I was really shocked to see that I couldn’t but a +poison damage modifier on a wand. As someone who is trying to build a poison based lich, this is very frustrating. Especially because of passives like Symbol of Decay that require a one hander. This basically means I must take an adaptive spell damage hit to get that modifier which doesn’t feel good or coherent especially as there’s spells that can be converted to poison, so I can’t buff spells and poison damage simultaneously (as all the other 1handed weapons are not spell based). It feels to me like I should just spec necrotic damage (which i hope doesn’t have the same problem). I think by restricting affixes by slot instead of item type, players will find more freedom and it will be harder for developers to accidently insert huge craters like this into potential builds for various classes.
generally poison builds in this game are not concerned with scaling spell damage, even if a spell applies the poison. you could use a burning branch wand and still do end-game damage with it as long as you can get enough scaling from your skill trees and affixes.
here’s an example i just made on tunklabs with a level 1 sceptre (which is the base weapon type i’d recommend in your case):
i’m not sure why exactly they don’t let you put poison damage on a wand, but it’s probably just because spell damage has no impact on poison. if you want to do a DoT build that scales both the hit and the DoT, ignite or bleed can do that a little more easily. (but again, scaling the hit doesn’t have an impact on any DoTs, since they have their own independent base damage that is only affected by relevant modifiers, not the hit damage)
i’m not sure why exactly they don’t let you put poison damage on a wand, but it’s probably just because spell damage has no impact on poison.
Poison stacks, yes. Poison based spells no. I’m still taking a damage hit if I decide to spec my life drain lich ability to do poison instead. In fact, it will do almost no damage because it doesn’t apply poison stacks directly. It’s also unclear if the lich-based poison curse, plague, that’s applied as a secondary ability scales with spell damage or not.
that’s a fair point, regarding life drain. i haven’t tried to build around that skill before so i didn’t know about that node on the tree. looking at it now it does seem like it would benefit from adaptive spell damage, and it has a 300% added damage effectiveness which is extremely good.
when i replied earlier i had also forgotten about wandering spirits, which can be converted to poison damage and then scales off both spell damage and poison/damage over time. (and for some inexplicable reason, uses your stats instead of minion stats, which is very counter-intuitive). i’ve used it in a poison build before but mostly ignored the DoT that the spirits apply by passing through enemies and just used their ranged attack to apply lots of stacks.
plague, i believe, can scale off of spell damage as well but i’m not sure if adaptive spell damage applies to it. since it can’t stack, i’ve always viewed it as just a bit of extra damage and not worth trying to scale on its own.
after reviewing some of the lich’s poison-based spells, it does seem like there are some builds that would scale both poison damage and spell damage. however, i still think the lack of “%inc poison” affixes on wands is not that big of an issue. instead of the example i provided above, you could just put %inc spell damage and %inc damage over time on a wand and end up with the same results.
it doesn’t explain why EHG have chosen to make it work this way, but it doesn’t seem like they need to change it, necessarily.
It shouldn’t because it’s an ailment not a spell.
Poison as a concept is in a bit of an odd spot, since it’s an ailment (so no benefit from % spell damage or adaptive spell damage) that is also it’s own damage element & as Neckbeard said, you can convert some skills to use that damage element.
It shouldn’t because it’s an ailment not a spell.
I guess this is stated in the tooltip, that it’s an ailment. But note the Acolyte ability spirit plague that spreads it is also labeled as a spell. The distance between a spell and an ailment in tooltips isn’t very far for acolyte with names so similar.
Poison as a concept is in a bit of an odd spot, since it’s an ailment (so no benefit from % spell damage or adaptive spell damage) that is also it’s own damage element & as Neckbeard said, you can convert some skills to use that damage element.
Correct. I think it comes down to the fact that poison actually means two things in game:
- The ailment (like bleed)
- The damage type (like physical).
Other ailments have names that are different from their damage type. Poison doesn’t and that makes it weird/harder to understand.
Yes, you need to disassociate ailments (which are all mechanically simple) from spells (which can be as mechanically complex as the devs want). Spells can spread, repeat/echo, proc ailments, crit (if they don’t have the DoT tag), chain, debuff mobs, buff the player, heal, stun, knockback, leech & do damage based on subsequent hits. Ailments do damage, leech & debuff the target (Frostbite & Shock).
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