I've actually read it before, really good post. I have a couple disagreements with it - it's way too difficult for new players to understand, and scaling it with STR and DEX will make balancing inherently harder for the item team. I personally also want to have it decoupled from STR and DEX to differentiate it from raw melee damage. DPS that changes over time is an interesting idea, but the difference between something like TCC and NOL boss fight times would make things really weird. I'd also say it's a bit underpowered: "DPS after 60min: ~10.58x = 101130 ~ 101k DPS (~3x current value)", while a current 7 Toxo build can do over 100k DPS without needing 60 minutes to charge, and that puts it on just about the same level as regular mythic builds. That is a matter of simple multiplication though, so it shouldn't be too hard to fix. It also looks like 2 poison builds in a party would be hurting each other if I understood correctly, which I don't like.
I do like that they managed to avoid the formula of [raw dmg id and % dmg id], we have it in 2 places already, and stacking normally automatically implies it.
That being said, here's a simpler idea* that does unfortunately fall into this pitfall (but does avoid other ones):

This is harder to balance than a major ID, but easier to balance than scaling with STR and DEX. Some poison items would probably be changed to have poison stacks id instead of poison for this to make sense, and there would almost definitely be items with negative poison and positive stacks and vice versa. As I mentioned, it does technically follow the formula of [raw dmg id and % dmg id], except %dmg id is in multiples of 100% (unless you make the default stacks x where x > 1, then it's multiples of 100/x %). That is quite wacky, but it helps differentiate poison from other damage types and makes up for elemental damage boosts being inaccessible.

*I'm not sure if that's exactly what you were referring to here,

but the point of using a minor id instead of a major one is to make it quite common, probably about as common as healing efficiency id (though a bit more common on jewelery than it). Some builds would be left in the dust, but more should emerge.

If it was done like that, do you think it would work better?

I think it's time to add the minor id idea to the main post as an alternative huh

 

actually the ims did some stat merging (for instance homeorheosis or whatever gives % damage increase IIRC. tomes do as well)