Working on a poison build at this time and was saddened to see a significant lack of unique melee-focused poison items that are generally usable or build-changing/enabling.
Weapons focused on poison include:
- Draalstring (spear)
- Plague bearer’s staff (staff)
- Acidflesh (bow)
- ~Ruby fang cleaver (axe), kind of
Gloves: Li’raka’s Claws are focused on throwing attacks
Belt: Vipertail just gives some poison strike and is nice for leveling
Amulet: Serpent’s Milk focused on minions
There are no helmets, body armors, boots, relics, or rings that really do anything for poison builds specifically. You do have things that add/deal with generic DoT (e.g. Atrophy gloves, Stymied Fate), but even that is really minimally related and you don’t have the affixes to scale Void. I’m sure I’m missing something, however.
Bleed and Ignite both have quite a bit of unique support in comparison with quite varied items (e.g. Invoker’s Scorching Grasp, Sunwreath, Valdyr’s Chalice; bleed has THREE melee axes). There is little of that at all for poison, let alone dagger-focused Bladedancers (which most non-bow poison builds will be). The “correct” solution currently for these builds seems to be to also invest in Doom to double up on your generic DoT.
Some example generic and specific melee-viable poison items:
- An amulet/relic that gives decreased bleed chance, bleed damage reduced to 0, and gain remaining bleed chance as additional poison chance
- A dagger with reduced poison damage but increased duration of poison per stack of poison on an enemy
- An amulet or dagger that causes all poison stacks on an enemy to “discharge” upon reaching a certain threshold, dealing all of their remaining DoT damage as a single hit and consuming all stacks.
- A sword with increased poison chance that is treated as both a dagger and sword for tree/item bonuses, giving bonuses for both
- A relic or jewelry that halves (or even slightly more reduced) poison damage but causes you to apply 2 stacks of poison
- An end-game item (helmet?) that converts Doom damage from void to poison
I think that given limited affixes and opportunity cost, these are all relatively balanced but can open up build diversity for melee poison builds. Really, I just want a chase unique for the archetype lol.