Do poison frost blade assassin builds work

Newish to the game since console release, sadly pc isn't a option for me right now. So far out of everything I've tried I keep finding myself drawn to frost blades. Did a gladiator frost blade that ended terribly and most recently a raider frostbite/frost bomb FB. My second FB character did MUCH better but I've already hit the wall on tier 7-9ish maps due too HP restrictions. The damage is there, but also likely a scrap character.

So my next idea is a poison FB Assassin. I was just curious if anybody knew if is would be a viable mapping character or if I'd just be wasting my time?

Any ideas and build tips to help make this work would be awesome.

I was hoping maybe building around Wasp Nest claws and the Volkuur cold poison conversion gloves would be a good start, but vacations over soon and the real world beckons and I don't want to waste my time on another lost cause. Think a poison FB Assassin would work?

It all really depends on if you are building around poison cold combos correctly. Where poison assassins used to go crit heavy as well, I don't think they are much anymore as there is more of a pull for damage over time to be modified by new support gems and such that downplay the initial hit in favor of giving more multipliers to the DOT. At least that is how it appears while I am loosely copying a build that is poison/bleed tornado shot assassin to something similar. Crit still helps, but not as much and likely would hold true for Frost blades assassin I would think.

Problem is you are new and that does not lend itself to theory crafting effectively. Hell I've played since open beta and still can't theory craft outside of the realm of the builds I have learned more solidly, even with the advent of Path of Building. If you don't have the time to learn to do it properly at the moment and know it will succeed and there are none created by others already, it may be in your best interest to put it on the shelf in favor of a less complicated build design to theory craft or find.

Path of Building doesn't want to update for some weird reason for me, so the problem with it is I don't know if I should center around ele damage, chaos, increased poison dam, ailments, get chance to poison or use weapons with chance like wasp nests and poison support. With the limited passive points it just hurts my noggin trying to decide where to go with it. I don't really mind trying to figure it out, but figured direction would help.

Once you get your chance to poison high enough it pointless to invest more yeah? What would be best for damage with the applied poison. Ailment increase or chaos/poison? Does poison even get affected by the increased chaos dam nodes?

It's good in theory in my head, but I guess it boils down to not knowing what buffs poison damage best and if it can even function well in a higher tier map. Do ailment immune bosses Make it worthless to even try poison anymore?

Yes in general, getting too much chance to poison would be a waste aside from the maps where enemeies have reduced chance to be poisoned, but mods like that shouldn't dictate your poison chance stacking. Wouldn't you agree it would be better to run a map slightly slower versus stacking like 150% chance to poison for most of your mapping?

Chaos damage seems pointless if going cold poison. The whole point is that with the gloves, cold damage can now poison. So it takes its place among being the starting damage for poison like chaos and physical. So at least elemental/cold nodes would be more useful on top of physical since FB is phys converted to cold. While some of the support gems may encourage the dot over initial hit like I said, you still want to stack that initial hit for the poison to start from I guess. But almost any reasonable dot and poison nodes in the shadow area would be necessary nowadays.

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PleiadesBlackstar wrote:

Yes in general, getting too much chance to poison would be a waste aside from the maps where enemeies have reduced chance to be poisoned, but mods like that shouldn't dictate your poison chance stacking. Wouldn't you agree it would be better to run a map slightly slower versus stacking like 150% chance to poison for most of your mapping?

Do you happen to have any substantive tests or developer posts to back up this line of reasoning? I'm very, very certain that that's not how it works - the Map modifier reads "x% chance to avoid y," not "x% reduced chance to be y'd" - this would imply that there is literally never any benefit to going above 100% chance to x/y/z, and that even abilities that "Always Poison" or "Always Bleed" will have a chance to not work on those enemies. This would be consistent with the rest of the game and my memory of how these mods were described when first released into the game.

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As for the original poster's issue, pending confirmation of the above -

• If your build is centered around Poison Damage, then you want 100% Chance to Poison, no more, and no less.
• If you have 100% physical to cold conversion and Volkuur's gloves, cold-variant, then increased physical, cold, elemental, ailment, damage-over-time, and chaos damage will all benefit your Poison equally.

The second point there is because Patch 3.0 changed ailments to work like converted damage, and we know how converted damage works.

Aside from that, you'd best be guided by the universal build principle of diminishing proportional returns, which is a fancy term I made up for the fact that the more Increased Damage you get, the less effective Increased Damage is compared to More Damage. When you have:

0% increased damage (1x increased-multi), 10% increased damage is the same as 10% more damage
100% increased damage (2x increased-multi), 10% increased damage is the same as 5% more damage
200% increased damage (3x increased-multi), 10% increased damage is the same as 3.33% more damage
300% increased damage (4x increased-multi), 10% increased damage is the same as 2.5% more damage
400% increased damage (5x increased-multi), 10% increased damage is the same as 2% more damage
500% increased damage (6x increased-multi), 10% increased damage is the same as 1.67% more damage

and so on and so forth, just because of the way math works and the fact that increased damage stacks additively.

