And that’s the difficulty of balancing different skills (or ailments) for single target versus AoE. If poison was the single target ailment, you could make ignite an AoE (via merging the spreading flames mechanic so each stack of ignite you inflict on a target spreads to every other target within X distance, though you may need to work it such that if a target already has ignite stacks on it, it can’t then have ignite spread to it from other mobs but can still have more ignites applied directly) and bleed a defensive ailment (damage deal by bleeding mobs is reduced by x%).
That way you have the different ailments being used in different scenarios.
And still poison comey out on top if bleed isn’t offering 50% dmg reduction ^^. On top of that the %dmg reduction will be worth nothing in scaling content like the arena at a certain point. Sure it pushes you further but so is the imense dmg difference from poison dmg.
From a practical standpoint I would happiely gut poison dmg into the right place instead of adding new mechanics into the code that need to be tested and balanced again and again. Call me crazy but there isn’t much time left untill release and we aren’t even in phase 3 yet. If they want to keep the release date they have to do a loooot of work. When I think about the missing masterys and the missing class and the time needed to balance them… well there is more important stuff to do then to redifine the base mechanics of some statuseffects in my eyes.
You raise a valid point about time & resource constraints. But I don’t think that just gutting poison would be a particularly good way of balancing it.
Poison literally should not have a stacking dmg increase. That’s all. Let it stack, but why does it need an exponential dmg increase? Remove that and problem solved.
After reading everything, I feel like something that keeps getting brought up is that at the moment in conversation is poison and it’s (current) OP’ness. @MisterWar 's idea to simply remove the 8% attached to poison seems pretty good. But if that’s the case does poison fall in line with bleed and ignite, or still way out-perform?
Difficult to solve this one, but I haven’t made a dot build yet so I can’t add much. Think Ill make a poison build though to see whats so ridiculous about it currently.
When you bring all dots into line with each other there’s no need for different ailments anymore. There might be more “innovative” ways to balance ailments. Keep poisons damage increase per stack but make it harder to apply stacks. Or reduce tick rate per stack (or maybe every 10 stacks).
Also there already were a lot of suggestions to pimp bleed and ignite with secondary debuffs on enemies. But a poison nerf is defenitely necessary.
Not realy because there are far to much ways to apply poison. Try an ignite build vs an poison build and look at the possible difference in stack numbers. Even without the dmg increase poison will outshine every other form of dot.
BTW for all possible dots… why don’t we just change the way they are applied in a D&D matter for example. Undeads, Elementals, Ghosts, Spectral beeings and so on simply can’t bleed or be poisoned but undeads burn pretty well. So just give certain enemy types certain resistences against certain dots that reduce the chance to suffer said dot by xyz%. So undeads might end up with a +500% poison resistence that is calculated against the poison chance of the player while they have -200% burn resistence that benefits the players chance to set them aflame. Such a system would balance itself because single DoT users will have a hard time against certain enemys.
Ooooo, no. Put a diminishing returns on the increase per stack & that way poison still keeps it’s identity & low-end damage without being totally bonkers on the high end damage.
Different dot resistance for mobs would be a nice touch.
Not really, it would reduce the damage at the high end, but it’d reduce the damage at the low end as well, so it wouldn’t work like diminishing returns. Diminishing returns has minimal impact at low stacks (in this example) but a high impact at high stacks (eg, at 1 stack you get the full 8% increased damage per stack, but at high stacks you would get a much lower increased damage per stack).
For example, in the above graph, the blue line is the current situation with 8% increased damage per stack, the purple line is with a logarithmic diminishing return on the increased damage per stack & orange is bleed. Up to ~50 stacks, the diminishing returns formula gives ~92% of the current damage (due to the parameters I chose, it actually does slightly more damage up to ~35 stacks, but that’s not the point & anyone who knew what they were doing would be able to choose better parameters), but that starts dropping as you get more stacks.
Just reducing the ticks per second or damage per tick would be a flat reduction.
OOoooor remove the dmg increase altogether and it falls in line with other DoTs, instead of doing ~500x more dmg (According to your graph) even with diminishing returns
It’s only a problem if you make it one. Poison is much easier to apply/stack, so on it’s own, without dmg multiplier per stack, it will still out perform all other DoTs, but not in such an unreasonable way. This change also brings focus back to your own ACTUAL damage, not just “How many hits can I churn out per second to abuse poison scaling as much as possible” (I’ll reference the lag inducing poison primalist specs)
The “maximize hits per second” thing is the way you go with all ailments, not only poison. So if poison would be in line you would just do the same to stack as many stacks as possible. You do the same on an ignite or frostbite build. I don’t see why this would change with a poison nerf.
