Dark Effigy and Poison Interaction

I had a build Idea that sounded great on paper and I made sure that the wording matched what I had in mind. Here it goes...

Dark Effigy "Raises a totem that bombards enemies afflicted by chaos damage over time debuffs.".

Poison "is an ailment that deals chaos damage over time...".

Some monsters have the attribute "Always poisons".

The Idea was to summon as many poisonous monsters as spectres, so that DE bombards them furiously. The expected outcome being:

1. DE recognises poison stacks as chaos damage over time (which it is)
2. Each spectre has it's own pool of poison stacks (which is the scaling metric of the build)

Neither of these expected behaviours seem to be true in the game.
Would you mind fixing that, please? =)

Debuffs same as ailments apply most powerful debuffs possible, so u get 1 stack of poison so u get 1 effigy projectile. Bad idea to be honest 0 synergy at all

Poison is an "ailment" that causes Chaos DOT

Essence Drain and Cantagion are "debuffs" that cause Chaos DOT

Dark Effigy fires projectiles per Chaos DOT "debuff" on the target.

An "ailment" is not a "debuff".

So no, Poison doesn't work to trigger extra projectiles.

Some spectres poison is not proper poison from what I've seen, it's a dot, the health goes down but the HP bar never turns green. I think venomous crabs might have the right way to poison for what you wanted to do.

On the other hand, I don't think that comorbidity gems makes DE fire 1 more shot due to 2 poisons. All in all, you might make it work but not sure how viable, I assume you would spec into minions, because if you big damage is supposed to come from DE, why would you even run poison spectres?

EDIT: nevermind the spectres poison just doesn't work.

Also poison, while being an ailment, is also a debuff that deals damage, and procs a shot from DE.

EDIT:

Did some testing, poison skill do trigger DE. Also I remember devs saying there was barely any chaos damage during the campaign (tavern talk interview?), so that makes me wonder if the venomous crabs and other poison monsters are actually doing a chaos dot. Would make sense then that the spectres don't trigger DE.

and as an additional titbit:

"Debuffs are negative effects that deal damage or penalise an entity's stats"

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Galtrovan#5344 wrote:

Poison is an "ailment" that causes Chaos DOT

Essence Drain and Cantagion are "debuffs" that cause Chaos DOT

Dark Effigy fires projectiles per Chaos DOT "debuff" on the target.

An "ailment" is not a "debuff".

So no, Poison doesn't work to trigger extra projectiles.

"Ailments are a family of common Debuffs associated
with specific damage types. The list of Ailments is:
Bleeding, Ignite, Chill, Freeze, Shock, Electrocute and
Poison."

So are ailments debuffs or not?

Just extra smart guy said the same with another words, nevermind 😁

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rollegee#3098 wrote:

"

Galtrovan#5344 wrote:

Poison is an "ailment" that causes Chaos DOT

Essence Drain and Contagion are "debuffs" that cause Chaos DOT

Dark Effigy fires projectiles per Chaos DOT "debuff" on the target.

An "ailment" is not a "debuff".

So no, Poison doesn't work to trigger extra projectiles.

"Ailments are a family of common Debuffs associated
with specific damage types. The list of Ailments is:
Bleeding, Ignite, Chill, Freeze, Shock, Electrocute and
Poison."

So are ailments debuffs or not?

Good question. GGG are sticklers to their literal wording. Essence Drain and Contagion literally say they do "Chaos DOT debuff" damage. Poison simply says it does "Chaos DOT" damage. And Dark Effigy says (paraphrased) "extra projectile per Chaos DOT debuff damage source". So on the surface, being poisoned should not add an additional projectile.

But, as you point out, ailments are a family of common debuffs. So does Poison count or not? Obviously, not per poison stack. You may get one extra projectile out of Effigy if a target is also poisoned, some have said you do get one, but getting one per poison stack is never going to happen. Would be way over powered. Plus, if poison does in fact give Effigy yet one more projectile, then being poisoned would only count as being debuffed by poison once regardless of the number of poison stacks.

Indeed, I was using the venomous crabs from act 1. They apply the poisoned debuff icon and they also recolour the health bar, just like any other poison.

I don't really agree with the argument that being poisoned by several enemies would only result in one additional DE projectile. It's not like DE is checking 'if poisoned or not', but rather it counts how many chaos DOTs are present. Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding the argument :/

Anyways; as I understand DE, it should fire one projectile per poison on an enemy. Each spectre should have their own poison stack (two with comorbitdity) and therefor DE should be firing A LOT.


TBH, I think that skill might be really busted if it would work that way but could be fixed, if the projectile damage is based on the DOT damage, so that many weak poisons don't result in obscene DE damage.