Melee needs better options to scale poison

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Astarte911 wrote:

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)

Unlike some people, we actually want this "diversity" GGG keeps taunting new players in with. But it's just not there when, like you just pointed out that it's flat out better to just do 1 thing.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

]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.

From what I know about this, the melee tag implies attack, the way the bow tag implies projectile. So in reality Melee Physical Damage really is a shorthand for Melee Physical Attack Damage.

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Astarte911 wrote:

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)

I guess you mean converting phys to chaos? I explained why, to get double dipping from Void Manipulation, as well as %chaos damage increases.

By the way that map mod you mention already gives more resistance vs phys than what chaos resistance most monsters have, and it can roll together with the endurance charge map mod.

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Zed_ wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

]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.

From what I know about this, the melee tag implies attack, the way the bow tag implies projectile. So in reality Melee Physical Damage really is a shorthand for Melee Physical Attack Damage.

If that is the case, that is precisely what should be changed. It seems completely arbitrary to me that "Projectile damage" gets good scaling with poison, while "Melee damage" doesn't.

I also wouldn't have problem with a few Spell skills which have the Melee tag.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

If that is the case, that is precisely what should be changed. It seems completely arbitrary to me that "Projectile damage" gets good scaling with poison, while "Melee damage" doesn't.

To be fair, it seems completely arbitrary that 'projectile damage' gets to scale poison at all, regardless of whether or not anything else does. It's just completely beyond logic and reason.

there was a testing thread on reddit and it looked liked AoE damage did double dip with poison, which is weird because its the opposite of what GGG said.

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grepman wrote:

there was a testing thread on reddit and it looked liked AoE damage did double dip with poison, which is weird because its the opposite of what GGG said.

Well, GGG only really talked about Contagion... it's just that the way they talked about it made it imply that all debuff DoT's in general would behave in the same manner. But, then again it's pretty clear that anything GGG says justifying the scalings of skills has to be taken with many, many grains of salt.

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Shppy wrote:

Well, GGG only really talked about Contagion... it's just that the way they talked about it made it imply that all debuff DoT's in general would behave in the same manner. But, then again it's pretty clear that anything GGG says justifying the scalings of skills has to be taken with many, many grains of salt.

He specifically answers a question about poison and not Contagion.

"A poison is inherently single target (each poison debuff is only on the one enemy, after all), so isn't area damage, even if the original source of the damage was."

Needless to say this reasoning doesn't make sense as ignite is a similar mechanic for fire and yet affected by area damage.

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Astarte911 wrote:

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)

Poison support gem scales with Phys dmg. I don't even have fatal toxins and with a poison gem I can literally annihilate any map boss with any mods with my TS connected with Poison. I'm sure if I actually took time to make a semi-decent legit bow build with poison I'd pretty much annihilate any boss ez.

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allbusiness wrote:

Poison support gem scales with Phys dmg. I don't even have fatal toxins and with a poison gem I can literally annihilate any map boss with any mods with my TS connected with Poison. I'm sure if I actually took time to make a semi-decent legit bow build with poison I'd pretty much annihilate any boss ez.

That's largely because of the stupid Projectile Damage abuse, frankly.

At its base, without any scaling factors besides the 'increased poison' on the gem itself, the Poison gem just adds 25-44% of your physical damage as poison damage, exactly the same as Added Fire provides... except Added Fire will provide that bonus even if some of the original physical damage is converted to another element, while poison will only operate on any physical or chaos damage actually dealt initially.

The benefit of using Poison instead of Added Fire *should* be the alternative way of scaling it up, using things like increased poison/chaos/damage-over-time/duration in the tree or Vulnerability. This is as opposed to using Weapon Elemental Damage and the like to scale up Added Fire while being able to benefit from leech and ailments on the bonus damage, and largely not having to go out of your way for specialized passives for greater returns... it's supposed to be a different type of commitment, and one that users have to balance out (optimizing their initial damage versus optimizing the poison's scaling).

But GGG in their infinite bias has maintained this system that allows poison itself (and bleed and ignite) to scale on factors like projectile or minion damage, enabling certain builds to scale both their initial damage AND their poison's damage on the same factors without those builds having to make any compromises or re-prioritization in the least for far greater returns than the elemental alternatives. As a result, melees got a reasonably-balanced alternative scaling route thanks to Poison (since they can't abuse double-dipping and have to actually TRY to build around poison), while other types of builds (bow/projectile, minion) get a ridiculously overpowered scaling factor they don't even have to put effort into achieving.

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Zed_ wrote:

He specifically answers a question about poison and not Contagion.

"A poison is inherently single target (each poison debuff is only on the one enemy, after all), so isn't area damage, even if the original source of the damage was."

Needless to say this reasoning doesn't make sense as ignite is a similar mechanic for fire and yet affected by area damage.

Ah yes, you're right, I was just recalling only the contagion-aoe question, forgot about the other one regarding poisons specifically. Still, it just reaffirms my statement that any justification GGG gives about why their scalings work the way they do shouldn't be taken as logical...

I mean, area damage doesn't scale up poison because 'the debuff is single target', yet projectile damage does scale it up despite the fact that there's no longer any projectile involved after the initial hit? Riiiiight...