Poison weapons, useless. Poison spells...... potential.

[Hezz]

I've been doing some testing with poison recently. I still haven't found anything completely redeeming about it, especially on weapons, but I thought I'd share my results. There's still more testing to be done, as there are things I cannot do with my test characters at the low level that they are.

For the purposes of these tests, I went to the Crucifixion Woods and the Halfway Fortress bonfires and tested poison on the giant crabs and on the Corvians.

MELEE POISON

First, I tested out the Ghru weapons. The dagger, the spear and the curved sword. With 23 Luck, their poison values were at 36, 37 and 36, respectively.

The dagger applied the poison by far the fastest, but the damage of the dagger itself was rather pathetic. Poison damage was 3 damage per second.

The spear seemed like the absolute worst of the bunch. It had a higher Poison number, sure, but it felt like it took much, much longer to apply the poison, and the spear's damage was nothing to write home about. Poison damage was 3 dps.

The curved sword seemed decent. The damage was ok, and it applied poison relatively quickly. I could see the curved sword being a half decent secondary weapon if the meta ever shifts to longer fights where the constant poison damage could prove valuable, but for now it's still mediocre at best. Poison damage was 3 dps.


I then infused all 3 weapons with a Poison Gem. The value of all 3 weapons jumped up to 39. There were no noticeable changes aside from the physical damage being notably smaller, as would be expected. The dagger was doing an absolutely pathetic 5 damage per hit to the giant crabs. Poison didn't seem to apply any faster except for on the spear, which was only slightly faster, and the poison DPS of all 3 weapons remained at 3 dps.

Finally, I dumped all my souls into Luck, raising it up from 23 to 31. The poison value on all 3 weapons went up to 40. There was no noticeable difference in poison application speed nor in poison dps.

STORYTELLER'S POISON

I then swapped over to my Luck Sorcerer, who had inspired me to test poison in the first place. She had 25 intellect and 25 luck, and wielded the Storyteller's Staff, which has the Poison Mist weapon art. I tested on the same enemies and found strange results. The Corvians took 4 dps, while the crabs took an impressive 8 dps from poison. Why they were affected differently while the melee weapons were constant, I am unsure. It should be noted that earlier today I used this staff to poison players for 8 dps, which is what had inspired me to test out poison. These results are curious, and I intend to dig deeper into this.


YET TO BE TESTED

First and foremost, I need to test the Ghru weapons when they've actually been upgraded with Titanite. At the moment they are at +0, which may account for their lackluster results. When I'm able to, I'm going to get the Ghru weapons and another 3 Poison Gems on my higher level Luck character and level them up to +6. With the higher Luck value and the weapons at +6, I SHOULD notice a marked improvement, but I'm doubtful that they'll do more than 3 dps. At the moment, that feels like a fixed value.

I also need to test the Ghru weapons with Hollow Infusion + Poison Resin. That turned out to be the superior combination for Bleed weapons, so it should be the same with Poison weapons.

I also need to test out the Storyteller's Staff further. I need to upgrade my Intellect, my Luck, and upgrade the Staff itself. What causes the increased poison damage with the Storyteller's Staff? Is it the Spell Buff stat on the staff, which would be increased by Intellect and by upgrading the staff itself? Does it simply just scale better with Luck than the other weapons do?

Finally, I need to test all of the above with other Poison sources, including the Pyromancy, Poison Mist.

Current verdict is that Poison base weapons are crappy (an observation many have already seen), and the Poison infusion seems borderline useless (again, an already known observation), but the poison from Storyteller's Staff possesses potential, and must be explored further.

[!?!]

Oh my god, can I poison bosses for actually good damage again?
The dream is alive.

[meow]

Poison Knives.

Also, Toxic. Toxic Mist and pooballs.

Poison damage is absolutely pathetic in pvp and you'll easily kill your opponent long before the poison even becomes a threat.

Same goes for most enemies in the game excluding some bosses.

edit:
Based on the wiki page here
http://darksouls3.wiki.fextralife.com/Poison
It seems that poison damage is largely based on the health of the enemy in most cases. This is probably why you were doing 8 damage per tick against players.

As for the effect of luck, well... nobody knows and I'm not sure we'll ever actually find out.

[Hezz]

Originally posted by meowreka:

Poison Knives.

Also, Toxic. Dung Pies are all I can think of.

Poison damage is absolutely pathetic in pvp and you'll easily kill your opponent long before the poison even becomes a threat.

