Make poison chaos only

It used to be hard dealing 100% chaos damage, so it made sense for physical damage to be able to poison as well.
Nowadays, several skills convert physical damage to chaos damage, but if you're playing a poison build, it makes no difference. Making poison chaos only would make these skills more valuable as well as the Pathfinder's conversion. It would also help balance skills that otherwise shouldn't be able to poison so easily (e.g. Blade vortex and Seismic Trap). Finally, skills like venom gyre could get the Scourge Arrow treatment, i e. reducing their base damage and providing added chaos damage or poison multiplier, so that it's less utilized in elemental builds.

From what I know, poison is always considered chaos damage, even when it is caused by physical damage. It's the same thing as other damage types causing ignite, but burning damage being calculated as fire damage

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asdfjimmy wrote:

From what I know, poison is always considered chaos damage, even when it is caused by physical damage. It's the same thing as other damage types causing ignite, but burning damage being calculated as fire damage

thats not what theyre asking for


lets look at ignite. ignites have to be caused by fire damage (outside of special cases*)

even if you have 100% chance to ignite, you cant ignite without doing fire damage*

However, poison is different. you can slap 'chance to poison' onto nonsense like ball lightning, blade vortex, cyclone, etc etc, and without doing any actual chaos damage HITS, still inflict poison.

i am unsure i care to have them change this.

As long as you have a special modifier allowing this different damage to poison, wich are limited cases. And even then, the poison damage over time will still count as chaos damage. It's the same thing for me...

Now that phys has impale I don't think it would be thematically crazy to keep poison in the realm of chaos damage only, perhaps with some exceptions coming from unique item pieces or an ascendancy.

lorewise chaos damage in poe is unnatural.

besides the occassional spiders, players encounter monsters that deal chaos with much lower frequency. its the whole reason why in many old build guides chaos damage is neglected.

lorewise, how exiles/humans in POE actually obtain the power of chaos is usually by unnatural means. such as "science"/thaumaturgy where powerful artifacts/gears are required to unlock the power of chaos.

look at the purity series of auras. we have all purities for each of the 3 main elements and one purity which is the combination of the 3. where is purity of chaos? it doesnt exist. the nearest we have is purity of elements grant chaos resist granted by a watcher's eye mod (powerful artifact).

on the offense side, we can find wrath, anger, hatred. elemental auras that provide elemental damage. where is the chaos version? envy can normally be found on an aul's ammy or a breach sword (powerful artifact).

also the added X damage support gems, the elemental ones can easily be purchased at a vendor. added chaos used to be drop only to signify how rare it was.

saying there are many sources of chaos damage, yes you're right. but theyre all rare and totally not common.

similarly in real life, humans have to dabble in chemistry to concoct poisons. i m aware we need to suspend our realism as lightning and ice are not easily wielded by humans without technology but i believe you can see how all of my points are showing how unnatural chaos is.

as such i would imagine poison would suit the theme quite well. humans try to create poisons and the result is pure chaos coming from physical and chaotic forces.

if you want pure chaos DoT, there are spells that do them specifically, there also is a decay support gem for more chaos DoT.

all in all, i feel that poison thematically is where it should be.

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exsea wrote:

lorewise chaos damage in poe is unnatural.

I keep hoping for the interaction of Volkuur's Guidance and Fenumus' Toxins to work with some future league item to (re-)unlock the potential of elemental-poisoning that isn't subpar compared to other pure-elemental or pure phys->chaos damage solutions.

..but also agree that thematically, the niche/rarity of poisoning sources/interactions follows a consistent and head-noddingly-good trend. I do wish there were more options to take a flat (melee+attack) hit based damage kit and trivially converting it to a reasonable (90%+ effective) DoT solution that allows for higher character mobility and isn't just existing ignite/poison/bleed DoT duration/multiplier stacking.

It seems to me that initially the point of the physical + chaos joint contribution was that "poisoned weapons" is such a common fantasy trope. They wanted people to be able to say "okay, I'm playing as a Duelist using Cleave, but with 'poisoned weapons'".

If you remove the physical contribution you can still do that, but only if you also do other other things to actively build it back, like, I don't know, put physical to chaos damage conversion on poison nodes or something.

It'd be "neater" to be able to say each ailment has one element associated with it. I'm not sure that means it'd be better, or worth doing.

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exsea wrote:

similarly in real life, humans have to dabble in chemistry to concoct poison. i m aware we need to suspend our realism as lightning and ice are not easily wielded by humans without technology but i believe you can see how all of my points are showing how unnatural chaos is.

Finding poison is as natural as foragers eating the wrong plant. If "natural" means anything at all (and I don't really think it does, personally), eating plants or getting a spider bite is surely far more natural than, say, having an ancient god construct a god-suppressing body-horror bioweapon that people thousands of years later are mining the crystalline hide of to make gems that let them shoot fireballs from their hands.

If you use physical damage to poison, you need to scale both physical damage and chaos damage over time, which is not that ideal. If you want to scale poison, you want to convert the hit damage to chaos anyway, for easier scaling.

There are items like Volkuur's Guidance and Pneumatic Daggers which enable different/all damage types to poison. Why's nobody using them?

^ You only need to scale chaos damage over time, physical damage over time doesn't effect poison even if you caused it with physical damage.

Volkuur's guidance halves poison DPS which used to balance out vaguely with EO but no longer does so its a bust, Pneumatic Daggers are fantastic on any poison based dagger build but there really aren't that many poison based dagger builds, or dagger builds in general frankly. I want to do shattering steel with a dagger but can't even do that :(

I've got my usual PoB for a pestilent strike build with a pneumatic but i'll never get a dagger good enough to make it work, but will try for the 4th league in a row :p got close in sentinel but kept getting screwed on recombs.