pathfinder poison node improvements

Currently the pathfinder poison nodes do not make a lot of sense:

If doing a poison build you would never take contagious contamination, since it is available via herald of plague gem as a stronger version. But now you are forced to take it just to arrive at the Overwhelming toxicity node. And now it no longer makes sense to use the spirit gem as well and there are not many useful alternatives.

It would make sense if overwhelming toxicity would be a strong node like the 50% small passive effect one on titan that requires a non-damage node as a prerequisite, but overwhelming toxicity already has a downside of less poison duration.

So you are left with taking a node you do not want to take, just to get to another node that you want but already has a downside as well. So you have 2 downsides for getting 1 node.

I would suggest as solution either:
Remove contagious contamination as a prerequisite of overwhelming toxicity and make them separate 2 point nodes

Or leave overwhelming toxicity to be behind another node but replace contagious contamination with one option from below:
- 10% increased duration per poison applied recently up to 100% (moved from the tree to ascendancy)
- chaos as extra damage
- chaos gem levels
- chance to wither on hit (would be good to get a source of wither without standing next to enemy with withering presence)
- poisoned enemies are slowed

or something else useful that IS NOT poison spread.

EDIT: Also if you incentivize investing into poison stacks, just spreading one of them at a time has had 0 impact from what I've experienced. Especially since most of the poison ranger skills are aoe.

Sir would u mind sharing your skill tree?

Ain't much to it, just take all the poison notables and grab some evasion from the side. really can't go wrong. Use poisonburst arrow, combo it with toxic growth when you get it, if you get gas arrow switch from using poisonburst to gas arrow which allows easier bursting of toxic growth. I used the armorshredding support from the beginning, has served me well.

I just see the node as "free" HoA... Which is kinda sad.

It could be as well "+30 spirit" but the HoA variant has hinder as well which is actually useful since you want to kite enemies as a poison char. This one does not even give you the hinder part. For comparison Infernalist has the "free" dog that soaks damage as well. So in that case you have Thing A for free that others pay spirit for and it does extra stuff. As a pathfinder you have Thing A for free, that is worse than the thing people pay for and it does no extra stuff. If it even had 100% chance to hinder on spread then it would make a lot more sense.

I feel like y'all missing the point there, 30 spirit is quite big.

You get 100 spirit total, and not a lot on gear unless you really focus on it.

For 30 spirit you can:

Plague Bearer is a quite strong nuke for when you are surrounded, not necessary though, but great while leveling before you get the good stuff.
Wind Dancer is amazing, 19% -more- evasion rating per stage? It's nuts.
Alchemist's boon is really good on bosses, because of the charges per second. (You can get it on the flask itself, but you can also get better mods on the flast and use alchemist's boon)
Whithering presence, quite strong and stacks with the notable in the tree

Note that you can add vitality and/or clarity in those for some extra life/mana regen. (10 spirit each)

For 60 spirit you can run Blasphemy.


I think Whithering Presence and Blasphemy are default choices here. Those are 90 spirit together. Wind Dancer would be my 3rd choice, with clarity probably because toxic growth is hungry.


I'm glad I don't need to run herald!

+1 on the feedback.

While I can agree that "saving 30 spirit" is a good deal, the node is mandatory on the poison path (to get Overwhelming Toxicity) and is a worst version of the Herald of Plague, but good enough to make Herald of Plague not worth the 30 spirit.

So to me, in 100% of cases where you build poison and want the juicy "x2 poison stacks" given by Overwhelming Toxicity, you will not use the Herald of Plague gem as other supporting buff skills are better use of your spirit.

I strongly suggest to review/change either the ascendancy or the Herald of Plague gem.

"

The_Kay#6958 wrote:

I feel like y'all missing the point there, 30 spirit is quite big.

You get 100 spirit total, and not a lot on gear unless you really focus on it.

For 30 spirit you can:

Plague Bearer is a quite strong nuke for when you are surrounded, not necessary though, but great while leveling before you get the good stuff.
Wind Dancer is amazing, 19% -more- evasion rating per stage? It's nuts.
Alchemist's boon is really good on bosses, because of the charges per second. (You can get it on the flask itself, but you can also get better mods on the flast and use alchemist's boon)
Whithering presence, quite strong and stacks with the notable in the tree

Note that you can add vitality and/or clarity in those for some extra life/mana regen. (10 spirit each)

For 60 spirit you can run Blasphemy.


I think Whithering Presence and Blasphemy are default choices here. Those are 90 spirit together. Wind Dancer would be my 3rd choice, with clarity probably because toxic growth is hungry.


I'm glad I don't need to run herald!

Withering presence with high level and quality is basically ~4 stacks of wither which is good ~20-30% more damage. For 30 spirit huge value. Speaking about blasphemy + temp chains I wouldn't be so sure. 60 spirit for merely 25% of poison duration is not much considering that poison is already hard to sustain if you invest hard in max poison stacks. 30 spirit is easy to get on amulet. Even 60 extra spirit is not hard to get. Vitality and clarity is just laughable because of nature of regen in poe 2 for dex based builds.
Trading ascendancy point for 30 spirit is kinda weak. But good part about it there are no good nodes on ascendancy (besides free passives) so I don't feel bad about having it.

Updated: just checked withering presence requirement for level 19 gem. 190 int. There is no way to stack that many int + 212 dex for good bow minimum except with astramentis probably (100 divines now). So you either use low level which is a lot less multiplier because of wither duration and frequency of applying stacks.