2.1: poison mechanisms questions

I found the changes a bit overwhelming and was trying to forecast what will be viable in 2.1

From the recent update, we know what poison can only be triggered from phys/chaos dmg, i have few questions:
- do we know if poison triggers by default from phys/chaos dmg ? Or it's just a requirement ?
- does chaos bonus dmg still increase poison dmg ? Or it's now separated ?
- what would be some good ways to poison enemies ? There is a new gem that can be used with any skill gem, viper strike will auto poison, some unique can trigger poison like bino, what am I missing ?

I'm interesting to try out poison but I'm not sure I fully understand the mechanisms behind it.
From the tree change, it seems that focusing on phys, chaos, poison, dmg over time and bleeding might have good synergy ?

1) Dealing chaos damage, even with a crit, will not poison an enemy unless you have an item or skill that specifically says you can apply poison.

2) Poison is a special type of chaos damage, so increases to chaos damage will also increase poison damage. However, increases to poison damage will not increase chaos damage that isn't part of a poison effect (i.e. extra poison damage has no effect on Caustic Arrow or Essence Drain: they are purely chaos skills).

3) The Consuming Dark (dagger) also allows you to poison enemies and converts fire to chaos.

Poison and Bleed go well together since they are both DoT. Vulnerabilty is a great curse for Viper Strike and Puncture because it increases both the initial hit and the DoT effects. Using all those skills together will melt health bars faster than you can blink.

^Pretty much hit the nail on the head across the board there.

You need something to enable poison to be placed, it's nothing that can just happen by default.

Viperstrike will likely be the best poison in general, as its poison lasts 4 times as long as typical poison (8 second base compared to the normal 2), basically meaning its poison deals 4 times as much total damage by the time it's run its full course; otherwise there's a new support that will enable any hit to poison (based only on the chaos and physical damage dealt, of course), and that includes spells (so you can poison off EK or Shockwave totem or the new physical damage spells).

There's also a few uniques that grant opportunities to poison, like ocnsuming dark making chaos damage always poison, mark of the doubting knight which has a 25% chance to poison on crit, and quite notably Snakebite, which automatically causes all attacks to poison if you're at your max frenzy charges (which isn't hard to maintain if you keep your max frenzy charges low, even possibly lowering them with pacifist jewels).

Finally, there's a few passives that will also allow poisoning... Adder's Touch allows a 30% chance at poisoning with dagger crits, the new Dirty Techniques notable down in the duelist area will grant a 25% chance to poison when hitting bleeding enemies, and there's a basic node in the new poison cluster that grants a 10% chance to poison. From the looks of the Ascendancy classes, there's gonna be a bunch of ways to poison in the ascendant classes as well.



As for trying to spec for poison? Well, for starters, you probably wanna abandon anything involving physical-based elemental damage, like hatred or herald of ash or added fire; you can't poison off them anyway, so you're better off using those mana reserves or support links for more useful stuff. Curses will be your friend with phys+poison, as temporal chains and vulnerability (and projectile weakness for projectile skills) will amp your damage one way or another with them.

You'll also want to pick up at least a few poison/chaos/damage-over-time passives in the tree, as those will significantly increase the strength of the poisons... it's pretty unlike building around those physical-based elemental damage mechs, as for those you just continue getting the same action speed and physical-type passives. You still want that stuff if you're building a poison-based physical character, as stronger initial hits increase the poison's base strength and there's no longer a downside to hitting rapidly with poison, but by getting poison-enhancing passives as well you can make the poison into a better dps amp than phys-based elemental stuff can, theoretically by a pretty wide margin.

I was about to mention the Poison support gem. I hope it's not a chance to poison and is just 100% poison.

Easiest way to compare it to is Ignite.

Poison can only be applied by physical/Chaos attacks. If an attack does, say 50% physical, 50% fire, and it poisons, only the 50 % physical damage will be used in the poison damage calculation.

Poison does Chaos over time, like burning does fire over time. Poison is affected by Chaos Damage, Damage over time, and Poison damage. Poison damage nodes work exactly like burning nodes. They do not increase the initial hit, only affecting the DoT

There is a support coming that allows supported skills to poison, has not been seen so we do not know how it works.

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Rafein wrote:

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Poison can only be applied by physical/Chaos attacks.
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just one thing: don't say 'attacks'. Attack, spell, secondary damage, doesn't matter which, it'll all be able to poison if you set it up.

Anyone know how many stacks of poison you are able to inflict? I can't imagine it will be unlimited because it wouldn't make sense.

No limit, however, all poison only has a base of duration of 2 seconds, except for Vipstrike, which has a duration of 7 or 8, cannot remember.

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Rafein wrote:

No limit, however, all poison only has a base of duration of 2 seconds, except for Vipstrike, which has a duration of 7 or 8, cannot remember.

so basically the max stacks at any given time then will be only limited by the # of hits per 2 seconds. Need to brainstorm if there are any interesting cases where it would be very strong

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grepman wrote:

so basically the max stacks at any given time then will be only limited by the # of hits per 2 seconds. Need to brainstorm if there are any interesting cases where it would be very strong

Now that it stacks it will be a direct function of your dps, so it's the usual affair - highest dps = highest poison.

When it didn't stack you could do some monkeying around with marylene's fallacy and slow, high damage daggers to get very strong crits that would generate high poisons and bleeds every few hits, there goes that concept.