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.
Warpath is a physical spell.
Warpath is not a spell its a melee skill.
As for protection reduction well when it goes negative it should becomes a damage multiplier that stacks on top of all other damage. That means some should be good no matter what the problem is the protection/(max hp+protection) formula which means it only really better than increase damage. Since most of these protection reductions are in skills and will be taking the place of the multiplicative more damage mods they are bad IMO.
Thanks for pointing it out.
In terms of why, protection reduction is not very good, i agree with some of your points. Although, i will try not to explain why i conclude most of the things, since i am afraid of the post being to long, and maybe get out of hand. Although people can freely ask, how i came to the conclusion.
That doesn’t seem to have prevented you before.
Haha thats true. But i have come to the conclusion, that people don’t end up reading my post, due to the shear volume of rambling - same for my build guide on shield throw that was over a hour long. I honestly don’t think, anyone watched the full video 
On top of that, this post is meant for beginners that have just hit end game, and now trying to minmax their character - and i believe, deep explainings/disccusion on why i state most of these things, will confuse more, than help.
Is there any post like this one but for defenses? I’m not 100% sure how should I scale / focus then on builds, like resists, block, attributes, life, etc.
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Hey :). As far i know, i don’t think that there is a defensive post. But i know there are some good informations on YouTube on that matter 
Edit: If more people are interested to see a post similar for defensive layers, i do not mind making such post
Here’s a video about it:
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While it seems logical that a percentage increase in armor/protections would be more valuable if you stacked armor/protections to begin with, what about passive points that increase armor/protections by a flat amount? Do those nodes still make stacking armor/protection a better investment than life?
On a side note, it also seems that armor/protection has more benefits if you have ways of healing. So having a smaller real life pool and lots of mitigation makes healing more efficient.
Yes, it does.
Rimed video guide have been added. So if you are more for listening than reading, give that a watch instead
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This guide is awesome. Very nice. Many mechanics you mention I had to learn the hard way by trial and error. And even after getting some impressions I could not be sure if it truly works like i imagined. So i spent a lot of time on this forums (what wasn’t a bad thing 
) to search for tips.
This will help many people that start with LE to get into the mechanics. I’d suggest to spread the link via reddit and perhaps somebody could sticky it.
There’s only on thing where I don’t really understand the meaning"
So do you mean for warpath it doesn’t matter what damage type I am scaling?
Unless you have some specific +% XXX damage, then it doesn’t matter what flat damage you have on your weapon. If your have a damage conversion going on, it then doesn’t matter what flat damage you have added in as it will all get converted (then you need % modifiers for that damage type).
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Ok, thanks. Got a little bit confused by the wording “In general, depending on what class and masteries you are playing, you can easily avoid specific of type of damage increases.”
But I got it now 
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Hey man! Thanks for the kind words, and also for pointing out some of the sentence out, that is not completely clear. I will edit it later, so it easier to understand. Yea @Llama8 is right, that is my point with it.
Also something i dind’t mention is, that if you choose to scale a specific damage, the damage % ranges will be higher: For instances, if you compare the range for %increase elemental damage, and %increase spell dmg, the %increase elemental damage, should be higher on staffs.
But i ended up not mention it. Because, I would not recomend scaling %increase damage on gear (werll generally - ofc there is always an exception)
I might later on, make a new section for general guide lines, for what damage scaling you want to take on gear. I will have to think about it, because it tie very closely to the defense part.