Same goes for most enemies in the game excluding some bosses.

Adding those to the list to test.

Yes, poison is currently lackluster in PvP due to the current meta being so fast and fights ending so quickly (a symptom of how unbalanced many weapons are in terms of damage done to stamina consumed ratios, and the lack of poise meaning stunlocks are possible), and generic trash is always going to be fast, easy kills that you won't be poisoning, but bosses are still good targets for poison, and people who run fun builds for PvP will also want to know what poison is effective and what is useless.

Exactly how poison works, what stats affect it, and what poisons are worthwhile, could also be useful information to know once DLC starts being released. With new weapons, rings, armor and spells, we could one day find a desire to know what kinds of poison works, and what doesn't.

EDIT: Also, as for your edit, I read that article, too. However, Fextralife has only tested out poison from Farron Keep's swamp water, and has made note that other poisons may or may not function differently. I had thought about the crab's HP being a factor in them taking 8 dps over the Corvian's 4 dps, but that doesn't explain why the Ghru weapons poisons, which do 3 dps across the board, didn't increase in potency on the high-healthed Crabs.

[meow]

The only possible potential I can see for using poison in pvp is that there's pretty much a guarantee that other players aren't going to have an anti-poison setup because nobody even sees it as a threat.

[Hezz]

Originally posted by meowreka:

The only possible potential I can see for using poison in pvp is that there's pretty much a guarantee that other players aren't going to have an anti-poison setup because nobody even sees it as a threat.

Yeah, pretty much, for now at least. Those players I mentioned poisoning earlier today with my Storyteller's staff? It did a real number on them. The two of them appear to have been trying their hands at ganking invaders. At least, one of them had the Dragonslayer Armor's axe, and the other was an Estoc spammer, and this was at a low level in Crucifxion Woods. The 8 dps poison on them put the Dragonslayer SunBro down by a lot of health, and into a position where I was able to burst the rest of his health off, then the Host ran out of Estus flasks (not because of me, I think they'd been fighting invaders before me) and was unable to heal himself and died to the poison.

[Deadly.Crystal.Lizard]

a luck/ sorcery build? this sounds interesting! i need to try that

[!?!]

Does luck even have an effect on the poison (or bleed) rate of spells?

[terrorinsc]

You can poison the old demon king.. tha NPC summon I used totally poisoned him with whatever poison pyromancy she used.

[Freestyle]

doesnt poison slow?

Originally posted by terrorinsc:

You can poison the old demon king.. tha NPC summon I used totally poisoned him with whatever poison pyromancy she used.

u can toxic him too, and jst run around and he ded lel

[Cohnway]

A worthless status effect may just be made useful, somehow. Thanks for your work.

[!?!]

Seems like the dancer is immune. Lame.
Sulyvahn kind of melts as soon as he gets a whiff of that stick.
Yhorm is immune which is super disappointing.
Demon king can get poisoned but it isn't nearly as effective as on sulyvahn.

Seems like the storyteller staff is a good cheese stick.
You can cast hidden body with it and then use the weapon art to freely poison whatever mob you want without aggroing them. Upgrading the staff doesn't seem to have any effect and I suppose neither does luck, intelligence or faith so all you need is 12-15 int, depending on if you want the full hidden body cheese packet or not.

The scaling poison seems to be an exclusive thing to the storyteller staffs weapon art tho.
I hope they patch poison to work this way rather than destroying the staff, it's really situational anyway.

[Hezz]

Almost finished testing with Ghru weapons. I only tested with the dagger for this, not the spear or sword, there's only 1 more thing I have left to test but to be quite frank I don't think it'll make any difference whatsoever.

Swapped over to my SL79 Luck character. With a non-Hollow Ghru blade equipped, he's sitting at 37 Luck. The base +0 non-infused dagger has 38 Poison, while the +6 Poison Infused dagger has 48 poison. This substantial increase should be more than enough to determine what exactly happens when you build for Poison.

Long story short, it's disappointing.

I tested both the +0 non-infused and the +6 poisoned infused daggers on the same Corvians and Crabs. Results were almost identical. Poison damage remained at 3 dps. The +6 dagger DID apply the poison faster, but I wouldn't say it was entirely worth it. On a Corvian Mage (the other bastards move around way too erraticaly for me to reliably time my hits accurately), it took 4 hits with the +0 dagger to poison it, while the +6 Poison dagger took 3 hits. If your goal is simply to poison the enemy, this is a good thing, as for PvP purposes especially, fewer hits to poison means you can swap back to a REAL weapon sooner.

