So i was super excited to see the new spear Plague Dragon’s Tongue and to do some Serpent Strike shenanigans. Playing with a friend who plays a cold build had me look at the synergy between Shattered Immunity and Frostwyrm’s Fury, going for a mainly poison focused approach but also scaling from whatever frostbite stacks would be apply on the target by me or my buddy.
Early on i noticed that when you take Frostwyrm’s Fury, then the skill tag changes from “Phys, Poison, Melee, STR, DEX” to “Cold, Melee, STR, DEX” so not just loosing the Physical tag but also the Poison tag, even tho there is no mention of poison in the note it self. Wrote on the discord with a dev to see if they could give some clarification without luck, didt think more of it continued on my path, think the tag might just be missing as a tool tip but would still be there.
Then when i got the new spear i got much wise and the “+ 1-5 to poison skills” completely gets ignored when you talent you take Frostwyrm’s Fury, meaning it looses alot of value taking the notes at all.
2 possible things is at play
1, its working as intended but the wording Frostwyrm’s Fury fails to describe that the poison tag is removed aswell.
2, its a bug that the poison tag goes away when you convert the physical part of Serpent Strike to Cold damage.
I feel that the spear is designed with serpent strike in mind, i dear skill to us all, and therefore its sad to see that it doesnt include more build diversity.
I hope that there is a fix to the notes on the serpent strike tree to help others to get clarification to the interactions the notes have.
I had similar plans and was quite disappointed as well.
The poison tag is really hard to come by on Druid skills, which this spear seems to be designed for as it incentivizes using Swarmblade form for Locust synergy.
Besides Serpent Strike the only other skill capable of receiving the poison tag is Entangling Roots, which doesn’t really fit into a Swarmblade build, since there is no way to trigger it without leaving Swarmblade form.
Thorn Totems, as a minion, can receive the poison tag, but the skill to summon them won’t get the tag even if you take the node that tags the minion (making the spear’s effect not work with this skill either).
Effectively you are limited to Serpent Strike without Frostwyrm’s Fury if you want to make use of the awesome sounding “+1-5 to poison skills”, which makes it a worse affix than if it just were “+1-5 to Serpent Strike”.
I’m very much hoping that at the very least Serpent Strike losing the poison tag is considered a bug and will get fixed such that all of us who got excited by Plague Dragon’s Tongue will be able to play around with some more build diversity.
I think the simplest change would to alter the skill node Frostwyrm’s Fury to explicitly say that it will remove the poison tag, since otherwise it looks like unintended behavior.
This is also the behavior for a number of other conversion nodes in other skill trees. Incinerating Blows in the Shield Bash skill tree, Frigid Grasp for Mana Strike, Crimson Death for Harvest, Subzero Intrusion for Umbral Blades, etc.
