Ignite damage vs poison damage

[Brandr]

So I'm just getting back into PoE, and i left just before Chaos damage came in as a thing

Now, I love DoT, and AoE, skills and i was researching the difference between the two but i can't really figure it out

Fire damage does not stack, so multiple editions of fire damage won't stack onto the enemy unless they're from separate sources, in which case, the strongest will wear out its damage and timer first

But Chaos damage can stack, adding onto damage and duration.

So is there anything that sets the balance between the two? Because chaos damage seems to be the best option, with few resistances, and the capacity to stack its own damage from one source

[The Elder of the Scrolls]

You can stack ignites. Emberwake Unique Ring lets you stack them.

https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Emberwake

[Drake]

First there is the damage output and source. Burning damage (which is the dot, ignite is just one of the means to apply it), depends on the base fire damage and can be applied on a fire crit. It's very easy to scale it up and apply it fast.

On the other end, it's a little more complicated with chaos and poison. Poison is a chaos dot, and the damage of the dot comes from a percentage of base chaos and base physical damage. Then, not all chaos dots are poisons, essence drain, contagion, blight, caustic arrow, decay are all example of non poison chaos dot, they don't stack with themselves (they stack with each others though, including poison).
Also, you never poison on crit, meaning you need chance to poison on hit to apply the dots, and the duration is fixed, and it's short, and it does less damage than burning, unless you use viper strike which modifies poison behavior to stack better.

So on one end you have a spammable, durable and strong dot but unique (unless you go amberwake, but then it's not the same dot anymore), and on the other you have a stackable but short lived less strong dot.

So on the paper poison looks good, but in reality it's a lot more difficult to make a poison build, especially when other chaos dot builds like essence drain and cauetic arrow already do a very good job and can also use poison as additional damage support.

[Paroe]

İlk olarak The Elder of the Scrolls tarafından gönderildi:

You can stack ignites. Emberwake Unique Ring lets you stack them.

https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Emberwake

Up to two total ignites.
Poison stacks infinitely (but individual stacks wear off).
Ignite doesnt stack but can be refreshed.
Bleed doesnt stack but can be refreshed.

Fire damage scales MUCH higher and has much more bursty sources than poison.
Poison has all kinds of nice support that ignite doesnt though. Ive seen people do multistrike faster attacks viper strike with double wasps nest (or whatever the claw is) and just beat on tanky mobs till they die.
You can swap in ancestral call+melee splash for clearspeed too.