Toxins + Rain of Arrows = bad poison?

[ZorkNemesis]

Not sure if this is a bug or if this is working as intended but Toxins from Plant Manipulation seems to be rather ineffective when used with Rain of Arrows from Archery.  Toxins adds a fair bit of toxic damage to every other Archery attack as expected but when RoA gets used the extra damage appears minimal, even possibly nonexistent.  There's no combat log to show since RoA doesn't seem to report in the log, but the damage numbers above the targets are showing a very paltry -1 in addition to the -155 from the arrows landing.  Unless i'm not understanding the power correctly that almost seems useless to use with what is effectively my set's nuke power.

 

As an aside, and this may also seem to be working as intended, but it looks like Toxins' bonus damage isn't affected by damage buffs.  When used with or without popping Aim prior, the bonus toxic damage was the same for the same power.

[UberGuy]

The thing with Aim not affecting Toxins bonus damage is almost certainly intended. It's implemented as a "global proc", which means it's like (temporarily) slotting a special proc enhancement in all your damage dealing powers. It is conventional that damage from these cannot be boosted by, well, anything that boosts damage.

 

It seemingly not working right on RoA may be a bug.

 

RoA summons a pseudopet and, like most such things, its damage is implemented as a passive with a refresh interval such that it only ticks once in the pet's lifetime. The pet is passed the owner's buffs, so its powers should get the proc benefit.

 

0.11*(1.00*Melee_Damage)*minmax(power.base>activateperiod, 0, 2)/power.base>areafactor

 

This looks almost exactly like the proc calculation for passives/toggles used in Offensive Adaptation, with higher scale  multiplier. (That makes sense, Toxins is a click and OA is a toggle). So I don't think anything is wrong with the formula.

 

So... I dunno what's up there.

 

Here's a separate probable bug though. Toxins does nothing at all to PvP targets.

 

 

[Carnifax]

3 hours ago, ZorkNemesis said:

There's no combat log to show since RoA doesn't seem to report in the log

It's a Pseudopet. Right-click your Combat Log tab, pick edit and choose all the Pet Combat options to add to it. 

 

Should show up then a bit like this : 

2021-04-07 00:03:46 Poison Trap:  You hit Juicer Freak with your Neuronic Shutdown: Chance for Psionic Damage for 45.63 points of Psionic damage.
 

[UberGuy]

Actually I think this is working as designed, it's just the fact that the damage is implemented as a pseudo pet screws you out of a bunch of damage compared to it being a click. The proc's damage formula is tuned towards things like damage auras, which are long-running, rather than nukes delivered by pets. If you plug the numbers in you get about 2.5 damage before area factor, and such a large radius is probably what drags it under 1.0.

[ZorkNemesis]

Having not usually putting pet damage in my combat log, that's why I would've missed it.  So I made a separate tab for pet damage to see what Rain of Arrows was doing with Toxins.  If this isn't a bug, Toxins is absolutely worthless when paired with RoA, save for some extra ToHit.  I almost feel cheated how bad it is if this actually is working as intended.  Level 28 vs Equinox Parasites in Moonfire.  93.13 from RoA ticks, 0.31 from Toxins.  And not even on every tick either.

 

 

As for the Toxic proc not working with damage buffs, I can accept that, but it's a little disappointing. 

 

 

[UberGuy]

This is one of those cases where it's working as designed, but the edge case outcome for pseudopets isn't really what anyone wants, even the devs. The issue right now is that tech in the engine isn't available to handle these cases better. It sounds like actually adding something to support it is on the wishlist, but there's no timeline yet.

I suck up this proc behavior in "true" patch powers like Blizzard, because there's just no other way for them to work. But given how it works, I wonder why RoA really needs to be a pseudopet. I think the visuals may need to be, but it seems to me that the actual damage could be a regular TAoE with a short, fast DoT. That would also solve this problem.

 

About the only thing that would change is that stuff would no longer be able to move out of the patch during its cast delay. I'm not sure that's really a bad thing, given that most powers in the game work that way. I think the only NPCs that use this power are the various versions of Manticore, and I rather doubt that being able to avoiding RoA after its cast is a big part of anyone's PvP meta. 

 

Edited April 16, 2021 by UberGuy