Jay Wilson Explains Poison Damage in Diablo III
Posted 6 April 2012 by Flux
Poison damage works much differently in Diablo III than it does in most other RPGs (such as Diablo 2) and Jay Wilson took some Twitter time to try to clarify things.
Poison in D3 does not act like D2. It’s not a guaranteed dot. If a skill has a DoT reapplying refreshes duration unless noted. –JayWilson
with that said, is there a way of increasing the chance to poison the target or is there just a set % to poison? –sebducker
there is no ‘chance to poison’. If you hit, you hit.
so basically the target will only be poisoned by one poison effect,the one which does the most damage for the longest period? –sebducker
So, no DOT. Some skills have DOT mechanics, and some of those skills use poison damage, but poison damage does not DOT by default. –JayWilson
I’ll repeat: poison damage does not work like D2. It does not apply a persistent effect, it’s a type of damage like fire or holy. –JayWilson
I suppose this is simpler, with poison just another type of damage, and not one that works in some special different way than all the others as it did in D2. I can also remember how hard it was to calculating poison damage D2, once you had multiple sources of poison adding DPS, stacking or resetting the duration, etc. That said, it seems weird to rethink it now, since the whole concept of poison is that it takes some time to hurt or kill, whether in real life or video games.
Note that Diablo III has (or had, who knows how things have changed recently) a Disease type of damage which dealt DoT while also adding a reduced damage debuff. (Both Poison and Disease are mitigated by a character’s poison resistance.) Also note that poison damage is often called “Acid,” such as from the WD’s Acid Cloud skill. Confused yet?
Alright, nice! The way poison worked in D2 was nice, but needlessly complex. Basically different sources of poison stack as you would expect:
Let’s say you hit every second with a spell that does 5 poison damage across 2 second. And you hit 2 times:
t0: First hit
t1: 2.5 damage from hit 1 + second hit
t2: 2.5 damage from hit 1 + 2.5 damage from hit 2
t 3: 2.5 damage from hit 2.
Total damage: 10 damage (2 hits of 5 damage) across 3 seconds (1 second overlaps).
You’re correct, if the different sources for the DoT were two different skills or in the case of one specific skill, two different players. Otherwise, DoTs won’t stack.
Don’t forget that it stopped stuff from regenerating, just like the ”wounding” affixes.
DoTs may still do that, we just don’t know.
Pretty sure that was “Prevent monster heal”.
Oh hey, a Flux speculation!
Regardless: Poison as its own thing makes sense. The nature of the damage is that acidid, body-attacking, well, poison or “disease” that does not directly hurt you like fire or ice, but attacks the body in a different way.
Hence the different resistance, hence the green display. Nothing confusing about it, imho.
that post makes no sense at all
It may be for the best. Poison got neglected in d2.
What’s confusing about Acid Cloud? Its tooltip makes it very clear, that it does Poison damage.
Disease damage seems to be gone from the game, unless monsters use it.
then it should be called Poison Cloud
Acid would affect zombies, poison would not
In a game world it doesn’t physics doesn’t matter unless stated otherwise with resistance or immunity.
All green damage is poison, disease effect is only applied with Witch Doctors “Bad Medicine” passive.
That’s an arbitrary conclusion. Poisons can inhibit muscle coordination, and seeing as zombies have muscles, it could affect them. Poisons can degrade bones, or destroy marrow, so it could have that affects on zombies and skeletons as well, making them brittle and weak.
On the other hand, zombies presumably don’t feel pain, and may be cold and wet from the earth, so you could just as easily say that they don’t take damage from fire or ice.
Seeing as Diablo doesn’t use D&D rules, I don’t think we need to consider preserving their classical affinities. “Zombie” as a term is almost never conclusively agreed upon. I happen to think the whole concept of a zombie is pretty dumb.
Agreed. What’s so confusing about having to read a tooltip to see the damage type?
You could say the same thing about Magic Missile: It doesn’t do “magic” damage, it does “arcane” damage. Wave of Light deals “holy” damage, not “light” damage. Etc. etc.
Jay should have just answered more simply: “Poison makes your attacks green. That’s it.”
A critical reply from you? Impossibru!
He said it very simply for anyone who knows what a DoT is, and I’d kinda expect anyone who’s kept up with the action/rpg genre over the past 10 years to have that knowledge. Jay’s first reply hit the nail on the head for me.
So basically you hit, you dmg the exact amount of dmg and that’s all? In this case only the “I’ll repeat…” part would have been enough explanation. Its a source of direct and immediate dmg (unless noted otherwise).
Btw there are still DoTs in the game, are there any knowledge about their mechanics? (stacking, reseting, clipping ect?)
Jay’s very first reply addresses your questions about DoTs. Quote: “If a skill has a DoT reapplying refreshes duration unless noted.”
They are making the game more and more casual and simplistic every day… It will end up being like an action/adventure mario game. You suck Blizzard! Really…
Have to agree. Poison damage in D2 was far more interesting. Now it’s just like someone else said: makes your attack green.
…don’t think casual is the right critique…this is more real…acids (strong) are poisons…poisons should act immediately (sarin, OP insecticides, curare, etc) to be effective in battle…it would be semi-retarded to throw asbestos at someone in battle and say, ‘haha…you will die…in 20 years…of mesothielioma’…(while he bludgeons you to death in the present)…besides fire doesn’t kill people right away either, explosions do though…
It’s got nothing to do with “real”, and no acids aren’t poisons, they’re completely unrelated to eachother. (And if you’re going to use a ridiculous example, why use something that isn’t even related to either of them?)
No, the magic word everyone is looking for is “streamlining” and of the extreme kind in this case.
OT: I think of acids as being yellow in videogames.
So is there any point to the different elemental affixes on weps? Or is it just a pretty shade of corpse color and a weapon glow now.
Critical hit does different things for every damage type. (At least it used to; they might have ripped this whole system out last week, for all we know.)
At any rate, fire crit set the target on fire for DoT. Lightning stunned, Arcane “silenced” etc. So that’s a big diff for diff types of elemental affixes. And of course monsters have varying resistances, so fire or poison or whatever might be much better choice in certain situations. I’m sure we’ll learn more important/useful aspects of this post-release.
“Critical hit does different things for every damage type. (At least it used to; they might have ripped this whole system out last week, for all we know.)”
Pretty sure there was a blue post a few weeks ago by Bashiok saying they took all that stuff out because they didn’t want to force players to stack fire damage to the get the fire crit effect.