Poison buffs? Poison buffs!

Poison ticks a lot of boxes for a support set: heals, buffs, debuffs, controls...

The problem? It's basic.

No real theme, almost no unique aspects, just green waterballoon versions of powers pulled from other sets with Toxic resistance added.

EXCEPT... for one feature that was added later in the set's life: splashing.

I think if we leaned-in to this more for the whole set, it would both improve the performance of Poison and also define a theme for the set: potent ST powers that “splash”.

Alkaloid

Add scale 0.865 Heal (0.76 for MM) in 8 ft radius 'splash' (115.8 for Defenders, 101.9 for Corruptors/Controllers, 81.4 for MM)

Add base 10% Res(Toxic) in 8 ft radius 'splash' (10% for Defenders, 7.5% for Corruptors/Controllers/MMs)

You toss your vial of Alkaloid, it hits your main target and splashes on nearby allies. Simple enough. I think if you added "Caster" to the Entities affected field, it would also heal the caster with the splash, which would be nice.

Envenom

No changes

Weaken

No changes

Neurotoxic Breath

Increase recharge to 60s

Increase duration to 40s

Ok, unrelated to the splashing suggestion, this power is actually pretty potent as a debuff, it just has a slightly short duration. Poison as a whole can already spend a lot of time reapplying debuffs, so I feel it would really help if it lasted longer, so it wouldn't need to be reapplied so frequently.

If others feel differently, I’m perfectly fine with it as is.

Elixir of Life

Add 100% Recovery in 8 ft radius 'splash' (30s duration)

Add 50% Recharge in 8 ft radius 'splash' (30s duration)

Add base 20% Damage buff in 8 ft radius 'splash' (25% for Defenders, 20% for Corruptors/Controllers, 15% for MMs) (30s duration)

Add base 15% ToHit buff in 8 ft radius 'splash' (18.75% for Defenders, 15% for Corruptors/Controllers, 11.25% for MMs) (30s duration)

Add base 10% Res(Toxic) in 8 ft radius 'splash' (10% for Defenders, 7.5% for Corruptors/Controllers/MMs) (30s duration)

“You want to give half of those very potent buffs to a whole team with no crash!?”

Here’s the thing:

1. Someone has to die to use this power

2. It takes 3 minutes to recharge

3. Duration will only be 1/3 of the main buff

Antidote

Add scale 15 Protect(Stun, Sleep, Immob, Hold, Confused, Terrorized) in 8 ft radius ‘splash’ (6.495 for level 50 Defenders, 5.19 for level 50 Controllers/Corruptors, 3.9 for level 50 MMs)

Add scale 250 Res(Sleep) in 8 ft radius ‘splash’ (108.25% for level 50 Defenders, 86.5% for level Controllers/Corruptors, 65% for level 50 MMs)

Add 25% Res(RunSpeed, Recharge) in 8 ft radius ‘splash’

Add base 5% Res(Cold) in 8 ft radius ‘splash (5% for Defenders, 3.75 for Controllers/Corruptors/MMs)

Add base 10% Res(Toxic) in 8 ft radius 'splash' (10% for Defenders, 7.5% for Corruptors/Controllers/MMs)

If this ends up seeming too good, then at least I would like the Damage Resistance portion of this power to be an AoE, like Increase Density (possibly also the slow resistance).

I hesitate to also allow the splash of this to affect the caster, but frankly it would seriously help keep Venomous Gas from being detoggled, at least on a team.

Paralytic Poison

Add 14.9s Sleep (mag 3) in 8 ft radius 'splash'

Increase recharge to 18 seconds

Similar to Blind, give the main hold an AoE sleep. Recharge increase is simply double that of Blind, the way Paralytic Poison is already double the recharge of ST Control set Holds.

Poison Trap

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I literally don't know. I don't want it to just be a copy of the Traps version, but the Poison version feels like it does almost nothing anymore except for the Hold.

Venomous Gas

No changes.

Hey Trickshooter

I like the thinking you've done on the poison set. I can't estimate the math behind this. But the ideas are great. Only with Neurotoxic Breath and Venomous Gas I would disagree. I prefer having a shorter cooldown on Neurotoxic Breath like it is today. Because it makes you more flexible in fast killing teams. Even for Envenom and Weaken I would let it as it is or lower the duration and reusetimer. For me is Venomous Gas the bigger "problem". I saw your post too late. But like I already mentioned (https://forums.homecomingservers.com/index.php/topic,6829.0.html) I'd prefer having it (and all other pbaoe debuff toggles) as a ranged ability. The other ideas are really nice! Especially this chain heal effect.

Greeting Chips

Good ideas!

I'd prefer to give reduced Elixer of Life's values to a living target. +30% damage, +15% to hit, 50% recharge. Maybe lower the crash accordingly.

I do think the AE radius on alkaloid and envenom need to go up to 15. People incorrectly look at the toggle change as a pure QOL issue, when it dramatically boosted the effectiveness of rad, dark, and other toggle debuffs.

EXCEPT... for one feature that was added later in the set's life: splashing.

... now THAT is a change I can get behind, for Poison.

I'd still like to see a "Poison Assault" sort of thing, though, to complement the support-oriented Poison set we already have.

I want Envenom and Weaken to get better AoE. As it stands (and I admit, i may be wrong, since the power info REALLY does a poor job of accurately showing the aoe portion), they are both strong (but not GREAT, for a set built on 2 single target debuffs, they should be amazing) but still struggle to simple reliably cripple more than a few baddies. Even worse in comparison to AoE toggle debuffs, with a huge aoe, and that also hang about in the anchor die.

I'd still love some kinda infection mechanic, maybe the more targets teh aoe hits, the stronger the debuffing gets (as it reaches a critical mass of toxicity or whatever), and well as the original target, on death, maybe exploding with a basic toxic DoT.

