I’m playing a Markswoman, and trying out some of the poison nodes. However, the only poison I’ve tried before is with an Acolyte so I’ve never had to think about a couple details before, which I ask now.
Does poison happen ‘on top of’ regular damage or instead of? For example, if I’m using poison attacks (let’s say Acid Rain), do the +1 physical damage nodes (e.g. Swift Assassin in the Rogue tree) still benefit me?
I think the answer to 1) is yes, so I ask a 2nd question: do I still need them? For example, if the damage I want to primarily do is poison, and I don’t plan on buffing any +physical damage at all, is there any point to getting the +1 phys damage anymore? Am I better off getting other buffs (for the example in 1), replacing Swift Assassin with one of the Dex of Dodge nodes)?
For Exploding Arrow, which reduces the explosion damage 50% but increases the poison by 200%, do I care about that explosion damage much at all or should I focus 100% on the poison damage? Asking here as I’m not 100% sure how much of the explosion damage is helping me, or if it’s the poison that’s doing the heavy lifting now.
Last question: is there a threshold I want to/need to reach to make a build like this work? I know “the more the merrier”, but I noticed the Acolyte can melt things with their poison attacks much more quickly than the Markswoman does. This isn’t a complaint, it’s likely as I don’t have a lot of buffs to my +poison yet, but I would like to A) have enough poison to melt things, and B) not have too much so as I have no defense.
Poison the ailment is in addition to any other damage. Poison the damage type (such as Hail of Arrows Acid Rain node or the Acid Fletch bow) is just one of many damage types (physical, fire, void, etc). Because the Acid Rain node converts the damage for Hail of Arrows, that means that any added physical damage (from your gear or passives) will be converted from physical to the poison damage type.
You want to stack as much flat added damage as possible & then get as much % increased (or % more) damage of the appropriate types (either melee/bow/throwing/spell or the element, such as poison if you go with the Acid Rain node).
Probably not, for that skill/node you likely want to stack attack speed & poison chance (since the damage will primarily come from the poison stacks you apply rather than the explosion damage).
As Llama pointed out, and he is completely right about that, stacking flat dmg is the best way to improve your dmg output even if you fully wanna go for ailment dmg (i can tell for marksman atleast). This is something i currently don’t like about playing dot builds. I tried to focus on bleed/physical/dot dmg only for a bleed puncture build without carrying too much into flat dmg, because i wanted to see how far i can bring dmg. But then you simply add 6 points into Snipers Gambit for 30 Flat dmg and Skills like HoA/Detonating Arrow completely outperform a pure bleed playstyle.
You do actually. I played poison detonating arrow and after trying out the most dmg output i figured out mixing Jolting Charge (250% shock into Poison) and Well Crafted (explosion dmg) together with barrage (cone) i got the most out of it. Barrage somehow applies both the hit and explosion dmg at the same time which helps alot for dot builds to stack dmg as fast as possible. At least for my playstyle it was kinda safer in Arena aswell.
So i got the best dmg for poison DA out of this (tested both naked and fully geared): https://imgur.com/xWsw5s2
The 3 points into Barrage seems like to be completely wasted, but you have way more control in Arena and even the dummy dmg output was higher. Even the homing node can be really helpful because missing one arrow can be crucial due to the poison uptime on enemies.
You mean the marksman passive or Detonanting Arrow node? But in both ways they do increase your poison dmg because it’s explosion dmg (more multiplier, but be careful also less AoE) for DA and not explosion hit dmg. And the concentration node on marksman passive is a global dmg increase (not a multiplier).
sorry for not pointing out I meant marksman passive and poison dmg from Detonanting Arrow poison stacks. when I tested it on test dummy it didn’t seems to increase poison dmg.
Tested it real quick: Both character sheet poison dmg & detonating arrow tooltip dps increases when i put points into concentration.
Sometimes its really hard to see the different dmg numbers on the dummy, especially when alot of buffs like ‘Arrow Storm’, ‘Jade Quiver’ etc. are active. Also if you have for example 450% global poison chance and cast 10 detonating arrow shots in a row, sometimes you proc only 4 guaranteed poison stacks per cast only and with another 10 shots you proc 5 poison stacks because of the 50% rest which is not a guaranteed one of course. Thats why the numbers can alternate everytime you test your dmg on the dummy.
