Game Design The Poison ID

I wanted to make this post a sort of one stop shop for all things poison inspired by the various comprehensive professions guides around the forums along with a post about the ins and outs of a certain mechanic I found a while back [if I ever recall the post ill credit it (here)] but also include it in my more feedback related thoughts here as well since I feel an understanding of the basic mechanics are needed to show what needs improvement. If I need to split the posts for any reason I can do so if need be. ANYWAYS...

So, Poison builds in wynncraft are kind whack... not that they themselves are bad or that the identification itself isn’t good I mean look at items like Toxoplasmosis basically preventing people from existing in hunted mode being able to deal fatal damage to 70% of endgame builds within 4 seconds by simply wielding the weapon and a bracelet. More so what I mean is that the way that the way poison operates as a mechanic makes it very cumbersome to use especially within a multiplayer environment and compared to other builds or playstyles requiring a much steeper learning curve to use and deal damage effectively.

Now for a general recap on how poison within in wynncraft works. For most of the wynncraft community most of this will be already well known so feel free to skip this section for the real feedback part unless you want a refresher (who knows you may find out something new). I'll explain my post in the feedback in a means that may reference some of the information in the recap, but I’ll try to reexplain anything necessary so that anyone who skipped this section won't be too lost.

Spoiler: Recap of Poison on a basic level:

Currently in wynncraft the way poison works is that when a player with equipment, consumables, raid buff that give the poison ID hits a mob/player they initially take the source damage of the initial attack whether spell damage or melee damage. After a short amount of time the target is put in a "Poisoned" state (Indicated by a series of multicolored potion particle clouds around the target) where over the course of the next 3 seconds give or take server lag the target takes the total amount of the user's poison damage divided by 3 for a total equal to the user's original poison value rounded up to the nearest whole if decimals.

IE 1998/3s poison value causes damage ticks of 666 3 times spaced out 1 second apart from each other for a total of 1998 damage as opposed to damage ticks of 1998 over the course of 3 seconds for a total of 5994 damage.

*If the division of the total ends up with a decimal value such as 152/3s returning 50.66666... then the poison ticks will round up to 51 for a total of 153/3s despite displaying the 152/s


Poison can be activated through the following means:

Hitting a target with a melee attack (left click with a weapon or right click if using an archer)
Spells that deal damage
Weapon powder specials that deal immediate damage (Courage activation hit, Chain Lightning, Quake)
***Tomes that give the Poison ID
Equip able gear that gives the Poison ID (both positive and negative values)
Plague Major ID spreading poison damage​

Poison not activated by:

Non damaging powder Specials
Armor Powder specials
Punching damage
Damage with weapons that deal no damage (Specialist, Wybel Paw, etc.)
Damage with weapons that no longer deal damage (old wynncraft weapons that no longer work)
Thorns
Reflection
Non damaging spells
Incomplete spells (stopping meteor before it falls or hitting nothing with multihit/uppercut)
***Plague Major ID without poison ID already
If you don't already have anything giving you the Poison ID
Hitting a mob already in the Poisoned state
Missing a hit on a target with agility
Pet damage
*Positive and Negative Poison cancels to 0/3s​

While the target is within the "Poisoned state" the target is able to be damaged via melee, spells, thorns, reflection, pets, etc. however only the poison damage applied which put the target into the state will damage them and only will be affected by poison the moment after the final poison tick's damage is dealt.

The damage poison deals is considered Neutral damage meaning it is unaffected by a target's elemental defenses and poison damage will also remain unaffected through an opponent's defense and agility stat or any buffs they may receive after the initial weapon hit is received and poison is active.

As of hotfix 1.20.4 #1 the poison damage inflicted on a target is no longer a flat division of the initial hit's total poison damage meaning that an increase or decrease in the amount of damage dealt [typically through the use of powder special buffs such as courage or curse] will immediately increase the damage dealt during the following damage tick and if the buff expires the damage will drop from the buffed damage to the base or lowered state.

Spoiler: Additional notes on Plague because it itself is kind of weird

So according to the Major ID's Description it mentions "Poisoned mobs spread their poison to nearby mobs" which isn't entirely correct at least intuitively.

When a user with the Plague Major ID hits a mob and the mob successfully enters its poisoned state, the user is provided an actively updating radius around the player where any mobs not currently under the effect of poison and are within the radius will begin to also take poison damage without any additional done by the user lasting until the most recently poisoned mob exits its poisoned state.

IE: If you smack a mob then run 50 blocks to another group of mobs (assuming you made it before the poison timer expires) standing next to the new group will cause them to enter the poison state.

