the plague bearers staff alongside the fact that poison getting more and more damage per stack is part of the issue. Bleed and ignite struggle to feel good where as poison its reletively easy to apply 6-10 stacks in a very very short time. Since bleed and ignite dont have any special thing about them or any kind of support like that, they feel very weak in comparison.
My lich can apply something like 50 with a single transplant cast with the rip bloods and explosions its pretty silly.
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Yea i agree! I hope though, they never will stop the scaling for each stack, since it a quite interesting mechanic, and i hope bleed and ignite with get some different but special effects to them to. To add som flavour. Like bleed could remove armor to - haha or something like that. There is a reason why i am not devolopper 
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It’s not the staff, it’s purely due to the fact that poison gets % increased damage per stack. I’ve done some spreadsheets to show this.
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Yea i have actually seen those spreadsheets, they were really awesome. But the way i am seeing it, if you are limitting how much stacks people can apply (now its 250% increase poison chance on hit, on the weopen) - you will also stop that insane scaling. When that is said, i do believe poison is maybe a bit overtuned at the moment in terms of how good the scaling is on it. But i still believe that lot of the problems with poison is caused by the staff, since it makes other, unintended characters, be able to use poison - in setups the devs have never balanced around. Like devouring orb setup. (Thank god abyssal echoe cant applie ailments haha :D))
Edit: Although i will say this. I am not master at poison or ailment at all. I have mostly beeing playing around hit damage and crit, since it suits my playstyle more :)!
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The staff just exasperates the problem because it allows any class to get 300% poison chance for the low low price of your weapon and belt slot. and this is suddenly all the damage you will ever need.
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But that would be a cap and, people don’t like caps.
Nope, it’s not the staff, though as ForgottenAmnesia says, the staff just makes it more obvious. Besides, the most powerful poison builds aren’t even staff builds, they’re pet builds.
Hahahahahaha well played… Well played, but let me use another word “Limit” the players
Edit: Don’t force me to start calling you Liam again haha <3
It does, but the staff itself isn’t the problem, it just makes it more obvious. If poison didn’t have the % increased damage per stack effect, it’d be the same as the other ailments & you don’t see them doing enough damage to kill the training dummy do you?
I think the poison on hit chance is a bit too high on the staff itself with the current balance of poison damage . But you are correct, ignite and bleed builds tend to hit like wet noodles since they dont have the scaling like poison does. they could keep poison scaling but have it increment every 5 or 10 stacks instead of every 1. It goes hand in hand. The staff by itself is a better applicator of poison than any ignite or bleed item in the game by about 100%, and on top of that, poison is just silly on its own.
The problem is that there is limited Single-Type scalings, or other methods of scaling Bleed and Ignite compared to poison. The result is that any build that is built around Ignite or Bleed would function basically identically if you swapped it for Poison and work the exact same. Combined with poison only requiring a relatively small # of stacks to equal the damage of a bleed or Ignite, and quite easy to exceed that. Poison ends up just being superior.
The specific bonuses that DO exist in some cases to differentiate bleed/ignite, can simply be made up for by scaling poison even harder. Bleed Duration/Effectiveness maybe doubles or quadruples the damage of bleeds. But if you’re applying enough poison stacks, you make up that damage difference. Either the specific-modifiers need to be stronger so that if you invest into bleed, theres 0% chance that poison can ever match the damage, or poison needs to scale much weaker off of itself (resulting in basically the same effect as the other modifiers becoming stronger). Otherwise the only other option is to mechanically separate their purpose and function for a build.
If Ignite was for example to spread its stacks to nearby targets, Ignite would work as the “AoE” ailment, while poison was superior for Single Target. Bleed could do a set % (current or max) of enemy HP per-tick, or it could ignore protections or something to make it more powerful against Defensive enemies, where they would otherwise reduce a lot of your damage, maybe for a build that thrives on killing small weak fodder monsters but struggles against bosses. Or maybe Bleed no longer stacks but instead new applications just refresh the debuff and it infinitely scales to do more damage the longer it has been applied to a target indefinitely. There’s a lot more options for mechanical differences and flavor that aren’t really being explored atm.
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I would think bleed could be very useful if it were to shred armor for each X number of stacks so it would be damage alongside benefiting a hit build.
The spreading idea could be a neat idea for ignites could be an awesome unique
but that wouldnt fix the issue more or less it needs some way to hit harder without exponentially scaling with itself
.
Lowering the damage for poison and giving other ailments more purpose would be helpful.
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Part of that is because it’s a 2-handed weapon, so it needs to have higher numbers than a 1-handed weapon. Plague Bearer gives 100-250% chance to poison, Torch of the Pontifex gives 130-170% chance to ignite, so yeah, I guess they could tone the staff down by 50%-100% chance, but Torche of the Pontifex also gives 130-170% increased ignite damage as well (while the staff gives increased plague effect, I’m not sure that plague stacks).