I can’t disprove your statement right away. But I am not sure if you are right.
Also this can be balanced by items and skillnodes that affect these ailments. It’s not a flaw of the ailment itself.
Well, I don’t think it necessarily is. True, the Plague Bearer’ Staff has quite a bit of poison chance (100%-250%), but if you go balls to the wall a Paladin can get ~1,100% chance to ignite.
It won’t, since it starts off with significantly lower damage and there are many passive nodes for many masteries that grant chance to ignite/bleed (though they’re often conditional, either spell or melee).
Let me rephrase, you can stack poisons easier/faster with specs that use/rely on poisons than you can with builds that stack/rely on bleeds/ignite/frostbite. No ignite/bleed/frostbite spec is stacking as much as fast as a lich or really any primalist. In theory sure you can stack ignite chance like crazy, but even a moderate amount of poison chance will net you exponentially more stacks if you’re playing a primalist wolf/totem poison spec.
Regardless, the damage increase should go.
And the staff isn’t that OP there are plenty of items with that much ailment chance. Eye of Reen, Torch of Pontifex, Draalsting, Morditas Reach (500% btw), Soulfire, Ignivar’s head, Calamity, Snowblind, Boulderfists (Stun but still), and Stormtide. Yes, affixes are significantly lower, but the staff itself isn’t exaclt OP, especially since there isn’t really any other uniques that buff up poison chance like this (Unlike Ignite chance for examplem, which you can almost have a full set of uniques to boost ignite chance).
TLDR Staff isn’t as OP as people make it out to be, Poison itself is OP but propping up an item is easier than admitting to abusing a broken mechanic that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
Yeah, pet builds are best at stacking poison due to the large number of hits a target can get. But if you ignore pets, ignites are probably the easiest to stack (as I mentioned here).
My only concern about that is that removing the per stack damage increase strips poison of it’s unique effect, then the DoTs (well, bleed, poison & ignite) all become a boring beige with nothing to differentiate them. Which DoT would you like to apply today? Beige, off-white or oatmeal?
If you give the other DoTs a unique and useful mechanical effect then people will use them & find them more interesting, to an extent frostbite already does this as it applies protection reduction per stack. I also think that the other DoTs need more support from uniques in a range of slots.
DoT should be just that, damage over time. You’re trading up front damage for a DoT. Having one DoT scale exponentially while the others tickle is poor design. Bring up baseline DoT dmg, remove 8% scaling. As for the beige-ness of it, tough? It’s a DoT… I mean you could have spec improvements (At X stacks, target releases AoE poison DMG) but they should be tied to the build, not built in. I mean, if you’re runnign a poison build, you’re not going to choose bleed effects. If you’re running ignite, you’re not going to choose poison nodes. They have their place and they’re not just interchangable. If you have DoT, there will always be people that prefer to run DoT.
I feel like your only argument is “I don’t want to give up the damage of poison” and everything else is just misdirection. Poison stacks easier/faster with POISON builds than ignite does with ignite builds. It will innately do more damage because of the sheer volume of stacks. Granted it’s almost impossible to prove because we have no debuff counters, so maybe I’m completely wrong (But I really don’t think I am).
The fact remains, an exponential increasing dmg buff to a stacking DoT is poor design and shouldn’t exist. Even with diminishing returns it’s still poor design. You want flavor? Come up with flavor. Scaling dmg to ridiculous amounts is not “Flavor” its literally the definition of OP. Nothing, I repeat, nothing else in the game can compete with poison dmg scaling, now or with your diminishing returns. That is why your idea and defense is flawed.
Here’s an example of flavor:
Ignite: Has a chance to proc Spreading Flames, dealing x dmg to enemies in an area over 4 seconds doesn’t stack
Bleed: Has a chance to inflict Infected Blood, slowing health regen by x% and dealing y dmg Doesn’t stack
Poison: Has a chance to proc Noxious Cloud, dealing x dmg to enemies in an area and slowing movement
but this won’t happen and never happened in the past in any game ^^.