It does not cause poisoned mobs to spread their poison damage to mobs immediately next to them if the receiving mob is outside the radius.

Attached is a terrible MS Paint diagram to reference if a visual representation is needed. (Triangle is the player, the large circle is the poison radius [not to scale], Red diamond is mob A, Green is mob B, Blue is mob C) Here

Diagram (1): If mobs A. B, and C are inside the circle, and you attack mob A then mobs B and C will begin taking poison damage at the same time​

Diagram (2): If mob A is inside the circle while mobs B and C are outside, and you hit mob A then mobs B and C will remain unaffected​

Diagram (3): If mob A is outside the circle and mobs B and C are inside and you attack mob A then mobs B and C will begin taking poison damage at the same time​

Diagram (4): If mob A is outside the circle standing near mob B and you attack mob A then mob A will continue taking damage until the damage expires, mob C will begin taking damage, and mob B will remain unaffected​

Any usual poison mechanics will still apply to poison afflicted through plague so the 3 ticks mechanic, damaging through neutral damage, ignoring defense and ***agility and lasting curse/courage specials will increase the damage of the next to all currently poisoned mobs within and outside the radius.

However, the poison given to mobs through the plague effect currently has a rather strange property... currently the base damage (so damage when courage/curse buffs are excluded [assuming the buffs have expired, if not then newly damaged mobs will also take the buffed damage but will default to the base after its expiration]) is applied to mobs that are within plague's radius. These mobs including the one afflicted have a property where they will continue to update the plague giving radius around the player even while the item with the plague ID is swapped out of use by the player or replaced with something of lesser or no poison damage without impacting the base poison damage being given to new mobs.

So theoretically the player could say plague a mob, swap their entire build to something else without poison and still be dishing out the same poison damage to new mobs as if they never swapped their build.

I imagine this is a uhh... slight problem... I’ll leave figuring out why as a task for the reader... anyways...

However, the total poison value can be increased [possibly lowered as well if some form of weakening from some enemy debuff or ] through various means such as:
Courage powder special (Including other player's Curse/Courage powder special)
Strength Skill points
Tome Buffs (poison id/strength skill points/or +X% damage to mobs)
Raid Buffs
Consumables such as Scrolls, Potions, Foods Buffs

note: Poison damage cannot be increased through War Scream damage buff, your own Totem damage buff, ally Totem damage buffs, Vanish damage buff, Bash damage buff, or any of the Armor powder specials
*Double note: unsure if the Major ID Saviors sacrifice can reduce poison damage taken or buff an ally's poison damage or if guardian absorbs partial poison damage
**triple note: Unsure if poison damage expires or not when the user is too far away from a mob mid poison state


*Footnote(1): Has not been tested
**Footnote(2): Has been tested with some but not all of this feature
***Footnote(3): Has not been tested due to no items present giving this effect in isolation

Now for the actual feedback:

Spoiler: Flaw 1: Useless damage

In the recap I mentioned a segment regarding a "Poisoned state" that occurs following the mob being hit with spells or melee which is where all the poison damage will then occur. While in this state the target is susceptible to any forms of damage done by the player, other players, other mobs, pets, environment damage, etc. however the one form of damage they aren't vulnerable to is poison damage itself. In this state any additional attacks done by a poison user will only deal the damage of spells/melee and not tag on additional poison ticks. This by far is one of the most glaring flaws of a poison build.

When under the state assuming the poison user's main source of damage is through poison then they are rendered essentially useless for the next 3 seconds as any of their damage will either be negligible or flat out irrelevant due to many of the poison-based weapons’ damages being already pathetic to compensate for their damage through poison. The poison ID seems to be of a few sets of IDs that have a cooldown of sorts those being Life steal, Mana regen/steal, along with health regen and % all being on 3-5/s with poison being the only one of these that directly impact a player's damage. IDs such as Thorns or Reflection are not limited by a cooldown and simply proc based on percentage which the player has a say to adapt their build to how often it operates likewise for the Explosion ID and especially with the now present Major IDs giving them more benefit not needing to kill a mob for its effect to happen with Explosive Impact.

Now I can understand why this was done. By giving it the 3/s effect, it more suits the effect of a poison killing the target slowly as it does. Also, from a game balance prevents some absurd dps (Imagine if toxo did its 13k damage all at once with its fast attack speed... sheesh) and to an extent I respect the way it is as a concept. However, the way it is currently implemented in game only causes more problems such as...

