Toxic Rain

Hello, level 91 CA pathfinder here.

I love toxic rain as a utility skill. It hits often, and covers a medium area.

What I am baffled by is the lack of understanding of how to scale this attack. Builds that do tons of damage seem to not have any rhyme or reason for it. I would love to have a short explanation about each part of the skill and what types of damage affects each.

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tsHavok wrote:

Hello, level 91 CA pathfinder here.

I love toxic rain as a utility skill. It hits often, and covers a medium area.

What I am baffled by is the lack of understanding of how to scale this attack. Builds that do tons of damage seem to not have any rhyme or reason for it. I would love to have a short explanation about each part of the skill and what types of damage affects each.

This is my experience with it. There are three parts to toxic rain.

I look at toxic rain as sort of a hybrid of blast rain, caustic arrow and blast rain.

The inital hit from the arrows landing scales of attack damage, the dot effect scales off projectile, area and chaos damage, the explotion scales of the initial hit plus area damage.

I could be off on some of these, but im fairly certain i got the dot effect figured out as i spent the most time scaling that part

When the arrows land it leaves a spore pod. That sport pod does a dot until it blows up.which then does area damage.

Best way to scale the dot is to try to get as many pods up as fast as possinble. Increased duration allows the pod to last longer, allowing you to stack multiple pods, and the dot effect stacks. Since the dot is affected by project damage and not projectile attack damage, individual damage numbers on a bow isnt important. Also less attack damage mods dont hurt you.

I got a hiero rat toxic rain build up here built this way did all content from lvl 12 to uber elder.

Definitely an interesting skill.
Main concern - in its current implementation it sometime cause latency/fps spike.

Toxic Rain works great with Quillrain and focusing on Damage over Time. Also the slowing effect works well with Maim (Tombfist for example) and Temporal Chains (I use CoH on Rain of Arrows with Decay). Makes everything crawl or come to a close stop. Also works very well with Withering Touch.

A nice, surprisingly versatile, skill.

https://twitter.com/ZiggyDStarcraft/status/1041179593141436417

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Just got confirmation from the beautiful @RoryRackham that Toxic Rain pods from the same attack do indeed stack "The visuals look like they don’t stack above 5, but there is actually no limit If you get enough aoe you can have all pod dots from a single shot overlap!"

im very curious about something regarding toxic rain. does it indeed HIT when you first cast the skill to drop the pods on the ground? can that and does that hit?

im kind of testing this out with blind, and honestly it doesn't seem like it does hit as things are never blinded when i initially attack but always blinded once pods start exploding.

Looks like this skill has problems triggering Virulence stacks for Herald of Agony on certain bosses, it happened to me on Malachai, Daresso, Kaom and Avarius so far (80% poison chance, no virulence stacks until some add appear)

EDIT: nevermind, found the reason; looks like on some bosses (probably because high chaos resist?) with 0 physical damage because of Storm Cloud total direct damage is so low it doesn't apply poison.

Can the DoT from Toxic Rain break breakables like how Contagion, RF, and Death Oath aura were changed in 3.8 as well? Is this part of a balance/design issue? I don't know why certain DoTs are allowed to break breakables but not others.

I like Toxic Rain a lot from a design perspective. The ability to play Attack gems like this and CA without having to stack any accuracy at all (without needing Resolute Techniques) is something I am glad the game offers.

However, something I find frustrating about a gem as complex as Toxic Rain is how little insight the description gives into the actual specifics of its inner workings.

My understanding is this:

Toxic Rain fires projectiles in an orbital spread, and every projectile lands a multiple of ??? units a random direction away from the point where the attack was aimed. Increased AOE does not appear to scale this number of units: for this attack, increasing AOE appears to scale only the AOE of the Pods, which deal a dot and explode with a default radius of ???. To increase the AOE of the entire attack significantly, one must instead increase the number of projectiles it fires.

It seems that unlike many things in this game, the explosions and dot effect of this attack can "shotgun."

Overall, these are neat and pretty unique mechanics, hybridizing various traits from other skills we have seen. I just wish we had more insight into how big these distances were...