Following this discussion, I still idly think about serpents milk occasionally. I wondered if you could scale the flat poison damage in entangling roots. For example, this build could use flat minion physical damage and high minion poison chance to do some decent hybrid damage, with entangling roots for AOE and minions for single target.
But some questions arise:
Would there be any way to get adaptive spell damage to be allocated as poison damage?
Would poison effectiveness apply to added poison damage, or only to poison on hit?
Would salt the wound work with ‘added melee crit multiplier’ as from ‘Suloron’s Step’?
No, poison is an ailment not a spell. If a spell had the poison tag it would be doing poison damage (scaling with adaptive spell damage) but it wouldn’t be applying the poison ailment. Spell/ailment/melee/etc is how a skill does damage & they are entirely separate. Phys/poison/void/is what the damage is.
Poison on hit.
No, it only works with generic crit multi from gear/passives. Not melee/spell/bow/throwing crit multi.
I’m on my phone, but from the sound of it, it’s a spell that does poison damage per my reply to your #1 question. It’ll scale with poison/dot/spell/attunement.
Since Entangling Roots has the DoT tag it can’t apply the poison ailment but that node adds flat poison damage and is likely one of the only instances in the game where its poison-as-a-damage-type (like fire, phys, etc) rather than poison-as-an-ailment.
Virtually all other places the game refers to poison it means the ailment but this node is an/the exception.
To add on to this, the minions’ repeated application would still scale up the damage of the entangling roots due to the innate poison resistance shred applied by stacks of poison.
Not sure how effective it would end up being since their is a cap to resistance shred (100% for mobs, 40% for bosses).
Whoaaa. Okay, could actually be stupidly strong then with a bunch of pets applying poison stacks. Only pet stats you’d NEED would be health, chance to poison and attack speed, everything else could go to scaling entangling roots… Hmmmmmm…
But based on Llamas kind answers, it seems the base damage of entangling roots is 10 physical, then + 15 poison, then all added spell damage (say 100 from a weapon alone) would be physical, so we’d be trying to scale poison on the wrong skill. I guess this would leave the primalist with only being able to use ice thorns or serpent strike if they want to equip serpents milk.
Does it not gain the poison tag? I’d have thought it would given Shuriken gains the lightning tag when you take the node that adds lightning (or the affix that adds lightning). I’d say that’s a bug if it doesn’t but its being reworked in 0.8.4 so unlikely to be worth fixing.