You then have things that augment your damage that are not bonuses to your damage, which then function as more-like damage; this would mostly be things like Increased Damage Taken and Reduced Resistances on the enemy. They are often called "more damage" in the community based on estimates assuming 0% base on the enemy.

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That impromptu lecture now over, the lesson of it would be: you want multipliers. Vulnerability, things that decrease enemy Chaos Resistance, Intimidate if possible (if you're a hispter like me, you'd dream of having a The Anticipation on weapon swap, so that you can proc it once on long boss fights, then switch back to your main weapon setup).

A Wither totem is one of the biggest boosts to Poison damage there can be because Increased Damage Taken is not the same multiplicative step as "Increased Damage" (outgoing), making it act, like described above, like "more damage." Many people stick it on a Totem to get anywhere from 60% to 120% more damage with poison.

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That said, everything I just babbled about was paper/theory/mathcraft, and that can never be more accurate than in-game experience. I just now noticed Volkuur's gloves cut your Poison duration in half, which means half the Poison DPS, so I'm not sure if Poison-focused Volkuur-glove builds "work." If not, then you may want to use classic pre-3.0 principles of "scale the hit and the DoT," in which case you may want to consider:

• "Increased x damage" where x is cold, elemental, physical, chaos, or {nothing}, will increase your hit as well as your Poison.
• "Increased y damage" where y is Attack, Melee, Projectile, "...with Weapons," will increase your hit, but not your Poison.
• "Increased z damage" where z is Ailment, Damage over Time, Chaos, Poison, etc., will of course increase your Poison, but not your hit.

and sadly I don't know the proper logical term (subtractive or? exclusive or? inclusive or?), but if you have a term like "increased physical attack damage" it will increase your hit, but not your Poison.

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adghar wrote:

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PleiadesBlackstar wrote:

Yes in general, getting too much chance to poison would be a waste aside from the maps where enemeies have reduced chance to be poisoned, but mods like that shouldn't dictate your poison chance stacking. Wouldn't you agree it would be better to run a map slightly slower versus stacking like 150% chance to poison for most of your mapping?

Do you happen to have any substantive tests or developer posts to back up this line of reasoning? I'm very, very certain that that's not how it works - the Map modifier reads "x% chance to avoid y," not "x% reduced chance to be y'd" - this would imply that there is literally never any benefit to going above 100% chance to x/y/z, and that even abilities that "Always Poison" or "Always Bleed" will have a chance to not work on those enemies. This would be consistent with the rest of the game and my memory of how these mods were described when first released into the game.

I may have worded it badly since I was just bringing up that map mod on the fly since I tend to do as little look up to make sure I have mods like that verbatim and how the mechanics are.

Mainly, I was just putting it out there that in my opinion, if you normally have 100% chance to _____ or close to it and that is the only amount of % you can reach without sacrificing too much life or other defense or offense involved, is it really worth it to go higher specifically for those map mods?

Was mostly just basing my assumptions off how in my experience, everybody eventually overcaps resists if they can but not much else. Usually people seem to just put up with maps that hinder your main form of damage or reroll rather than doing things that are unnecessary for any other map mod combo.

Oh ok, yes, in that case, I would agree that that is common logic - most people don't bother getting permanent/Passive Tree solutions to specific map mods.

I'm a hipster though, of course, so I like to swap in Timeclasp to get that sweet sweet packsize/quantity bonus from Temporal Chains Maps :P

The main idea would be to try and use poison as my main form of damage, with the speed you can achieve with frost blades using attack speed and multistrike I was hoping to use it as a method to spread poison stacks at ludicrous speed causing wasp nest chaos bonus to fire up and then adding the assassin bleed/poison/maim deal into the mix for flavor.

So do you think that trying it that way would be efficient or would I probably be achieving higher dps buffing my cold damage because of the majority of crit available to the shadow/assassin and then use poison as icing?

I've made up my mind to give it a go, still just trying to wrap my head around the best way to allocate my passive points.

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Poison0929 wrote:

The main idea would be to try and use poison as my main form of damage, with the speed you can achieve with frost blades using attack speed and multistrike I was hoping to use it as a method to spread poison stacks at ludicrous speed causing wasp nest chaos bonus to fire up and then adding the assassin bleed/poison/maim deal into the mix for flavor.

So do you think that trying it that way would be efficient or would I probably be achieving higher dps buffing my cold damage because of the majority of crit available to the shadow/assassin and then use poison as icing?

I've made up my mind to give it a go, still just trying to wrap my head around the best way to allocate my passive points.

You would be better off just making a cold frost blades if that was your aim. The difference between poison before 3.0 was that it could be stacked way too easily on top of other forms of damage. Now, the reason you have more poison nodes on the tree is because you need to be willing to invest in forms of increased poison damage, duration, chance to poison, etc., to be a functioning poison build. If you try to build a frost blades assassin with poison as icing, the points and gear invested into poison would be better spent just buffing through its main damage form physical converting to cold.