I’ve been using aura of decay for quite some time now (Acolyte). I’m aware that it drains health, but I easily offset this effect with health regeneration. My game crashed today and after logging back in, my aura started killing me very rapidly. At first it does it’s normal pattern of removing 20 or so HP and then my character heals back to full health, but over a period of a minute or so, my poison resistance starts to dwindle and then my health shoots down rapidly within a few seconds and I die. This is with no enemies around and keep in mind I have been playing with the same gear, etc. for a long time now. This wasn’t happening before the crash. If I bring up my character screen, I can see my poison resistance jumping up and down, but in general it continues to move in a downwards direction until I die. I can’t play my character now because I can’t stay alive for more than a minute.
Before the game crashed, I had added an idol that gives you +93% poison damage when using the aura. However, I have since removed it and restarted the game, but nothing seems to work. I’m stuck now and can’t play after putting 40 hours into this character. Not sure if it thinks the idol is still applied or if that is unrelated and it’s solely due to the crash messing something up.
With this kind of weird issue, I would recommend doing a Game file verification if you are using the Steam version. Sometimes the game install can get messed up by a crash or even a partial update (can happen especially with Steam)…
I would also suggest that you post your player.log (game debug file) from a session where you experience this issue - the logs are overwritten each restart so it has to be from the last session where you used this character and experienced this problem.
If the game file verification doesnt resolve the issue, then hopefully the log will have something to indicate what could be going on…
I was able to track down the issue to the Icarion Poison skill. Once I despec’d this, the issue went away. I had been running this skill for some time however without this issue. Is this skill supposed to decrease your poison resistance down to zero over time as a penalty? When I added it originally, I did see a bump in how much damage it took, but I didn’t notice anything with my poison resistance and my character stayed at full health. I played for hours like this, but suddenly I was dying within one minute. It starts small taking 20 health or so and then suddenly your health is dropping 100-200 per second 15-30 seconds later (and poison resistance dropping along with it). I have a good amount of regen and healing effectiveness bonuses, so again it’s odd.
I was able to run the steam file verification and there were no issue detected. I will have to try re-adding it once I have a point available (but it takes forever at this point to get another point even if I despec one). Thanks for the reply!
Icarian Poison scales the output of aura of decay up infinitely - the longer the aura is active, the more poison it applies, both to yourself and enemies. That means that after a certain amount of time it will start killing you. Playing with this specialization requires you to carefully manage that and toggle the aura off and back on occasionally to reset it.
The reason you did not notice this immediately is the fact that changes in aura of decay specialization don’t come into effect until you turn the aura off and back on. So when you crashed, you had to turn the aura back on after restarting the game, at which point icarian poison started working for the first time.
Sounds like @Tomagathericon has the reason… I dont play Acolyte much so I didnt think that it could be a skill snapshot causing the issue… Most skills (maybe all?) that have an on/off & minions etc, snapshot so its best to reactivate after any changes to a skill tree…
Yes, you are correct :). I ended up adding it again and noticed it didn’t actually take effect until I toggled the skill off and on again. I think because I have the poison resistance reduction part of the skill tree enabled, it’s applying this reduction to me incrementally as you mentioned. Thanks everyone for the clarification!