Pretty neat idea.

If we're going pie in the sky, you could make it the first support set with an extra charge mechanic like water blast where you build up "contagion" using the base splash powers and then spend full contagion on the suggested powers to add a splash. The breath could have a contagion bonus of spreading from targets it hits and the trap can give max charges when triggered.

Pretty neat idea.

 

If we're going pie in the sky, you could make it the first support set with an extra charge mechanic like water blast where you build up "contagion" using the base splash powers and then spend full contagion on the suggested powers to add a splash. The breath could have a contagion bonus of spreading from targets it hits and the trap can give max charges when triggered.

While a neat idea, it doesnt necessarily leave a lot of time for blasting or other powers on an already busy set. IMO, any buffs should ideally be easy to implement for a volunteer team. Just expanding the buff radius. Additionally, the most important time to debuff is the beginning of an encounter.

I don't know if people are unaware, but Poison doesnt even hit every target in it's small AE debuffs with the same effect for Envenom and Weaken. The splash is half as effective, and the - res component (arguably most important) doesnt splash. It also requires a to hit roll. I just don't see how anyone could claim this is balanced against other debuffs. It's an endurance hog of a set that doesn't function particularly well with big teams/spawns.

I don't know if people are unaware, but Poison doesnt even hit every target in it's small AE debuffs with the same effect for Envenom and Weaken. The splash is half as effective, and the - res component (arguably most important) doesnt splash. It also requires a to hit roll. I just don't see how anyone could claim this is balanced against other debuffs. It's an endurance hog of a set that doesn't function particularly well with big teams/spawns.

I knew that the splash is at half debuff values, but City of Data and Mids both show the half-strength -Res debuffs as being AoE.

http://web.archive.org/web/20140821090939/http://tomax.cohtitan.com/data/powers/power.php?id=Corruptor_Buff.Poison.Envenom

I recall a discussion where people were arguing that the debuffs are especially strong on a single target since you could splash the AV with the debuff from a nearby enemy, and then hit the AV directly, and get both the splash and the main target debuff for -45% rather than just -30% resists. Granted, that's some serious positive thinking, but it wouldn't even have been an argument if there were no splash debuff for -Res.

Pretty neat idea.

 

If we're going pie in the sky, you could make it the first support set with an extra charge mechanic like water blast where you build up "contagion" using the base splash powers and then spend full contagion on the suggested powers to add a splash. The breath could have a contagion bonus of spreading from targets it hits and the trap can give max charges when triggered.

 

While a neat idea, it doesnt necessarily leave a lot of time for blasting or other powers on an already busy set. IMO, any buffs should ideally be easy to implement for a volunteer team. Just expanding the buff radius. Additionally, the most important time to debuff is the beginning of an encounter.

Again, if we're pie-in-the-skying this, that can be accounted for by making the charges' duration longer.  While Water Blast's tidal is like 8sec (I don't know, never played the set), Poison's Contagion could be like a 25sec or 2x the recharge of Envenom so it wouldn't be an issue of needing to use poison powers often.  I'm thinking, the main goal of this suggestion (mine, not the OP's) is if the OP's suggestion is too strong, this would be a gating mechanism to limit how often or how powerful the stacking capabilities could be when taking advantage of the splash effects.

The one change I want to see with Poison is more animations or effects.  Let me spit poison more and not have vials/traps.  I want my character to be physically producing the poison, or at in the case of the trap planting some kind of fleshy polyp thing and not a mechanical device.

As for how the set works, I love it.

You know what bums me out about Poison?  I think Noxious Gas is super, but I wish it always worked like it does for MasterMinds: where you cast it on a target, not yourself.

I like that you pretend MM poison doesn't exist, and your Paralytic poison change is terrible because it makes hold-stacking with my pets against +4 bosses hard with increased recharge.

Coming from the perspective of a MM /poison player.

I don't believe /poison is as bad as I used to. I'd do three things:

1. Allow neurotoxic breath to take Hold IO sets.
2. Turn Noxious Aura into a toggle like Venomous Aura, or at the very least reduce the recharge so the uptime can be made 100%. It's a very important part of the set's power.
3. And this is the big one -> Make poison trap a ranged, ground targeted summon that can be seen by enemies, and that they can attack.

The last on is the big one IMO. Buff sets are easy. They are agnostic to mob size, and they work for the alpha and everything after. Debuff sets are harder. You have to apply the debuff first. For /Dark there are multiple ways to break an alpha. For /traps you have seeker drones and a +def power. /rad's two anchor abilities pump their effect faster than /poison can. I think if /poison had a way to summon something like seeker drones that ate the initial hit, then I think the set would be much more fun to play and perform better to boot.

You summon the trap. The mob nukes the trap, and whoops trap card activated. While all that's happening Neurotoxic breath has been vomited out, and while the orbs of mob neutering are being hucked about, either the player or their pet have moved in debuffing the group further with the aura.

7 hours ago, RubberDougie said:

I like that you pretend MM poison doesn't exist, and your Paralytic poison change is terrible because it makes hold-stacking with my pets against +4 bosses hard with increased recharge.

How did I pretend MM poison doesn't exist? I included MM values in all my suggestions. Is it because I didn't say Venomous Gas/Noxious Gas? Either way I'd have no changes. This suggestion was about adding AoE splashing to the single-target skills in Poison. Since Noxious Gas is already an AoE, any changes to it were outside the scope of my post.

Edit: To be fair, I did include a Neurotoxic Breath suggestion, which also was outside of the splashing suggestion.

You can disagree with my ideas, but you don't have to have an attitude about it. I'm a player just like you and I'm open to discussion and compromises.

I can't confirm, but I wouldn't be surprised that if they tackle this set it gets a whole lot more changes than the little things you are talking about.