Spoiler: Flaw 2: Poison does not refresh + additional notes

So, we know that whenever the target is within the poisoned state, they are not able to deal additional poison damage till the end of the 3 seconds. But because it cancels any incoming poison that also means that no additional poison is being reapplied.

If you say hit the target right before its final second before the 3rd poison damage from the initial hit, the target will simply just take the final poison damage of the original hit shrugging off the most recent one and ending its poisoned state right there. Reapplying poison damage is extremely difficult to time as the only means to reapply poison optimally is to damage the mob right when the final damage has been delt so that the poison can begin damaging the target as soon as possible or lure an already poisoned mob near a unpoisoned mob using the Plague ID. Any sooner and the mob shrugs it off and you’ll have to hit it again or any later after it finishes, and you have to suffer the unbearably long (in reality it’s like 1.5 ish seconds but feels like an eternity) time it takes for the mob to begin the poisoned state again.

Now none of this would be an immediate issue. If you are aware of all of this and this is your main source of damage you would simply just always be sure to time the hit on the target right as soon as the first ran out in that space as soon as the 3rd hit happens and that would be fine. However,...

Spoiler: Notes

So apparently this segment is a "bug" according to Selvut meaning hopefully this part will soon (hopefully) be irrelevant so thank you for letting me know. I'm still going to keep this section here because it hasn’t been patched therefore is still valid information for the current update and because other questions.

Spoiler: Flaw 3: Poison weapons are slow

For a vast majority of the weapons in the game that utilize poison most of are slow attack speed weaponry. This is primarily because of the fact that the Poison ID is linked to the Strength skill point and by association the Earth element which features the characteristic of slow but heavy damage. This gets in the way of timing that optimal hit to reapply the poison damage because due to the swing speed being slow it’s hard to link up that final optimal hit with your weapon/spells getting off of cooldown and dealing constant damage to prevent the target from healing, dealing damage for aggro, micromanaging spells or building powder specials meaning more than likely the user is just going to be spamming their melee or sort leaving no room to time.

Assuming you are able to manage with all of this, perfectly timing your melee hits or using a weapon of the 29% of them near/around the end game that specializes in poison with fast+ attack speed, meanwhile building up powder specials, using spells, and actively damaging a mob now the worst flaw about wynncraft poison begins to show itself. The multiplayer.

Spoiler: Flaw 4: Multiplayer...

Now for this section I want to give credit to a feedback post made a while back by user @ccccccccccccccc [here](https://forums.wynncraft.com/thread...s-poison-dots-on-one-mob.285333/#post-3387170) as at the time of thinking about this feedback post I found their post and much of their work was right along the lines of my discoveries and issues as well as a word that this problem still plagues (hehe funny cus poison) the game and minimal to my understanding, has been done about it as evident by the update logs and their mention of the bug not being put in the list of current bugs at the time of their writing.

As mentioned in user @ccccccccccccccc 's post, wynncraft update 1.20 brought about some of the most significant changes in my opinion in regard to the multiplayer of wynncraft and making the experience more mmorpg like as the server sets itself out to be. Granted the server has always held multiplayer experiences and the poison problem has always persisted through experiences such as bob's reincarnation, qira's hive, Tower of Ascension, ???, and guilds along with the addition of Eldritch Outlook in the 1.19 update that brought along the Silent Expanse. However, with 1.20's additions promoting forgery/dungeon runs for parties of people up to 5 and the new hit being the 3 Raids which require the teamwork of a group of 3-6 to beat a task, multiplayer and the server itself hasn’t been this impacted by an update before. However, this update here brought about the worst flaws of poison's fundamental mechanics just with the addition of another person all because poison damage doesn't override others.

Now for those who haven’t experienced a heavy poison-based build where poison damage is your only source, I want to paint an image for you. Let's imagine taking on a foe with a group of 2, 4, 16, etc. for a situation like this there’s a few likely scenarios:

Scenario 1) You are the only member of your party with poison in their build. You manage to hit the target, and everything is going as expected dealing damage for the next 3 seconds (occasionally limited due to flaw 2 but still fine) and when your poison runs out you smack it again reapplying it without any hassle and the boss dies as normal with everyone contributing.

Scenario 2) You are one of 2 people in your party with poison within their builds, but the other's id is minimal (let’s say 750/3s versus your 13,000/3s and let’s call them "Dave" with his poison necklace and super-fast spear). You manage to hit the target before Dave hits them and everyone begins to continue to attack the boss. When your 3 seconds are up Dave gets the hit first with his faster spear due to yours suffering from Flaw 3. Due to Flaw 2, despite your poison damage being magnitudes higher you are unable to apply your 4333-poison damage meaning you now also suffer from Flaw 1 because of Dave's poison being still active for the next 3 seconds. When it comes time for Dave's poison to be up you manage to hit the enemy first overriding his poison for the next 3 seconds. Rinse and Repeat swapping whose poison gets afflicted until the enemy dies where you end up only contributing partially.

