Burn/poison/bleed double dipping changes will open new possibilities

I think people aren't reading this closely enough.

Poison/bleed/ignite is now based on the base damage of the skill causing it, meaning the damage WITHOUT factoring in increases or mores to attack or spell damage and the like.


What this means is that, with 100 base physical attack damage and 500% increased attack damage, with poison (now doubled in magnitude), you would do 600 attack damage and a whole whopping 32 poison damage over 2 seconds, because now boosting your attack damage does NOTHING for poison.



This is a nerf to poison and bleed, period. Not just a nerf, a massacre. If you can't scale your hit and poison/bleed DoT on the same modifiers with this system, poison and bleed are useless. And even for builds that can scale both equally and simultaneously, they'll be barely-worthwhile.


I hate double-dipping builds, and I want them gone, but this system... it just completely kneecaps any poison/bleed build that never abused in the first place, and the only ones that'll be passable are the ones that previously double-dipped (because those are the same ones that can scale both hit and DoT at the same time)

That doesn't account for the addition of dot-scaling supports (like Incr.Burning becoming a More) nor for dot-specific %increased.

Now if you want a dot build you can build into it instead of always having dot scale off the same thing as the originating attack (doubly, even).

It's pretty much what ED builds do nowadays.

I also see nothing wrong with making Poison not a brain-dead always-include support gem on every attacking build.

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pneuma wrote:

That doesn't account for the addition of dot-scaling supports (like Incr.Burning becoming a More) nor for dot-specific %increased.

Now if you want a dot build you can build into it instead of always having dot scale off the same thing as the originating attack (doubly, even).

It's pretty much what ED builds do nowadays.

I also see nothing wrong with making Poison not a brain-dead always-include support gem on every attacking build.

Poison isn't an always-include support gem right now, it's only around a 22% dps amp by default. Without double-dipping abuse, it's only with a reasonable degree of extra investment that poison outshines other supports.

On top of that, these changes likely aren't making you able to viably focus on only poison/bleed damage ignoring the hit damage. Yes, poison/bleed will no longer scale with the hit, but unless the numbers on these 'increased poison/bleed damage' mods are astronomically high, you won't even come close to making the output compete with regular hit dps.

Don't worry guys, there'll be new mechanics in 3.0 that'll completely blow then-reformed bleed/ignite/poison out of the water.

You know, come to think of it, I have to predict that this new system is not possible to balance correctly. If I am interpreting it correctly it seems like there's no way they could possibly make ignite and poison not suck without making righteous fire, scorching ray, and blight absurdly, brokenly strong. Wouldn't that be something though, blight becoming a meta skill...lol.

Edit; well, to an extent I guess. It depends on how many modifiers become exclusive to ignite/poison/bleed and how many are generic "damage over time". If there are many buffs to ailment specific nodes rather than generic dot then maybe it could be balanced.

GGG will end up nerfing poison too much, but buff burning.

As for bleeding, there need to be a fundamental change in mechanics, it's hard to tell now, right now bleeding is just a super weak version of poison, it doesn't stack, the damage amount is low unless you invest 10 more points in passives and they are oftenly not on your travelling path, bloodlust is right there but you can't use except for a few builds, and it has to be melee (seriously, who play puncture bow?). Stationary/moving target is never the problem, lion's roar flask can force enemy to move

This is also interesting:

"In a subsequent post early next week, we're going to go into some more specifics, like how this change will affect monsters, changes to make Poison and Bleed count as "ailments", and how these ailments will interact with critical strike damage bonuses, and a new keystone."

Maybe we will have reasons to not go crit on most builds.