Yes, and by that same logic, any bonus that makes poison deal more dmg, aka poison pen, poison duration or straight up poison potency, gets applied to every single stack, which is why poison Lich is so strong (well, one of the reasons at least) but Necro doesnt have any of this, and only way for necro to scale poison is apply more poison stacks. And that hits diminishing returns very quickly: when you apply 100 stacks/sec and then increase it to 110 stack/sec, its not nearly as strong as making every stack last 56% longer…
Intriguing- looking forward to the changes.
The Dread Shade and Wraith changes look exciting. I look forward to (hopefully) no longer feeling like Dread Shade is mandatory. How will Twin Spirits and Covenant of Souls interact with each other?
I have some concerns about Abomb still but I’ll wait and see how it all looks together before I spout off about it.
I think this change was made with all items released in 0.8.3 in mind, as the newly leaked “Lethal Concentration” looks like it could solve some of this problem. Use that weapon and put some passives in Lich so your minions benefit from the poison damage you get.
So that is a nerf for ice skeleton / mages build?
now grants a maximum of +1 Skeleton (from granting +1 skeleton per point)
Great. Nerf skeletons of all things. Such a stupid change. Many other builds perform much better in bossing and/or clear, and yet you nerf skeletons.
How can something, that has no effect, be a nerf?
Your comparison is a bit off. Yes, penetration and damage are strong tools to scale poison damage. But as Lich you don’t have that many minions that can hit an apply poison than you have with a necro specced into poison minions. So you will apply a lot more poison stacks 8n a shorter amount of time.
You have to compare the damage output of a whole build with all the pros and cons.
The way you can scale minion poison. currently is with poison chance and attack speed. Having 20-30 minions that attack with frenzy buff and all the other passive AS speed bonuses from passives and shades, can be devastating.
I don’t say there should never be stuff like pen or shred or duration or stuff like that on a necro poison minion build. But just adding it now, without adjusting all the other stuff, would make it broken op - as it is already strong right now.
The question is, what your understanding of an endgame build is. Imho, in it’s current state it is viable. I tested a poison build with relatively unoptimised gear when the last patch got released and it performed very good. I could beat empowered timelines with little effort. I don’t know how it would perform in 300+ corruption, though.
-1 skeleton
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I see a lot of good changes here, mostly around having more synergy with volatile zombie, which is a solid S tier skill on it’s own 
And yet it also provides up to 20% phys/poison penetration for your skellies so if you have more than 5 skellies out that do phys/poison damage (ie, it’s only 1/2 as effective for the fire/ice archers) it’s a net upside.
Going down from 11 to 10 skellies you’re loosing 11% dps (I’m ignoring the loss of the 10% increased damage since that’s a trivial number) but gaining up to 20% more. If you go down from 9 to 8 (ie, you don’t use the Hollow Finger ring) then you’re loosing 12.5% but gaining 20%. This would make pure phys/poison skellies a bit stronger.
This looks great. I especially like the fact that this is based on player feedback; very refreshing to see devs listening to their player base and making the game better based on that feedback. Any idea when this patch drops?
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Hey, Welcome to the community…
The Devs usually start posting these delectable snippets 2 to 3 weeks before patches drop… So if they stick with their past schedules, then maybe towards the mid to end of August - dont hold me to it though… 
why 20% if my Skellies use Cold Arrow. So physical damage is only ~50% of all of their damage
Is there a release date (or date range) for 8.3?
I want to play the game, as a Necro, but with the large class changes I think it would be better to start after the update than start playing and then have to relearn the Necro playstyle
Hey… .Welcome to the community… As I mentioned above… its probably mid to end of August if the devs stick to their usual schedule… but only they can confirm for sure…
Heh, yeah I scrolled up, saw it was literally 2 posts above mine and was like “Well now I look like an idiot :P”
Thanks for the reply though
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Yes, the cold/fire arrow nodes are 50:50 phys/non-phys damage by default. Though if you were able to add more flat minion bow phys damage (the Unearthed Arms passive comes to mind) that would skew the relative damage towards phys to make the new penetration node more effective.
Sounds great and funky,
Looking at this “Age of undeath” node that makes Abomination permanent, does it also include Skelly Vanguards which are not a part of Summon skeletons or Summon skeleton mage trees?
I guess the node is designed in a way to have as many skeletons used as material for Abomination and prevent their further use, which would mean we will need 3 skills (Summon skeletons/mages + Abomination) to get the biggest perma-Abomination but can only use 2 skellies else Abomination gets decay.
Also, is there a cap on number of consumed creatures when crafting Abomination?
Question, does “Beyond Death” consumes the full mana cost when summoning the Volatile Zombie? Or is it cost-free?