Scenario 3) You and Dave again with your party, Dave hits first due to Flaw 3 then you suffer 2 and 1. When time is up Dave hits again, you suffer, rinse, and repeat till the enemy is dead and you had no contribution to the damage pool.

Within @ccccccccccccccc post he showed some of these scenes and this phenomenon in action with a shaman's poison damage and another person's poison damage. For a majority of the time the warrior's poison damage overrides the shaman's damage causing the dummies to take visibly less damage with the one on the left being down an 8th in health while the right one being attacked by the warrior being nearly full health. While Scenario 3 is very unlikely to happen #2 is a very common sight and this is made even more present with the massive health pools of the enemies within the scaled forgery dungeons, raid, and other group bosses like Legendary Island to the point that if you want to play as optimally as possible you have to ensure no one else has poison and if they do either dismissing their assistance, leaving yourself, or forcing one of the conflicting builds to swap.

Now I’ve used a Snail Mage build based around heavy poison for about a little over a while now and since then I’ve partaken in a large number of raids primarily TCC and NoL. Having this build for a while and poison damage being consistent and the visibility of the enemy health bar I typically have a sense of idea for when my poison has been applied or not such as when courage is active buffing my damage to 21k ticks, but the boss is only dropping health gradually from 5,000 to 3,000 giving me situations where I feel in some instances I could defeat an enemy faster alone then being together in a group. I am also not the kind of person to drive people away if they happen to conflict with my build mainly because 99% of the people who end up bringing conflicting builds with my poison damage aren’t aware they are doing it as they are simply using a good build. This brings me to my next point because items with minimal poison are everywhere in the endgame especially for non-poison users.

Here I want to talk about some common weapons/accessories in the end game that use poison. For my build mentioned above using the Snail armor set plus Saundersi Signet, Dying Lobelia, and Contrast as accessories. While I could use Planet Healer for more poison damage the utility of Contrast with its mana regen, life steal, while still having poison it helps my build out better than many of the other necklace options and other people see the benefit of it as wellbeing commonly used in builds being a common staple for my issues running raids, LI, etc. In addition, take items like Chaos-Woven Greaves and their use in ETW builds, Writing Growth in raw stack, Nether's Scar in Tier stack etc. All of which being commonly used in builds all indirectly linked with poison damage but none of which meant for poisoned based builds. But by far one of the worst offenders come from negative poison users through common weapons such as every mana mage's secondary King of Hearts with its -17500-poison damage all because negative poison still puts targets in the poisoned state making it so healers actively make things more difficult and in fights for tokens like LI or clearing a room filled with enemies can make things near impossible to progress for both parties.

Now that the situation has been explained time for some solutions:

At the minimum fix flaw #4 being the issue regarding multiplayer and people's poisons being able to cancel another should be fixed or altered in a way that benefits the higher poison damage user. Some suggestions include:

1) The best of all worlds, just make everyone's poison damage be applicable at once so that no one has to sacrifice their dps and everyone is happy.

2) If this isn't possible due to server mechanics or something make the system recognize which person's damage is higher and apply that poison damage over the smaller, sure if 2 people are using heavy poison and the other guy happens to have a toxo then the other would be useless but it’s better than the weird mix happening now.

3) Make it so the most recent hit deals their poison damage. This may come into conflict with Flaw 3 but at least the slower user won't be completely irrelevant and is still better than now.

5) As suggested in @ccccccccccccccc's post just add all the incoming poison damages together and apply it as a sum and track which ones are being added and expiring over time.

As for the other flaws,

4) Flaws 1, 2 and partially 3 can be fixed by simply allowing the poison state to refresh mid-way making it so the poisoned state lasts until 3 seconds of whatever was the final hit meaning if the player has full access to the enemy the poisoned state lasts till the enemy dies.

And for flaw 3... well its earth and slow weapons just have to deal with it

 

Bumping the thread also corrected some grammar/word mistakes and added a poll

Give me some feedback on what you think about the state of poison in wynncraft. Does it bother you? Are you Indifferent to it? Or if you have any additional information to correct some of the untested features I listed or may have omitted let me know so I can update them.