Disappointed that such a subsantial increase in stats provided no tangible damage boost in the poison, I thought I'd look at it in another perspective. Maybe the increased damage isn't alloted in the same duration. Maybe it increases the damage by *extending* the duration?

So, I took a trip back to the Crabs in Crucifixion Woods, as they had more than enough health to test this theory. I attacked the crabs, 1 swing at a time, keeping a mental note on what the damage number was when the poison kicked in so that I could get an accurate total damage reading when the poison ended.

A lot of dancing around the crabs later, I got my results. The +0 non-infused dagger did just a little over 500 damage. The +6 poison infused dagger.... did just a little over 500... well, that theory was busted.

So now I know, for Poison weapons at least, all that poison value does, and thus all Luck and the Poison Infusion (and the Poison Resin) does is apply poison faster. It does NOTHING to help with poison damage nor duration. This means that Poison weapons are of little use for anything but a secondary weapon to quickly apply poison then switch out to a proper weapon.

In other words, it's more or less useless, sadly.

I haven't tested a Hollow infused Ghru weapon yet. This may make the Ghru weapons better PURELY by making them do more damage with a Luck build while still being capable of poisoning, but in that case, why not just use a Bleed weapon? The only arguement I could make for this case is to poison then swap to a bleed weapon in order to make use of both, and that's a rather flimsy arguement as it is. What a Hollow-infused Ghru weapon won't do, based on my tests, is increase the poison damage at all. But hey, at least you could still use a Resin on it this way.



Yet to test Pyromancy Toxic Mist, Storyteller Toxic Mist, Poison Knives, Dung Pies.

[Hezz]

Originally posted by chris:

Seems like the dancer is immune. Lame.
Sulyvahn kind of melts as soon as he gets a whiff of that stick.
Yhorm is immune which is super disappointing.
Demon king can get poisoned but it isn't nearly as effective as on sulyvahn.

Seems like the storyteller staff is a good cheese stick.
You can cast hidden body with it and then use the weapon art to freely poison whatever mob you want without aggroing them. Upgrading the staff doesn't seem to have any effect and I suppose neither does luck, intelligence or faith so all you need is 12-15 int, depending on if you want the full hidden body cheese packet or not.

The scaling poison seems to be an exclusive thing to the storyteller staffs weapon art tho.
I hope they patch poison to work this way rather than destroying the staff, it's really situational anyway.

I was curious with what you said about Sulyvahn, so I upped my int to 12, and went and got myself summoned for him. It took a couple of attempts to determine how much exactly the poison was doing to him, because, y'know, I kept getting summoned into large groups that wail on him like a pinatta.... but then I got summoned to a world with just a pyromancer and Anri of Astora, which allowed me to get a perfect reading off of Pontiff.

Storyteller Staff poison did a VERY impressive 54 damage per second to him! Now I'm going to have to test the Ghru poison out on him, and then get myself the Pyromancy Toxic Mist, see if that works like the Storyteller Staff. At this point, your findings seems correct that only the Storyteller Staff poison scales with HP, though.

[Hezz]

An update. I've since used both the Ghru Dagger and the Poison Mist Pyromancy on Pontiff Sulyvahn. Both did 13 damage per second on him. With this in mind, I'm concluding that ALL poison scales with health... just the Storyteller Staff's Weapon Art scales *so much more* that it isn't funny. I mean, seriously. 13 damage per second on a +6 Poison Infused Ghru weapon and on a Pyromancy, vs 54 damage per second on a staff Weapon Art that doesn't even really use much FP.

I feel like Storyteller Staff is how Poison is SUPPOSED to work, because the poison from that staff is actually good.

On a side note, I checked out storyteller staff on the Pontiff Knights outside of Sulyvahn's room while waiting for a summon. The one with the shield took 5 damage per second, while the one with the scythe took 6 damage per second.

[Jiango T]

Nice analysis, really.

Talking about the effectivity of poison and numbers appart, It has a (relatively) good use putting pressure in PVP. My archer uses a Poisoned Bandit Knife which also has bleed. The moment I manage to apply the poison to the opponents, the pressure begins and they start doing more punishable moves, specially punishable for a kiting bow.

Resuming, although poison numbers in weapons may be low, it has a good use for the PVP mindgames. Pretty useful for kite/bait based characters and potentially deadly against heavy weapons, since they are the most kitable/punishable when forced to take the initiative.