Melee needs better options to scale poison

So I started a melee poison build as my first character this league, which after today's mechanics "reveal" turned out to be a complete waste of time.

- Projectile damage increases and multipliers (and spell damage in the case of Essence Drain) double dip on poison damage, unlike melee damage.

- Turns out area damage doesn't scale poison as opposed to ignite, which means Concentrated Effect also cannot be used for scaling. (this is the only thing on the list that I counted on to make my build semi-decent)

- Melee skills cannot be trapped (or "mined") for better scaling.

- Melee has no option to turn base damage into chaos damage, unlike bow and spell builds, for Void Manipulation double scaling (Voltaxic, Consuming Dark+Infernal Mantle). This can potentially be fixed by adding a unique item for melee that accomplishes the same thing.

- Viper Strike + Melee Splash is useless, thanks to the 50% less damage to the splash targets cutting poison damage in half. VS single target could be decent over a long duration, but with the handicaps mentioned above that's no longer worth bothering with even if you built a very slow tanky character to take advantage of the duration.


In my opinion this cryptic and counterintuitive DoT system needs a complete overhaul. It's been responsible for several cases of game-breaking interactions (ignite-prolif, Puncture traps) and it seems we are looking at a similar problem case with poison. But if it's kept in the current state, melee poison scaling needs to be much closer to bow/spell poison scaling.

Path of Ranged.

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Melee needs better options to scale damage

Fixed that for you. Right now melee is basically crit or GTFO

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Right now melee is basically crit or GTFO

Yes, fixing that is the main point of the poison mechanic in my eyes. With crit you want elemental scaling for status ailments. Trying this out is why I started my poison melee (noncrit) character in the first place.

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Tin_Foil_Hat wrote:

Path of Ranged.

This has nothing to do with being far from or close to monsters. An AoE specced Reave will have excellent range, while Flame Surge has kinda bad range. Yet Flame Surge can be scaled with poison like 3 times better.

I personally don't think melee needs better options to scale poison; it's more that all the other stupid scalings like projectile or minion need to *not* scale poison. Right now melee's poison scaling is fine, in my opinion.

I've got a 2h viperstrike/spectral throw character using poison scaling (with zero projectile damage, so no abusive garbage to help out, effectively the same as melee has to work with), and my poison on spectral throw is dealing ~60% of my initial hit's damage in total (it'd be ~80% if GMP's less projectile damage wasn't double-dipping on the poison). I could pump that up to ~90% (or ~120% without GMP's penalty) if I'd spend 4 passives to grab an increased duration cluster (I wasn't sure if it would work til the first Q&A, so i hadn't planned for it). And that's not including the extra damage i deal via vulnerability.

In my book, for one link and a couple handfuls of passives, that's a pretty solid boost of strength, and about what I'd expect to get in return for my investment, and I don't think it needs a buff (aside from vulnerability not being a godd*mned pure intelligence skill for some unjustifiable reason). It's the stuff that gets way more returns than that for the same or less investment in ways that melees can't use, using projectile/minion/trap/whatever, that needs to be nerfed.

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Shppy wrote:

I personally don't think melee needs better options to scale poison; it's more that all the other stupid scalings like projectile or minion need to *not* scale poison. Right now melee's poison scaling is fine, in my opinion.

I agreed with you in the last paragraph of my op.

By the way, from the recent FAQ regarding game mechanics...

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Bex_GGG wrote:

There are four "categories" of damage - the different kinds of damage calculation can happen. They can't overlap and all damage has to be exactly one of them. Those are Spell, Attack, Secondary and Damage Over Time.

What's very interesting is that Melee is not specified as one of these "categories." So if it says "Melee Physical Damage" as most melee passives do (as opposed to "Melee Physical Attack Damage," which is the wording of the Strength bonus) it really should double-dip with bleeding; similarly, the Templar's "Melee Damage" should double-dip with bleeding, poison and ignite. I am not sure if this is the current behavior or not, and I suspect it isn't, but I do not see any reason why the "Melee" designation should be treated as different from the "Projectile" type.

I also think a fair deal of the weapon-specific passives (ex: Sword, Mace) should be opened up to dealing simply "Melee Damage" rather than specifying Physical. This would be an especially interesting thing to do with some of the least-used damage clusters (I'm sure GGG has data on this).

edit: Actually, now that I think on it, the "% increased Physical Damage with [weapon type]" passives probably wouldn't/shouldn't stack with bleeding, because weapons are used during attacks, weapons aren't used during bleeding; same reason WED doesn't boost ignite damage.

Why would you ever trade your phys. DMG for Poison ?

Phys DMG is the best alround damage you can get in PoE. No resistances on mobs (endu charges are the only one) and only 1 Map Mod that does reduce phyiscal damage (flat % phys reduction)

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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Melee needs better options to scale damage

Fixed that for you. Right now melee is basically crit or GTFO

You right there