I found a Plague Bearers Staff and am excited to make a build for it. But I’m finding the theory crafting overwhelming and off putting. Its really not well documented for most skills whether they trigger a hit or not. Maybe it needs to be a tag? I thought Acolyte would be a good fit for this item but the “hit” status of many of their abilities is hard to know. E.g. bolts cast by Decay Aura and projectiles from Wandering Spirits. And Drain Life has some secondary effects that seem like they could trigger hits. Surfing the forums seems to indicate that these things dont trigger hits even though they sound like they should.
As a general rule, everything that is not tagged as damage over time will hit.
There might be some very rare exceptions, but this is a very helpful guideline.
To answer some of the specifics you mentioned:
All of your mentioned Nodes do actually hit.
“Spectral Putrescence” in Wandering Spirits and the “Poison Bolts” in Aura Of Decay both even say it in the tooltip.
https://imgur.com/LH0amgI
https://imgur.com/6QVOl89
The “Pustulent End” Node in Drain Life does not specifically state “hit”, but it’s a burst of dmg, which implies it hits. And yes it does hit.
I wouldn’t mind if certain things are more clear, especially for unexperienced players, but once you get a hang of the mechanics in LE, most of the stuff is pretty clear.
Thanks Heavy. Those tooltips say that they apply poison “on hit”. Does that mean its safe to assume that all of my on hit effects will also apply? That seems to be what you are saying, which is good to know. But yeah, it’d be good if that were more clear in the game somehow.
Yes. The tooltips just specifically say they apply poison with a hit.
There are some skills that do not hit, that apply ailments though.
But the way these 3 specific examples are worded, they imply that they do hit while apply 100% chance (1 stack) poison.
I dont usually scrutinise these wordings as I dont theory craft too much. But I agree with you here, I think it would help to make “hitting” more clear. Saying X would apply Y on hit doesnt necessarily implies that X hits.
If X doesn’t hit then how could it apply Y?
Not necessarily, the skills with DoT tags that apply ailments should all state that they apply them every second (like Hail of Arrows does) rather than on hit. Certainly the Acolyte DoT skills do this.
?
I am confused. I never said something different. That’s why i specifically stated this, to diffirentiate these nodes from nodes/skills that apply poison at a fixed rate without hitting.
I even specifically mentioned one paragraph before you quoted me, that there are skills that apply ailments without hitting.
I just wanted to make clear that the specific exampels we are talking about here actually do hit (while applying some ailments baseline), but also give the skill the ability to hit at all.
It was probably because in the final paragraph you never specified what “these” referred to theref6i assumed that it related to the previous thing you mentioned, skills which don’t hit but apply ailments.
Fixed
You’re already making the assumption that just because it’s said that X applies Y when X hits. X must have a hitting mechanics. This might be intuitive and maybe obvious. But not technically so.
It may be possible that X applies Y when X hits but it doesn’t ordinarily hits and requires something else that causes it to hit.
Yes. If X doesn’t having hitting mechanics then saying X applies Y on hit is superfluous. Do you assume that Iron Blade (from Vengeance) may not hit because it has a node that says that it can ricochet on hit?
If a thing says “X does Y on hit”, then X has been defined as being able to hit even if that’s not been explicitly stated elsewhere. Would you want the skill tooltips to explicitly stat everything a skill did & did not do? That would make them very long indeed!
It is not superfluous if that’s exactly what it does.
I can accept that this is the convention the devs intended. But I stress again that the specific words “X does Y on hit” themselves do not imply X will hit. For someone as pedantic as yourself, I am slightly surprised you’re willing to give the devs a pass on this 
As above, I am prepared to accept the convention. But all I am saying is, if the devs want theorycrafting to be accessible to the most inexperienced of players who is prepared to study the “ruleset” as outlined in the skills descriptions, then yes, I do think it helps to make explicit what hits and what dont. This doesnt need to be a verbose explanation. “Hits” can be a keyword for example.
Because, IMO, it’s so obvious it doesn’t need stating & not needing to state that allows the devs to make the tooltips & descriptions briefer.
In the vast majority of cases, it’s just the absence of the DoT tag (with 1 exception - Hungering Souls).
This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.