 

Regarding point 2, it USED TO refresh, and is supposed to. I'm genuinely uncertain why that broke again. At first it was supposed to refresh, and didn't. Then, it got fixed and refreshed properly. Then it broke again without prompting and we're not sure why.

 

Meant to reply sooner wups technically a bump then.

That's at least nice to hear that point 2 was intended to operate like that originally, at least before it got broken... then broken again... (perhaps I should make a bug report for it then?). I wasn't aware of it being like that prior due to my lack of poison focused damage only starting to use poison based builds in 1.20.X so that's neat.

Although perhaps you could answer a question regarding how it should operate. If it is supposed to refresh does it still invalidate other poison user's ability to poison by only allowing the original user to refresh it or would it work similarly to solution #3 alternating poison based on most recent hit? Hopefully latter over the former because it would probably be worse to eternally be stuck in a Scenario #3 situation highlighted in the multiplayer tab.

 

Le Bump for poison awareness Also further correcting some information thanks to recent info and findings

Send on over any thoughts, discoveries, or questions or just share your opinions.

 

Why can't Poison from different players not just stack on mobs? (Not stacking on players, pvp)

What a big flaw in an MMO game :/

 

So apparently poison got a silent fix? maybe it happened in 1.20.4 #1 or just a seemingly small addition but something about it changed and when I figure out all the details ill update the initial post to reflect the new changes.

From my limited testing the total poison damage is no longer a flat rate as it was before. Now you are able to immediately mid poison state increase and subsequently decrease the amount of poison damage you are doing specifically when a courage/curse buff is activated or runs out.

(for example: if you hit a mob and it takes the first hit for 9,000 poison damage then activate your courage/curse buff then hits 2 and 3 will increase to the buffed 22,000 damage and vice versa for when courage/curse runs out the mob will start with 22,000 damage then after the buffs run out will return to the 9,000 damage

*note: swapping to another weapon whether higher or lower in poison damage does not increase the total damage, the mob will just take the 3 hits at that initial weapon's hit as it has always)

I haven't retested any of the other things yet such as other class buffs working, skill point potions, etc. but the refresh bug is still a current bug and to my understanding multiplayer is still an issue.

________________________________

Also added a 5th poll option along with a 5th suggested fix

 

Le thread bump to keep this thread relevant and to hope someday this'll get reworked/fixed so I can enjoy killing the light doggo faster.


(since I don't have anything more to update about how about I share some poison related weird stuff I found while browsing through wynndata)

• Spleen splitter is a word for word "poor mans" toxoplasmosis having basically exactly the same stats minus loot bonus and the obvious less poison which is interesting because they were both added in the same update 1.19... wonder which one set the tone for the other
• For each of the 5 classes non mythic poison weapons there are 2 Legendaries (Spear: Quinque and Bow: The Evolved), 2 Uniques (Wand: Sequoia and Relik: Spleen Splitter) and 1 Rare (Dagger: Forest Aconite) [kinda sad that mages and shamans are reduced to uniques while the others get rare+ but at least they have the most damage per poison... makes me wonder what classifies a "Unique" weapon]
• Speaking of Forest Aconite its the only item in the game with that weird "Rainbow spell damage" ID at least according to wynndata

 

Plague staff for mage tho

 

Well I meant more so the most poison damage non mythic weapons for each class (so basically just not toxo because Gaia has weaker poison than 2 wands being the before mentioned Sequoia) though the weapon itself completely slipped my mind mainly because it's intel req made it cumbersome to use. However... your point got me to try and force it into my snail build and I realized that the Plague Major ID's description text lies about what it does. (This is probably well known to most people granted I wasn't aware of this so I'd imagine others are similar) According to the text it says that "Poisoned mobs spread their poison to nearby mobs" which at least from my limited testing isn't correct. What it seems to do is upon having a mob enter the poison state for the lasting period of time the state is active for the player has an actively updating radius based on the player's current position where any other mobs that enter will then enter the poison state. IE if you smack a mob having the plague ID, run 50 blocks to another group of mobs and just stand near them then they will then start taking poison damage. If mob A is poisoned and is standing one block away from mob B then unless mob B is within radius of you as well will not be poisoned.

I suppose noting this I can add it to the "Poison recap" section for plague as well as some sort of note to update the description text for it to better represent how plague works so I thank you for your input.

 

Bump. Retyped a decent bit of the original post and added/corrected more information regarding newfound inform as well as adding a section regarding Plague since plague is technically related to poison kinda sorta (I recommend looking at that section specifically because I really don't think that is how plague was intended to operate... unless it is then shrugs cool I guess)