IMO incrementing every X stacks (where X >> 1) would feel kinda/mildly annoying if you know you’re not hitting those thresholds, just reducing the effect by the same amount would feel less annoying/whatever.
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several skills/passives already let you do this. Armor shred is a pretty weak mechanic so that this ends up still being worse than poison in almost all cases afaik. Havent done the exaact math, but just estimating it.
For example, you might need 10 stacks of Armor Shred to reduce a 1k HP/Prot enemy in order to double the damage of bleed. Same as 10 stacks of poison doubles poison damage. Except when that enemy is now 10k HP/Prot in endgame high end arena and such, you still only decrease the EHP of that enemy by 1k, which now only translates to around a 11% bleed damage increase. Compared to poison, which is still doing its full 100% bonus damage.
Which is why I’ve said all along that the other ailments need some form of mechanical differentiator to give them their own role as compared to poison.
My concern with bleed also applying a stack of armour shred is that that would increase the damage that bleed does purely by having higher bleed stacks, just like poison does now, though with the added benefit of also allowing any other sources of physical damage to do more.
Edit: Maybe bleed making the target take x% more damage from physical sources if the target is bleeding (ie, the benefit is capped at 1 stack) would be more effective as you could then increase the % without having to worry about someone figuring out how to apply 50 trillion stacks per second & break the server.
true in the current iteration its not great but it would give it an identity
yeah plague doesnt stack. its just a spreading poison damage dot (hard to tell if it actually does anything) But with how poison works, losing 150% damage is essentially nothing compared to torch of pontifex. even if the staff were like 100-150% chance to poison, i think it would still be one of the best weapons in the game just due to how poison works
Which shows that the problem is poison, not the staff. Keep the staff how it is, give poison’s increased damage taken per stack diminishing returns, give bleed/ignite their own identities/functions, job done.
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The staff isnt insane power level on its own. The problem is that very few other slots have ways to get poison chance at all, let alone a decently significant amount. Poison is VERY limited availability on Sentinel for example, the staff is one of your only sources of it, outside of Idols, which usually could be used for much more important/unique effects.
If “Chance to Poison” were available at 25% ish on several gear slots, Plague Staff would be seen much less commonly.
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you can use viper tail and the staff with any build and get over 300%, the problem is poison and honestly it should probably be 1% increased damage per stack and still that may be too much.
Its just too much on one item to be considered balanced in how poison works right now. i cant think of a single build that isnt minions that wouldnt be straight up better with the staff and introducing poison compared to without it.
heck i play a poison sentinal and the only sources i have are the staff and belt and i dont really scale anything else and it does like arena 200+ without a hiccup. Id like to see poison brought down and bleed and ignite given identities.
I really don’t think it would, since the staff provides such a big chance to poison by itself.
All of that said, I have an on-going project, an ignite Shield Throw Paladin & it can/will be able to get a pretty high ignite chance (with Shield Throw converted to fire to make it a fire skill):
Helm - Calamity 150%
Body - no ignite chance but Prism Wraps for +% fire damage & reduced elemental damage taken
Gloves - Maehlin’s Hubris, no native ignite chance, but they convert all bleed chance to ignite chance, plus a fire DoT damage increase
Belt - Nothing her per se, but you can use a Flame Spitter’s prefix for up to 300% chance to ignite for 4s on potion use
Boots - Nothing here per se, but you can use Firey Dragon Shoes for increased ignite effect
Rings - Invoker’s set ring for 75% x2
Amulet - Nothing per se
Relic - Soulfire for up to 210% plus up to 30% as an implicit
Weapon - while I went sceptre/shield for defence, you could go Torch of the Pontifex for up to 170% chance to ignite + up to 170% damage
In addition to this Shield Throw can get up to 100% on it’s skill tree, Smite can get up to 125% (but currently doesn’t benefit from any ignite chance outside of it’s skill tree), Holy Aura can give up to 12% (big whoop! /sarcasm) which is doubled for 4s on active cast of Holy Aura.
Passives:
- Forge Guard’s Smelter’s Might gives +7% ignite chance & +7% bleed chance per point for up to 70% of each (bleed converted to igntie via the gloves) for a total of +140%
- Paladin’s Pennance node can give up to 200% bleed chance (converted to ignite via the gloves)
This will give you a total of 1,162% chance to ignite permanently (with Shield Throw), going up to 1,474% chance for 4s on potion use & Holy Aura cast. That’s nearly 12/15 stacks per hit (Shield Throw hits twice with Eruption). I’m getting a bit over 2 throws per second (without Smite’s attack speed buff, probably up to a bit under 3 with the attack speed buff) for somewhere between 24 - 72 ignites per second on a single target. For multiple targets within the AoE of Eruption multiply that by 1 + the number of ricochets plus the number of mobs Shield Throw passes through 'cause they proc Eruption as well.