Ninja Rats, escaping the difficulty modifier?

[Jsuelieta]

I'm curious if perhaps the Ninja Rats aren't a bit bugged in DM Mode. Their primary attack of shuriken can't seem to break containers half the time (unlike every other monster) and their secondary, the poison pool and main reason for this being posted, does some unholy amounts of damage even on Very Easy difficulty if a player is forced to stand in it for any length. Four ticks worth of damage and a VE player is down. That's 25% of their health every tick, where everything else would do...maybe 1%? Less? I dunno if that's actually toned down from higher difficulties (nothing's lasted long enough for me to actively test) but it's still pretty insane.

[ZhonLord]

If I remember correctly, the Ninja Rat's poison pool deals a percentage of the player's maximum health per tick rather than a flat damage amount. Being percentage based is why changing difficulty doesn't reduce or increase the amount he deals, since there's no flat number to change. It makes him the only real threat on Easy or Very Easy as a result.

On the other hand, if you're playing Normal, that damage just blends in with everything else that's being thrown at the player, and on Hard or higher he becomes underpowered compared to any other monster who's throwing hits at you.

(of course all of this assumes that I'm remembering it right and I'm not just pulling stuff out of thin air, so don't quote me on this)

[Jsuelieta]

One would think that if the difficulties applied a global damage modifier to monsters the pool would be affected. I dunno how the coding works or anything, but even if the poison pool does 25% damage, the equation could just as easily be (H*0.25)*D, where H is a players max HP and D is the difficulty modifier. I also don't know how much health a player has, but let's say 1000 for the sake of arguement and having a large, round number to play with. Hard would be (1000*0.25)*1 damage per tick, or 250 damage. Normal cuts it in half so (1000*0.25)*.5, 125 damage. I don't even know what the Very Easy damage modifier is (99% perhaps? I dunno), but either way, why would this equation not be a thing to avoid just easy TPKs on VE?