Game Design Poison

Poison was nerfed in 2.0

So poison is no longer affected by strength, and it was confirmed to be a balance change and not a bug. This doesn't make sense to me because poison was not used in builds outside of farming mats or hunted pvp.

Poison needed a serious buff in 1.20. @runsoccer did a good job summarizing a lot of the problems poison had in 1.20
https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/the-poison-id.294827/

Spoiler: Old thread

Originally I created a thread in 2.0 beta Discussion & General Feedback. But I wanted to continue the thread now that 2.0 is live.
https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/poison.302109/

 

I think a good buff to poison would be to have it be affected by HALF of the player's strength. This way poison wouldn't be too OP, while still being viable.

 

poison was super problematic before because of curse & courage multiplying its damage numbers to actually ludicrous amounts, so poison was either stuck being really low all around just to not allow curse/courage to make it absurd dps for little effort, or in a few cases that was just ignored and to no one's surprise the poison dps was off the charts if supported properly. basically, these two not affecting poison anymore is just great and isn't coming back. i'm not sure where you got the idea that poison was underpowered in 1.20, because it really was just not abusable to the max because of a few bugs preventing that.

as for strength, i'd like to see it affect poison again, but this boost was removed as a result to poison having been changed by the developers because of constant dysfunctional ability interactions.

poison ids will probably see a more general rebalance with curse/courage finally out of the way to be more fitting for general builds down the line but it's not particularly high priority- most of the existing endgame items with significantly higher poison than others are likely already pretty close to how poison will end up. though again that does depend on if strength affecting poison will return or not

 

Realistically I think poison needs the reflect/thorns treatment. Do more damage against mobs, less against players. Or make defense/agility affect poison. It seriously needs a buff, nerfing it is laughable. Besides using toxo, it's really bad for any PVE content. On top of nerfing the courage damage bonus, it really makes any poison builds unviable.

 

@Bart (MC) is biased! He hates poison!!! Booooo he wants to imprison it eternally as negligible passive DPS

I disagree (namely Spleen Splitter use in regular combat builds but that's about it) but it definitely saw minimal use and was not meta damage.

Seriously though, buff poison it's so terrible now.

 

I meant to reply closer to when you sent your message but I keep getting distracted by outside means... haha funny squid game


@Bart (MC)

If you don't mind answering because I am just genuinely curious but in what way was poison damage "ludicrous amounts" even when courage/curse was applied in 1.20?


Perhaps this stems from me using a more average damage poison damage build with a base 8k courage boosted to 21k, but isn't 20-23k around par for average for the typical melee build? hmelee non mythic stinger could hit 24k per hit and the usual tier and raw stack non mythic usually aim for 20k. If we go on the more damaging side of things non mythic spleen splitter can hit 13k ticks up to 40k curse boosted which is more on the extreme side which obviously sacrifices ehp but you could hit similar numbers doing the same with generic melee and heck you can achieve similar numbers if you tried with spells with arrow storms hitting 20-40k non mythics, less immediate but old assassin combos with vanish, spin attack, and smokebomb (i dont know the damage i dont play assassin please dont hurt me) hitting spell damage numbers other classes could only dream of.


And what about comparing the mythics? An average toxo to my knowledge tends to be around 13-14k so 40k curses which for most mythics both spell and melee can hit around those marks and at max possible poison damage 20k base with 62k curse which weapons like epoch can hit with melee and divzer, rage gma storms etc. Plus this isn't even factoring that those weapons too can also use and abuse curse and courage plus the other armor specials all of which don't work for poison and in the case of spells simply casting another spell mid your current one increases the damage multifold something poison is incapable of more often than not because the base damage of most poison weapons are [downwards stonks into the toilet bowl]. In addition like all other weapons using powder specials you have to build it up so for the first 7-10 seconds you are only dealing the base damage off the bat compared to other weapons able to do what they do nearly immediately and when you do build it well shoot they have too and while you just met their old base theyve now surpassed it.

Now you mentioned how due to the fact some bugs were around that poison couldn't be abused to its max. That kinda confuses me.... At least that I am aware of the two main issues with poison being restrained were the lack of multiplayer stacking as well as the refreshing the timer which was confirmed to be a bug. For the multiplayer I'm unsure of how the fact this being fixed would make poison broken. If anything It would just make it as viable as it should've been being more consistent. Total damage wouldn't change its just now you are actually contributing to the damage pool like any other build would be able to do. Which we got in 2.0 and its nice and works... . . . has some strange properties... but works. As for the other bug the refreshing I still lack an understanding as to how abusable. No extra damage is suddenly happening its just once again more consistent. Damage ticks 3 times as always just now there isnt a downtime after-tick 3 where you can finally reapply but instead do so at any other melee hit prior.

Another thing you noted was that cause courage and curse poison values were so high that you had to keep the bases low to not become insane. I'm speaking personally for me but I don't mind managing the values we have now... most endgame armor hovers 3200-4200 accessories 900-1100 and weapons 3000-4000 with the only exception being toxo at 13,000 putting it in tiers with mythic level damage and at its current state It all seems relatively balanced at best and just pushing viable at worst which i'm chill with. If you want some ideas you could make a super high base poison damage weapon and balance it by not giving it any powder slots to use. Or even make it so a weapon with reasonably high poison damage and powder slots despite having a strength req tanks the strength skill points so that its only viable with powder specials. Stuff like that. In my personal opinion the only buffs poison really needed was for the those bugs that held it back to be fixed and It would've been perfectly fine as a build choice.

As a note all this excludes PvP. Everything I said applies and should only apply to PvE as i don't have any research into PvP nor do I want to delve into those matters of which is more of an issue regarding the damage formula on players vs mobs. Thats its own can of worms I wish to not deal with.

Once again though the reason I typed this was just being curious. I don't have any understanding besides what is expressed on the live/beta nor any indication of how things should or shouldn't work. Is the 2.0 poison stacking a bug or not? who knows? I surely don't. So thats why I ask you why does poison seem like such a issue balancing wise as I really didn't see any issue with it before.

 

Bumping this thread. Poison doing 2.34 times (tomes • strengh) less damage then normal should be addressed. Items should be balanced around pve, and not pvp. As said above, poison could just simply get the thorns / reflection treatment.

 

Bumping this again.

I had an idea of a way to change it, instead of a flat number it would be a percentage, and then it would deal weapon damage • percent • (other buffs) to enemies every second (something similar to Shaman's totem dot). It can then be treated like another spell.
This doesn't work well when we consider it on armor with certain weapons, but I thought I would share the idea.

 

Following up on the idea, raw melee damage ID (or raw spell) could be in the equation as well.

Let's consider Blind Thrust and Caterpillar. At max strength (•1.8), courage special (•1.1?).
4,550%•2,080•(1/3)•1.8•1.1=62,462.4 dps
Which is comparable to some 2.0 dps builds. But this is just 2 pices.

For raw spell, if we consider The Crossing and Alkahest.
4,550%•425•(1/3)•1.8•1.1=12,763 dps

I think this works well out because the raw damage IDs already act as a replacement for weapon damage as we can see in cases like Glissando. And if the dps turns out to be to high or low, it could be changed on a per weapon basis, or change the duration.

 

Bumping this. I really hope that poison is reworked in the next patch.