My build is a Poison Necromancer, and so far, my damage is great, I have no complaints. Then I dropped Serpent’s Milk, and the item looks good: +2 more stacks but 90% less poison damage. However, this item dropped my damage so hard:
Without Serpent’s Milk
Max stacks on the dummy: 431
Increased Minion Poison Damage: 848%
With Serpent’s Milk
Max stacks on the dummy: 540
Increased Minion Poison Damage: -12%
Am I missing something? The math doesn’t seem right, losing 860% poison damage in exchange for 109 stacks doesn’t seem worth it.
Where are you getting those numbers from? Skill tooltips and character screen don’t show accurate numbers, at best.
What you need to see is the damage numbers popping up, those are what matter to see if it’s an improvement or not.
On the dummy, it’s impossible to compare numbers because they all rain down at once. So far, I’ve tested it on bosses, and my damage is definitely worse.
The only recent builds I can see that use it only use it for the melee speed. So I’d guess that it’s not a good item unless you find a way to build around it. And probably not worth it even then.
Poison used to be better at some point and got nerfed a long time ago. And that item is old as well. So it’s likely that it’s not really worth using anymore.
Maybe someone will chime in and give you a different opinion, though.
This item ruins minions poison dmg. “90% less” in “more” category is a huge decrease - x0.1
But as I see in warlock passives it could be used for poison or even for physical spellcaster with supporting minions as their attacks will be poisoning and Poison overload will occur + defiling nova https://www.lastepochtools.com/skills/defiling_nova
The item heavily nerfs the minion’s poison damage but gives a large amount of poison chance to use for different things. For example the amulet is used in Serpent venom builds as Serpent venom deals more damage per poison on the enemy and the amulet allows your minions to inflict a lot of poisons. Another example is Thorn totem which deals more hit damage per poison.
You can also convert the poison chance to other ailments to bypass the damage penalty for example Swarmblade’s Locusts and Spriggan’s Vines have nodes that convert all their poison chance (which includes poison chance from items like this amulet) to Frostbite chance and their Frostbite damage is unaffected by the less poison damage from the amulet.
It will always be a damage loss for a regular poison damage minion build.
Yeah, before 0.9, the poison shred per stack wasn’t capped so you used to be able to push the target’s poison resist so hard into the negative (ie, your poisons did more damage) that you could do a ridiculous amount of damage. IMO, that stat on the item could do with being adjusted in line with the change to how poison stacks work now.
The item is a good damage boost for non-poison damage over time builds.
Eg. Minions applying bleeds with fast attack/cast speeds.
Say one has over 400% increased minion damage, damage over time, or similar. Bleeds might be doing 400 damage per bleed with 100% bleed chance (400 damage per hit). Poisons now do about 20 poison damage with 200% poison chance (40 damage per hit). This is a 10% more damage buff from your amulet slot.
Add in the poison resistance shred and some other factors like potential poison penetration, and you might get a 15 - 20% damage buff from your amulet slot.
But the amulet doesn’t have any effect on minion non-poison chance unless you the skill tree can convert from poison to something else (as has been stated above). Are there any minions that convert poison chance to bleed?
Basically the changes to poison completely gutted the item, the only way for it to be in any way useful is if you can convert the minion poison chance to anything else, ignite, bleed, frost… other than that its a trap item.
I was actually working on a very fun poison squirrel build before they changed how poison worked. It ran the bleed squirrels with the neck + beastmaster passives for poison & attack speed (for the helm phys res shred), then Serpent Strike for my own poison & bleed damage
But pre-MP-poison-nerf that modifier was absolutely necessary.