Poison and Fire DPS change suggestion

#1

I really love how you guys have programmed in the status effects! And the whole “total effectiveness is maintained” factor.

However… I feel that there is ONE area where this system is flawed. The DPS of poison and fire.

Why?

Simple. With the current system, enemies’ life expectancies are anywhere from 1-30 seconds, for non-bosses. IN ANY CASE, even for bosses and stuff… the longer the life expectancy, the more hits are expected to land on said enemy, right?

Anyhow, let’s start with a mob enemy with 10 second life expectancy.
This enemy is being hit by several archers who have poison passive. So, after 1 second, the mob now has 100 poison DPS, and it will last for 4+4+4=12 seconds (3 poison procs).
In other words… from this point on, ALL POISON PROCS ARE USELESS.

Same goes for enemies with longer life expectancies. The only difference is the “useless point” occurs later. However, in terms of “% of life expectancy”, the ratio will remain almost the same.
In other words, for a 10 second life expectancy revenant, only the first 1-2 seconds worth of poison procs are “useful”, all the rest are “useless”. So, about 10% of the poison procs are actually worth anything.
For a boss with a 500 second life expectancy, only the first 50 seconds worth of poison procs will be useful… 90% of the poison procs will be useless, since the duration will exceed the life expectancy.

…

Ok, how to fix this?

IMHO, I think that the durations for fire and poison status should have a cap… Something like 20 seconds for mobs and 3 minutes for bosses? Retain the “total effectiveness” mechanic, just make fire and poison damage occur within a shorter length of time?

As the game is, currently, poison is just weak weak weak.
Poison is ok currently in the situation where 1 archer is hitting 1 enemy, cause you can expect the poison to be contributing maybe 10% of the DPS.
But in a situation where multiple defenders are hitting someone, I think the poison damage might be less than 1% of the DPS, especially glaring in the case of multiple archers with maxxed out poison shooting 1 enemy…

Overall, I would say that poison damage, and to some extent fire damage, could use this buff…

#2

You’re making a lot of assumptions about character builds and unit placement.

If I decide to use poison heavily, then my strategy will match that. This means that I will have my poison dealers (dragons and archers) upfront, distributing poison evenly, perhaps supported by bleeders - and then a long stretch of nothing, with some kind of exit guard whose job it will be to mop up anything that survived the poison.

In other words, life expectancy of enemies in poison-based strategies will be “more or less the full length of the map, unless the poison kills them before”.
And if I plan to kill all enemies within a significantly shorter period of time, I will NOT bother with poisoning them :slight_smile: , using the skillpoints elsewhere to just kill them quicker.

[q]As the game is, currently, poison is just weak weak weak.[/q]
If you use it wrongly, yes. On some maps, it’s not very useful. On some maps, it’s a very good thing because the enemies will spend a long time walking before their paths join and before you will want to kill them.

In other words, the game mechanics don’t need adjusting just because your way of playing isn’t getting the biggest benefits from them :slight_smile:

#3

Coyot just got done writing a bunch of negative stuff about my thread too. Maybe an admin can review him for flaming people?

That snide tone has be from some little boy living with his mother.

#4

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Coyot just got done writing a bunch of negative stuff about my thread too.

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There was some positive stuff too, but you probably didn’t spend much time reading what I wrote I guess :slight_smile:

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Maybe an admin can review him for flaming people?

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Feel free to use the “!” button above a post if you think admins should have a look at it.

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That snide tone has be from some little boy living with his mother.

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Talk about flaming :slight_smile:

Try not to make things personal. Yea, I might sound negative, but at least I ain’t trolling and flaming people, only some things they write. And I stand behind what I wrote to Jason here - to get a good bang from your buck in fire and poison, you have to use them the right way, they’re not supposed to work well with every strategy and unit placement.

Hopefully he’ll not get as easily offended as you did and will try to beat my opinion with arguments :stuck_out_tongue: