D2R - Is Venom Sabotaging Your Character? (Venom Sucks)

[@corydawson5980]

I stayed a while and listened.

[@andrewcooks1]

It would be cool if they added a training dummy to the towns. Especially if you could modify their resistances and armor and whatnot.

[@skulker2]

Thank you. It makes perfect sense. 12 seconds is way longer of damage over time than .4 seconds of damage. I never realized that when I used venom I was cancelling out my team mates damage potential.

[@christiankoll1528]

Yeah, i was farming Dclones with my summoner necro this season. Rather, my merc and some CB summons were. But when i started, my merc was using insight (which has poison on it) and a crafted blood armor. After "upgrading" the armor to treachery, i noticed big d wasn't staying poisoned like he was before. Switched to a different armor(found a griswold and stuck some jewels in it), and it solved the problem. It's funny how many times a couple of pieces of janky cheap gear will out perform endgame setups because of simple game mechanics. Its the end of the ladder season and my merc now has infinity and bramble. I would probably have a more difficult time taking on dclone now, just because i don't have a good source of poison or open wounds. Got plenty of crushing blow, though. And i guess my insight iron golem has poison.

[@TheSwaGGerFM]

nice detail in the video, never knew how venom functioned

[@lefter700]

Realy didn't look into this before. Thank you good sir!

[@zacheryainsworth3825]

I have Maxed Venom on my Bladesin and it does great with the assassins blade tree. Just adds a little punch to help with physical immunes.

[@maramau2485]

i was thinking about that too. I´m currently buiding my first ever martial arts sin

[@kristopherleslie8343]

It does good with blade sentinel it doesn’t do good with blade fury at all

[@GGMentor]

Poison charms help with physical immunes too, and honestly work better overall than venom does if you have a decent number. Venom will out perform Poison Charms on one monster, but only if you continually strike that monster over and over. Poison charms will out perform Venom on groups, and don't require constant hits. Poison Charms will also outperform Venom on a Single target if you are missing too much or fail to maintain a constant .4 second to hit rate.

[@zacheryainsworth3825]

@@GGMentor I agree, but there hard to come by. Also I agree it's better on blade sentinel than blade furry.

[@albertwang0830]

I too use it along-side my blade sentinels, since it essentially makes it like a long term poison as long as the crowd don’t move away. I feel like it’s made specifically for blade sentinel and blade fury.

[@PedroJPedro]

Never figured that it would be messing with my poison damage if a merc had treachery on. So this is a good thinking point on my characters that have poison for stopping regen or for raw damage.

[@frankenstein3163]

I love the theory craft of venom for my Dragon talion, blade shield, shock web, shadow war/trap build. But so far I'm not having much luck on getting pre buff claws.

[@thefreedomhouse1984]

it should stay the same amount of damage jsut decrease the time it takes to deliver that damasge, a level 30 skill shouldn't set you back.

[@wbwright79]

when leveling Bowazon and wearing Treachery i noticed that the relationship between Venom proc and any (all) charms with poison properties would not play correctly together. i ended up removing all items (and charms) with poison damage on them until I could build a Fortitude. my experience only, could be imagining things.

[@GGMentor]

Venom does indeed nerf the poison charms yes.

[@ZachIdso]

I remember she could use it with her blade traps/shadow warrior for extra benefit so on her at least it's a fun skill. It'd be nice if it could be toggled on/off though so she doesn't have to keep recasting every couple minutes

[@fishstix4209]

I used to love my max poison ww assassin back in the original lod days before the poison nerf.

[@zacharyr6886]

It never ceases to amaze me how little i know about a game I have played for 20 years. Thanks for the info! looks like ill get about 30 more mf for my ww barb after i remove my poison charms.

[@GGMentor]

Yeah if your using poison charms with grief you might as well toss em. That grief venom proc ruins their purpose.

[@zacharyr6886]

@@GGMentor After actually paying attention to the mechanics it appears that whirlwind does not apply the venom proc. It's not so bad with a bit of poison dmg even though the a5 merc with greif interrupts my poison dmg. At least the merc is mostly single target.

[@edwinjusto5739]

You gotta show the math “ohhh no your archenemy” 😂

[@GGMentor]

Yup lol

[@imogreit]

If the game had a fast, average, and slow duration, like 1 sec, 5 sec and 10 sec poison effect, then let each calculate their own dps in their respective category, I think that would fix poison in this game, obviously this is a rough idea

[@nickelodeon1989]

i am thinking of socketing gface with poison facet to improve my ww-sin. i am using chaos and fury runewords. and venom skill

[@GGMentor]

Venom double dips on skill damage so if you are building venom it could be worthwhile

[@thebbcjoke]

To understand what most people do wrong with Venom, I`ll explain here briefly: poison damage is shown into screen as total damage + length, when in reality is is all about damage/frame + length. Normal poison damage works by doing the sum the damage/frame and the average the length for normal poison, meaning that it works BEST to get items with the highest damage/frame, regardless of length. Venom TRUNCATES the poison length to 10 frames, so now you want items with the highest TOTAL damage (the value that is shown on screen). An item with 1000 damage over 10 seconds that was USELESS before (4 damage/frame) is now your gold mine (100 damage/frame). Basically, what I want to say is: if you want venom to improve your build, you have to rethink your gear/charms.

[@GGMentor]

Kinda the point of the entire video is that venom hurts your build overall. Those poison damage charms are better without Venom. They last longer, do more damage, and in general stop regeneration better without Venom. The only thing your gaining in that scenario is the damage venom is brining to the table itself. But I would argue that using venom reduces overall poison damage enough to counter it's own damage addition.

[@kristopherleslie8343]

Ok Macro :) 😂❤

[@thebbcjoke]

@@GGMentor The point of the video stands on its own, and it is different from what I'm bringing in. Venom only hurts your build if you don't build around it, which INCLUDES the poison charms. For example, the best "normal" poison charm is the one with 6 sec duration on both prefix and suffix. But for venom, you want the one with prefix 6 sec and suffix 5 seconds, because the game is forced to recalculate the bit rate for a 30 sec duration. While you do lose damage for the unpoisoned monster frames, you get a lot more poison damage bonus from longer poison length. There is a threshold where this turns into a gain. EDIT: it seems the duration also gets added in 6 sec charms, so maybe that one is also better for venom. The important part seems to be the double affix.

[@GGMentor]

I understand what your saying, but I would wager a full poison build done without venom would outperform a Poison build built around venom any day of the week. Venom might be slightly faster on Single targets if you can maintain attack rate/not miss/don't get blocked, But the Raw poison charms will outperform Venom on 99% of other content. Even with the glitch your talking about I only have to hit the target once with raw poison damage, maybe twice. But with Venom that's 30-60 times for the same damage output

[@thebbcjoke]

@@GGMentor I disagree. Nobody would want to wait 10 seconds in D2 for a mob to go down, even assuming you could kill them with a single poisoned hit - because you'd still need to wait 2 screen max away to get the exp, and eventually you'd need to go back and look at the loot. That would be very impractical gameplay imho. I DO agree to the point that venom hurts most unprepared builds though, but let's be real, who uses enough poison charms in a non-poison-centered build anyway?

[@yasaiasazuke]

😅 Poison Javelin level 20 is 46 seconds. Level 15 venom should add 38K dmg. So, venom alone takes 13 hits to kill hell baal . Can I turn Lady Zon into LazyZon?

[@Smieciakowo]

100 dmg over 5 sec, will do like, 20 dmg over 1 sec with venom. Venom is 0.4 so it will do 10 over 0.5sec, so about 8/9 dmg over 0.4. So 100/5s poison will do 8/9 dmg with venom.

[@HaibaneKuu]

Question: If you are spamming your attacks, which is I think what's commonly done, is it actually worth to have long poison duration to begin with? The impressive numbers over 12 seconds it shows look, well, impressive, but they only really apply if you only attack each enemy once, and wait for those 12 seconds, which when calculated for resulting DPS ends up, well, far less impressive. Like 451 damage over 12 seconds (per a small charm) look nice of course, but if you attack, say 2 times a second (12 frames per attack, fairly mild), doesn't that mean that each charm essentially adds around 19 damage per attack, which sounds far less impressive, considering that other damage types - from what I understand, for example fire can roll up to 26-42 damage on a small charm? Which looks a lot less impressive than 451, but even with lowly 2 attacks a second that's far better than what poison offers, doesn't it? You are showing an example of tagging everything with multishot and running away, but how many builds are actually working like that? Why wait 12 seconds if you can spam your multishot and have it die in 2 seconds instead? Like sure for zealot or fendazon that might be useful, but if you are multishotting a pack of monsters, surely 12 second duration is essentially useless. Now whether venom actually helps you in that build is also a question as you have to probably jump through some hoops to use it, but I wonder if we should talk about poison damage in general, as I feel like its mechanics are hardly intuitives and damage numbers displayed are essentially deceptive.

[@GGMentor]

Hitting again refreshes the duration and applies 1 frame of the poison as direct damage. As for your comparison with an elemental damage charm, no because the poison damage stops regeneration. Canceling out Regen is a massive damage increase on its own. Granted you can use open wounds to do this but there will be gaps. As poison and Open Wounds stack it certainly doesn't hurt to have both ticking away. The other issue with comparing it to an elemental damage charm is melee and ranged characters inability to actually hit the damn target. Misses, blocks, Doge, avoid, evade, claw block, attack rating issues, ect. Long poison damage only has to be applied once and gets refreshed on the next hit. Elemental and physical damage require consistent hits to land to maintain output. So in most situations elemental damage won't keep up with poison as it ticks away without care requiring no additional attacks. As for whether venom helps, you can clearly see in the video when I add venom the build gets far worse not better. It becomes much harder to kill monsters requiring multiple hits to achieve the same goal. Regeneration becomes an issue as the monsters quickly recover from the venom damage. Overall the performance of the build went down tremendously by adding venom in.

[@HaibaneKuu]

@@GGMentor To clarify, when I said "Now whether venom actually helps you in that build is also a question" I meant venom as an isolated skill, not in addition to poison charms, as you demonstrated that it doesn't work well with poison charms well enough. I'm just questioning the part of "in most situations elemental damage won't keep up with poison as it ticks away without care requiring no additional attacks" How many builds are actually made around "not making additional attacks" - that's the question. I was under the impression that most of them are in fact built around making lots of attacks and landing them, are they not? Surely it's amusing to hit monster once and wait until it dies, but I don't see it as very practical if I can hit the monsters 3 times a second and kill them in 2 seconds instead of 12, which to me seems to be the real issue with poison - making more attacks doesn't make you do more damage, which I assume is what venom tried to address, but since it doesn't interact nicely with existing poison mechanics, it doesn't work well. I see your point when it comes to regeneration, but it's also seems like that's relevant if you are specifically relying on poison to stop regeneration, which, how common is that? There's other options, but you mention that open wounds leaves gaps, but doesn't it last 8 seconds? Surely you can reapply it quickly enough? Also, I feel like monster regeneration only matters to begin with if you are not outputting enough damage or for specific cases like ubers. Avoid, evade, claw block, etc are pvp scenarious, I thought we are talking about PvE, so main question would be attack rating, I would imagine that builds that rely on hitting the target will try to make sure they have enough AR to do it consistently enough. If we are talking multishot - my comparison with elemental charm assumed 2 attacks per second, which is 12 frame attack, and it's already around 80% more damage on average compared to the poison charm. But from what I see, 12 frames is rather slow for a multishot bowazon, they would like to have, what 7 frame attacks, which results in around 90 dps for the charm accounting for 75% damage reduction for multishot. While poison charm still just gives you around 30 dps due to way poison works. So you can miss two thirds of your shots and still match the poison damage for a multishot zon, which is probably far from an optimal situation, and you probably are going to hit way more often as a multishot zon. I mean I understand your point when it comes to venom in a poison-centered build, but I'm gonna bet most of the treachery, grief, etc. builds are not going to be affected too badly as they don't rely on poison in a way you assume in this case.

[@GGMentor]

"How many builds are actually made around "not making additional attacks" - that's the question." This has nothing to do with it at all lol. If Venom does 30,000 damage in 30 attacks, and I do 30,000 damage in 1 attack you HAVE to hit 30 times to do that damage I don't. I can also still attack multiple times anyway and regardless of hits or misses my poison is gonna keep ticking away while I do other things like CB, OW, Proc Effects, Physical Damage, ect. Venom is only gonna do that damage if you can hit the monster repeatedly. In large AOE Scenarios the poison charms are always gonna win over venom. Cows, Chaos, Tombs, ect A Poison charm user can walk into the cow level fire four multi shots 1 in each corner of the screen hit a very large amount of cows probably in excess of 100-200 poison them all and start working on the nearest pack while they all bleed out. The Venom users can't do that, they required 30-40-50-60 shots to achieve the same goal and a lot more time. Venom Sucks on Poison Centered builds, It sucks on the 1 poison charm user, it sucks when someone else has venom and they overwrite your stronger poison because of the technicality that venom has a higher tick rate. Grief gets away with it because it's overpowered and it has prevent monster heal to stop regeneration that way. So the fact that venom kills poison charm regen is muted by the addition of prevent monster heal. However this comes back to bite them in the but during ubers that are not affected by prevent monster heal, where a bit of poison would come in handy to assist OW in stopping all regen. Treachery is the real issue because it's such a good armor for players and mercs, so venom is everywhere wreaking havoc and people don't even know it.

[@HaibaneKuu]

@@GGMentor > If Venom does 30,000 damage in 30 attacks, and I do 30,000 damage in 1 attack you HAVE to hit 30 times to do that damage I don't. I can also still attack multiple times anyway and regardless of hits or misses my poison is gonna keep ticking away while I do other things like CB, OW, Proc Effects, Physical Damage, ect. I guess I'm looking from a different perspective - if I build around hitting monsters 3 times a second, then I might as well use the effects that benefit that playstyle. Venom maybe not cause it's hard to scale its damage, but elemental charms will probably fare better than poison ones. Though at that point maybe it's just better go exploding arrow or demon machine sorc. Shooting at cows, then waiting then collecting loot is probably a playstyle, but I don't know if it's much more effective than walking up to a pack and deleting it in 2 seconds. Frankly that's what best cow farming spec usually does. The 451/12 poison charms from what I see are mostly referenced in the context of pvp, which seems to be a completely different beast. When it comes to poison damage, I mean, I watched a number of your videos and you yourself often pointed out the issues with the way poison damage is working in the game - it stacks badly (or well... it doesn't stack at all from multiple sources), it is interrupted by other sources of damage and so on... So to me looks like venom is just another example of poison damage being borked in this game and that it's better to just not build for it at all :P Open wounds to stop regen when it's really needed cause it seems to play much nicer and isn't affected by resistances, and instantaneous sources of damage for, well, damage cause those don't cause nearly as much headache compared to poison. As a bonus, you could use Treachery without worrying about all that bs :) Also on a different note, you've mentioned regen in few other cases, like I remember the Thorns discussion, and you cited regen as a prime reason why Thorns isn't good, but I got the feeling is that the prime reason it's not good is that it essentially doesn't do enough damage and regen is just a symptom of that. Various sorcs, hammerdins, javazons don't stop monster regen at all and are doing very well, that's just cause they do enough damage to kill monsters despite the regen. Not talking about ubers of course, which is a bit of a special case where it is very relevant of course, but even then IIRC decked out nova sorc can take on them as well.

[@GGMentor]

Nah monsters just attack very slowly, which means no matter how much damage thorns does most of it is regenerated by the next time the monster attacks. All monsters have a rather terrible 15 frame delay and also AI issues. The moral of the story with thorns is you are relying on the crappy AI to keep up to hit rate and it doesn't. But once you stop Regen with thorns you will see it actually does a lot of damage and is capable of killing most monsters.

[@agyhalott86]

Can Venom work if my build is a fire trap assassin, and want to deal with fire immunites in melee? ( trap / shadow hybrid )

[@GGMentor]

What are you gotta hit them with? Venom only applies to melee/ranged. So a fire trapper has no way to apply venom. You need a melee or ranged skill to apply that. I don't believe venom is enough on its own to deal with immunes but In combination with some good melee dage maybe.

[@agyhalott86]

@@GGMentor Killing mobs with traps, get in close with Cloak of Shadow, tank dmg with Fade, Merc, Shadow Master, and killing fire immunes with Venom, with basic meele attacks with the help of claw mastery....thats the idea!:) Viable?

[@GGMentor]

@@agyhalott86 use dragon talon

[@agyhalott86]

@@GGMentor by itself or with Venom?

[@GGMentor]

@@agyhalott86 the assumption is your using venom so I picked the appropriate skill for venom

[@labspeciman7402]

Since resurrected was released I have not made a poison damaged anything. May add a couple small charms but not a main damage. If I want to wait awhile I will make a summon necro.

[@jdstark24]

So if we just have Venom and no other poison damage, Venom is fine, right? I got a Zealot with Grief and no other poison damage, and obviously prevent monster heal, so do those two considerations make Venom viable?

[@GGMentor]

In the situation of grief because it has prevent monster heal you don't need the poison to stop regeneration. but even in that situation it's still basically useless. like having a 50 lightning damage charm in your inventory. It's Extra Damage, but it could still have the unwanted side effect in group play of canceling out friendly poisons.

[@jdstark24]

@@GGMentor understood. Thank you! Goated channel.

[@yasaiasazuke]

Would a merc with Poison dmg interrupt a poison dagger venom attack?

[@GGMentor]

If the Mercs poison is higher tick rate yes(even if it's lower overall damage)

[@TrU-td6ml]

@@GGMentorIs tick rate the attack speed of hitting the foe?

[@GGMentor]

@@TrU-td6ml tick rate is the supposed poison damage rate. Venom has a very high tick rate but lower overall damage so it often overrides poison. Let me give you an example. Venom at level 15 from Treachery has a poison damage of 305-325. Taking the highest number you can find the highest tick rate by dividing it by the duration. 325 over .4 seconds so 325/10 = 32.5 per (1 Frame) So let's say you have a pretty decent poison damage. Like 3000 over 12 seconds. (3000/12)/25= 10 per tick. So venom at 325 will overwrite 3000 over 12 because it's technically a higher tick rate. But for venom to do the same damage you would need to hit the target a little over 10 times with consecutive hits to reach the same 3000 damage. Misses, blocks, increase the number of hits required to reach the same damage. Also venom allows regeneration where poison does not. So venom will lose damage every tick the Regen is allowed to happen which means it will take even longer to hit the same 3000. Furthermore, on multiple targets the 3000 will always do more damage because venom requires continued attacks to reach any significant amount. Any venom will cancel your 3000. Imagine if you will you have a ridiculous poison whirlwind barb setup and you whirlwind through a pack of monsters with a tick rate of 31 per frame over 12 seconds which is 9300 poison damage. Then your friend with a grief and venom proc with a tick rate of 32.5 and 325 venom damage overwrites and cancels all your ticking poison with crappy 325 venom hits. This is the basis of the issue is venom sucks lol 🤣

[@TrU-td6ml]

@@GGMentor THX! Got it. So basically use Venom with +3/20/20 SC or just use poison damage charms. P Facets add flat poison damage so that’s impacted too

[@TrU-td6ml]

@@GGMentor Can you do a video on how to effectively use a Bladesin? I guess WW, MAX 3 Blade skills, Claw Mastery and Fade? 1 point to DSentry, & WBlock

[@anilkocman9062]

Druid rabies skill: how does it interact with venom?

[@GGMentor]

Very poorly. Skill level is set upon biting. Any poison attack damage added by items or Venom is treated as a separate and thus competing source. If poison attack damage has a higher rate, it will be applied for its length; if this expires before the infection, Rabies poison rate and remaining length may be applied by missile afterwards.

[@kristopherleslie8343]

I just wish poison was time reduced to a maximum of 10 seconds

[@frankenstein3163]

I think if it could stack the slow DPS long duration would allow long psn duration and allow for fast attack speed builds to utilize it. but .. ya psn is interesting to work it into every build.

[@kristopherleslie8343]

@@frankenstein3163 from a time standpoint waiting past 10 seconds is a bit unneeded

[@frankenstein3163]

@@kristopherleslie8343 Very true.

[@GGMentor]

nah long duration poisons are fun to stack on targets, the problem with D2 is that only 1 poison can ever be active at a single time. If Venom and Long Duration Poison Charms could coexist without murdering each other it would be great. If you could stack multiple poisons on a target that would be great too. The problem comes in when in D2 they make deliberately and overly long poisons that they know are objectively worse than shorter better versions. If a 60 second poison had the same tick rate as poison nova that only lasts 2 seconds than the 60 second poison wins hands down. But that's not how it works in D2, most of the time the longer duration poisons are made deliberately worse than the shorter duration poisons. To a degree that things like Poison explosion, Poison Javelin, and other extremely long duration poisons have terrible tick rates and always get overwritten by venom, and any other poison damage from a superior source which is all of them.

[@kristopherleslie8343]

@@GGMentor I’m more comfortable with poison being redone and reimagined because what I see is more of a clusterfk lol.

[@mr_proctober2032]

How does grief overcome this? Raw physical damage?

[@GGMentor]

If a monster is dead you don't need to worry about them ticking poison or regenerating lol. But Grief does have a mal rune in the recipe which is Prevent Monster Heal. So although Venom Ruins Poisons anti regeneration properties, the Prevent Monster heal makes up for it. So Yes killing a monster outright prevents the need to worry about such things. In P1 Grief can do this in P8 Grief has to worry about monster regen just like everyone else.

[@Chrisfragger1]

Hello, can I get a Trang-Ghoul's belt from Hell Meph?

[@GGMentor]

Troll belt is in the TC Class 84 section pretty high, Hell Meph is level 87 so it should be possible.

[@TrU-td6ml]

What about VENOM Rabies Druid?

[@GGMentor]

The Worst possible scenario, Venom acts as a competing source and will cancel out rabies. Due to the nature of rabies there is a possibility that it could reinfect the target before rabies duration is over. But Rabies will usually lose damage output due to Venom. This is the Excerpt from Amazon basin article on Rabies & Venom. "Skill level is set upon biting. Any poison attack damage added by items or Venom is treated as a separate and thus competing source. If poison attack damage has a higher rate, it will be applied for its length; if this expires before the infection, Rabies poison rate and remaining length may be applied by missile afterwards."

[@TrU-td6ml]

@@GGMentor THANK YOU. So only 1 skill benefits from Venom, and it’s the Amazon skill? Does that make Grief less good then?

[@GGMentor]

Grief is OP, but understanding how Venom sabotages your build helps you undo some of the damage. By adding open wounds for instance. And realizing that poison small charms are useless with grief. So you use other more valuable charms.

[@TrU-td6ml]

@@GGMentor Thank you!

[@kristopherleslie8343]

Venom should be replaced

[@allysinlombard]

Does venom suck as an OSkill or does it just suck for the Assassin?

[@GGMentor]

Sucks for pretty much everyone, assassin included. It has very niche use case scenarios

[@rx3882]

The conventional poison damage meant to do 2 things: deals damage over a period time and stop monster from self healing while poisoned. If you expect poison damage to slowly ticks your target to death, venom literally works against that.

[@kristopherleslie8343]

Past nightmare wouldn’t even bother with it

[@kristopherleslie8343]

Except for bow assassin but that’s for memes

[@TrU-td6ml]

@@GGMentorWell, your video highlights it’s good for the javazon using the poison skill, so that makes it useful.

[@kristopherleslie8343]

Excellent job Ginger

[@matthewgill2695]

I hear you... but venom doesn't suck, venom is just being used incorrectly... 4 points to this. 1st, mercenary can't have charms, giving a merc a venom proc is a straight up damage increase. (except act 3 merc). 2nd, Play style, the whole take a shot, take hands off your keyboard and laugh, is a play style. If you rush and do lots of things and never let off the pressure, venom is better. If you play the style that you want to play, yes venom is bad, but that's your play style. and 3rd Venom on a toon that doesn't have space for 451's (instead using 3/20/20 charms) , the venom proc is very strong. the 451 charm takes up both the prefix and the suffix slot, If you can have access to venom for free, or use a 451 and have to change your build, don't change the build. a Zealer using greif should not run poison charms, its a damage loss - use a different charm. a ghost sin or hybrid sin what ever they want to identify them selves as now a days doesn't have space for these, they have there skillers and just the bottom row for SC's, they want the HP and Mana, or resist, and when they run in to a light immune, they burt that target down, not tap and wait for 12 seconds....and 4th, balance... A great argument would be just let me turn off the proc chance. balance is finite in the game, we have no idea how intelligent the bliz devs are/were, is there any possible way that they would have figured out that grief was unrelentingly so mindboggling powerful on a melee class, that putting venom proc on it would be a draw back? To stop people stacking poison damage rather than forcing players to invest in an open wound ability too? No way it lined up that perfectly? or maybe they were smart enough to "balance" it, or maybe just dumb luck, but either way, venom invokes a balance. I get where you are coming from, i really do and appreciate the research, but it does have a place, maybe not a place useful to you right now. maybe think of venom as a noob trap, if you use it poorly, it will punish you, use it wisely, and you can benefit from it.

[@GGMentor]

"1st, mercenary can't have charms" Nah but his venom can still overwrite your better poison. "giving a merc a venom proc is a straight up damage increase." A Mediocre one that can interfere with more meaningful poisons. " 2nd, Play style, the whole take a shot, take hands off your keyboard and laugh, is a play style." This is not playstyle it's how the poisons work, venom fundamentally changes how the poisons tick and work which require a drastic change in how you play just to maintain the same damage. The sad thing is you never will maintain the same damage with venom. Because if I can tag 100 monsters once with a poison and watch them all die, you can't do that with venom. no matter how fast you attack, no matter how hard you try it's not possible with venom. That's not playstyle, that's venom sucks. "3rd Venom on a toon that doesn't have space for 451's (instead using 3/20/20 charms)" Just 1 decent poison charm is worth the space and is better than venom. "the venom proc is very strong." It's mediocre at best, and what it takes away isn't worth what it gives. "If you can have access to venom for free, or use a 451 and have to change your build, don't change the build." If you have the choice the 451 is better, if you don't have a choice then well you don't have a choice now do you lol. So your just stuck with the inferior version. "a Zealer using greif should not run poison charms, its a damage loss - use a different charm." Yeah because venom sucks lol "I get where you are coming from, i really do and appreciate the research, but it does have a place, maybe not a place useful to you right now. maybe think of venom as a noob trap, if you use it poorly, it will punish you, use it wisely, and you can benefit from it." It's not just a noob trap, it's also a Veteran player trap. Even Vets fall into the venom Bullcrap trap because they think they know better just like you think you know better. I don't even think if you use venom "Wisely" is it worth it. Venom has a tendency to sabotage you, your friends, random people in pubs, and make the game harder as a result. The way that venom will overwrite stronger poisons is once of it's biggest issues. I could tag Diablo with a poison that lasts 20 seconds and does 80,000 damage and there's still a very good chance someone with venom with a slightly higher tick rate will remove my 20 second poison. Venom also removes poison from every monster it touches which means it "Enables" Monster regen across the board. If someone else is using a 451 poison small to stop regen and your using venom you are gonna directly sabotage their attempts to stop regeneration on every monster you touch. You might not like it, you might disagree with me, but none of that changes the fact that venom is a piss poor ability that in general only makes things worse not better. The only Reason people hold on to the idea that venom is actually useful is because deep down the want it to be useful. The Truth Is Venom Sucks, and should be avoided whenever possible, which is unfortunately nearly impossible due to it being free on two of the most popular items in the game.

[@matthewgill2695]

@@GGMentor If you are going to approach this with logic and fact's, i'm not going to win >_>

[@TrU-td6ml]

@@GGMentorVenom is good for the javazon poison Amazon bc that was the one ability it benefits that is actually good, so I guess it has some use.

[@GGMentor]

@@TrU-td6ml yeah I talked about how it stacks beneficially with Plague Javelin

[@TrU-td6ml]

@@GGMentor for some reason I was trying to tag the Matthew Guy but it seems to tag you. Thanks for confirming!

[@mewtwo239]

Botd has venom to

[@GGMentor]

Botd has Poison Nova not Venom, and it also has Prevent monster heal with is great! Stops Regeneration without the need for Poison. Botd is a great weapon for arresting regeneration.

[@mewtwo239]

@@GGMentor had botd and grief mixed and i just found my zod and have 384 ed and 12ll botd