Poison/Plague Javelin and poison sources

[mathfreq]

Hi all, I'm thinking of making a poison javazon, and I was wondering how these skills worked in conjunction with other sources of poison damage, such as charms. Am I right in thinking that this extra damage would only take effect if the target were physically hit with the thrown javelin, as opposed to if it simply walked through the poison cloud? And in the resulting poison damage calculation, is plague javelin simply another source of poison damage, just as if it were a charm with 2000 poison damage over 10 seconds? Finally, what happens if you were to throw Venom into the mix (say, with Treachery armor)?

Thanks in advance!

[foh pally]

Hi, I'm working on My second Plague zon. The charms do their own damage besides the poison from your skill, and yes that would only take effect if the target was hit with your javelin. I can't say about the venom thing though But i'm pretty sure it would act just like the charms.

[WrongdayJ]

The answer to your question is kinda complex, but I'll try to give you a general response:

1. Regular Poison sources mixed with the Plague/Poison Jav skills do in fact stack, but not in a very favorable way. Your rate and duration from the skill are counted as a source and used in conjuction with the rates and duration from the other sources. Short answer, on the enemy that you actually hit with the Jav. . .you will be drastically reducing your duration and cheating yourself out of tons of damage if you mix charms with extremely high damage source poison skills (like Poison/Plague Jav). All the other enemies hit with the clouds will suffer the normal damage from the skill alone.
Your poison damage rate will go up on the monster you physically hit, but not enough to justify the loss in total killing power. If you want to do more damage with a poison skill, some good ways to go about it would be more skill points, or Trangs gloves, or Poison facets. Be careful with stacking +X% to poison damage items though, as there is a diminishing returns thing that happens with each added item.

2. As for throwing Venom in the mix. . .well, I feel that Venom is a skill best used alone, too. It will reduce the duration of your poison into .4 sec. Even the highest of Poison Javs will do almost pityful damage over that short of duration. If you are a Strafer or a Zealot looking for some damage augmentation. . .Treachery is a GREAT tool. But a fully synergized Plague Jav with a modest amount of +skill points and Trangs gloves can do over 25k damage over 16 sec. That same character can do over 30k damage over 1 minute (or so) with a Poison Jav. I guess more is possible, but I find this amount of damage quite sufficient.

[mathfreq]

Thanks for your responses. Things are making more sense now. I came across this thread a while back, where SSoJ was talking about using Venom in conjunction with Poison Javelin to OHKO Baal.

From http://forums.diabloii.net/showthread.php?p=4961421#post4961421

Step #3: Throw a Poison Javelin until the Javelin actually PHYSICALLY HITS the target (i.e. passes the AR Check and deals physical damage). When the javelin PHYSICALLY HITS, the bitrate from the Venom will *STACK ADDITIVELY* with the bitrate from the Poison Javelin itself, and the poison will last for its entire listed duration. In this case, the 2117.5 Venom-based poison damage per second will combine with the 2048.69 PJ damage per second to give 4166.19 poison damage per second over 104 seconds (433,284 total poison damage).


So from this post it sounds like the duration of venom is INCREASED to match the duration of the poison javelin, rather than the other way around. Am I misinterpreting something here?

[peterpaulrubens]

So from this post it sounds like the duration of venom is INCREASED to match the duration of the poison javelin, rather than the other way around. Am I misinterpreting something here?

That's correct.

By all means add Venom to your Plaguer. But don't bother with poison charms. You may gain a little bit of damage from them, but you already have crazy high poison damage. Your charm slots are better put to other uses.

[mathfreq]

Okay, then, let me go through a numerical example to see if I understand this:

Say I have four sources of poison damage (making up the numbers for example's sake):
Plague Javelin: 1000 damage over 10 seconds
Small charm: 50 damage over 5 seconds
Small charm: 50 damage over 5 seconds
Venom: 400 damage over 0.4 seconds

Then my total damage rate is
1000/10 + 50/5 + 50/5 + 400/0.4 = 1120 damage / sec (including Venom)

And my total duration is
(10 + 5 + 5) / 3 = 6.67 seconds (ignoring Venom)

Is this correct?

[Wuben]

The chances you actually hit someone (needs AR to pierce through defense) with plague javelin are quite limited. The skill is timed and pretty slow. Don't count on doing it in PvP. The only ones you can do it pretty easy against are smiters and they usually have high defense.

For PvM plaguers kind of suck anyways. Sure, they're fun, but slow as hell.

[WrongdayJ]

Wow.

I know that standard poison sources like charms and equipment are reduced to the Venom's .4 sec, but I was totally unaware that the poison javelin skill carried the venom damage rate additively over the listed duration. Now I'm wondering if the other poison skills (Poison Dagger, etc.) are similar. :scratch:

You learn something new each day I guess. Thanks for the correction!

I guess that this would make the Trechery armor quite valuable to a Poizon. I always thought that it was better served on a fast-hitting build. Hmm. Very interesting. . .I think I'll do some testing. . . .

[Wuben]

Treachery is crappy for a poison amazon. You need to physically hit the monster with your javelin. Since both plague and poison javelin are delayed AND require AR (without having an AR bonus) this means the whole idea of combining poison sources is useless on a poison amazon.

You're on the lookout for facets, +% poison damage and skills when making a plaguer. Just don't make them for PvM.

[NASE]

don't forget that most of the enemies won't even notice the extra damage from treachery. They are only affected by the cloud and not by the venom as venom is only added to the physical hit.

As far as I know, there are only five poison skills that have a effective hit with a weapon are something like that. poison javelin, plague javelin, poison dagger, rabies and venom. The use of venom with the javelin has been answered here already. Useing venom (from treachery) with venom (from skills) seems like a bad idea. Only one will be active at a time, I guess. Using it with rabies is a bad idea too. Rabies 'rehits' the monster every second, only the first 'pulse' where you bite the monsters will be one with venom. I don't know the methode, though it isn't that usefull.

The leaves poison dagger. First, this is not an attractive skill. You can only hit one monsters, with a long duration timer on a character that doesn't have much defensive methodes and needs up to 60 points in synergies and a lor of points in the curses if you want lower resist. This leaves about 40 points - or much less if you take on lower resist - for other uses, making the other aspect of the necromancer suboptimal. I would go with poison nova or poison explosion if I had putten 60 points in the synergies. Though this is a thema build I plan on making someday*.
Now I assume that using venom will be usefull in combination with poison dagger, though in the guides, I couldn't find it in the guides.

*: Anyone counted how often I said that, and haven't yet done it?