JuliusSeizure

I like Dual Pistols/Poison. A lot.

Poison is a set that wants to play at range from 1-34. All of its skills from tiers 1-7 are best used at range and there is absolutely no reason for you to dive into a spawn or enter melee range. However, at levels 35 and 38 something odd happens. A set that primarily played at range is suddenly forced to enter melee range to use two of its most powerful skills. Once you get Poison Trap and Venemous Gas, you will drastically change your play style.

This is why I like Dual Pistols with Poison so much. Just like Poison, Dual Pistols is a set that plays best at range up until level 32, at which point it receives Hail of Bullets and a dramatic incentive to enter melee range to unleash carnage. These sets synergize perfectly in regards to leveling approach and they are insanely potent together. You have the option stack massive amounts of -damage debuffs with Weaken, Venemous Gas, and Toxic Rounds all being multiplied by your -resistance debuffs. You also can lay down serious AoE damage with Incendiary Rounds, Bullet Rain, Hail of Bullets, Poison Trap, and all of your debuffs.

While it takes the sets, the -ToHit stat won't do anything and procs won't fire. I have no idea why this bug (the fact that it accepts Accurate ToHit Debuff) has never been fixed.

I am 95% positive that you can slot them on Premium and F2P accounts.

The only skills that I will use Placate on after issue 22 are Throw Spines and Burst (assuming Burst still has an automatic critical, which it may not).

I voted A, but love them all.

I will undoubtedly buy this set, and have been wanting it for quite a while.

It's a great skill. You lay down a mine that will explode when an enemy is nearby, holding all foes in the area and creating a toxic gas cloud that continues to pulse holds and debuff endurance. I am not sure whether the target cap is 10 or 16 for this explosion, but either way it is significantly more than the one target you reference here.

The top 3 for me would be:

Ice Control
TA
Poison

All of the blast and melee damage sets are fairly homogeneous, and melee has received an overwhelming majority of the developer's attention over the course of this game. It's great that Gravity is FINALLY receiving some fixes 22 issues later (ignoring the addition of Singularity).

The desirability of any AT rises and falls with the current team composition but only after a certain break point. Every AT is desirable when first forming a league/team as all you need are willing players, and this universal recruiting extends until you are about 90% full. Only then you can properly judge the desirability of ATs as you try and round out your group.

My main debuffer right now is a DP/Poison as well. Poison is a bit of a wonky set. For most of your leveling career, it is built around two single target debuffs that have a very small splash radius of 8 feet that functions at half potency. You also will be using a cone slow at times. The result of this is that you will be using debuffs at range and likely attacking at range as well.

However, at level 35 you receive your most powerful PvE skill-- Poison Trap. This skill is just lights out for your foes, having a 1 minute recharge and 1 second cast time. At level 38 you receive Venomous Gas, a second power that encourages you to enter melee range. The debuffs on Venomous Gas are not all that powerful numerically but are comprehensive in the breadth of their effects (-defense, -damage, -ToHit, and -resistance).

So here's why I went with Dual Pistols: There is absolutely no reason for you to enter melee range before level 35, and at level 32 with Dual Pistols you receive a an insanely awesome skill that encourages you to enter melee range in Hail of Bullets. Before level 32, Dual Pistols functions best at range which is pretty much how Poison plays until it recieves Poison Trap and Venemous Gas. The issue of redraw is negligable with a Corruptor as you always are debuffing early and attacking later. There isn't much cycling between attack and debuff phases with this set.

At level 50 my DP/Poison is pretty solid. I can spawn dive, hit Poison Trap to hold most of the spawn and spam procs while simultaneously debuffing with Venemous Gas. I will then use Enevenom and Weaken once each on the hardest target and then whip out the pistols for Bullet Rain->Hail of Bullets->Bullet Rain. Just one redraw point, and people are often dumbfounded when the see how much damage you do.

I will say this-- Poison isn't built particularly well compared to sets like Time, Dark, Radiation, Ice, Thermal, or Kinetics. It has an anemic single target heal that you are forced to take at level 1. It also is quite poor at keeping your character alive as it has terrible AoE debuffs, no self buffs, and no self heal. While it has some powerful single target debuffs, it is overshadowed by all of the above sets when fighting the most important PvE single targets in the game: AVs and GMs. All of the above sets can stack more -Regeneration than Poison, which is perhaps the greatest flaw with this set. It's a single target specialist that loses it's effectiveness against anything higher than a Boss class foe. That, IMHO, is a terrible game design and should be addressed with regards to Poison. If Poison is going to have terrible AoE debuff values and be set up as a single target specialist, it absolutely needs to have the -regeneration values that many of the other sets receive.

Just to reiterate what others have posted and I have said repeatedly in every thread of this sort:

• Poison is a single target focused debuff set that is lacking in the most important tool for solo enemies that matter: AVs and GMs. Give it -regeneration debuffs that are on par with Time (-250%), Radiation, Thermal, Dark, Cold (-500%) or Traps (-1000%+). Yes, this is how immensely important -regeneration is against AV and GM class foes, and all of these sets that offer superior AoE debuffs and buffs are simultaneously better than Poison against AVs and GMs.

• Alkaloid is terrible. No other set is burdened with a single target heal as its only ability of this sorts while simultaneously being forced to take it at level 1. Radiation has an AoE heal. Storm has a single target heal that is primarily a buff (mez protection, perception, endurance protection) with a secondary effect of healing. Kinetics and Dark receive two of the most powerful AoE heals in the game. Every set that has just one heal in it is granted something unique or exceptional, while poison gets a weaker version of Heal Other with 15% toxic resistance slapped on for flavor. And then there is Time Manipulation, a set that was released when Poison was ported and has two of the best heals in the game and BOTH affect the caster. Talk about a slap in the face.

• The risk versus reward ratio for Venomous Gas is out of whack. Poison is forced to spawn dive with virtually no AoE mitigation, personal buffs, or self heal/mez protection. Meanwhile, Traps is a set that similarly encourages one to play in melee range, and aside from Poison Trap it also has Seeker Drones, Force Field Generator, Caltrops, and Triage Beacon granting it a suite of self-affecting buffs, mezzes, and debuffs that make this set far more playable. It also has superior -resistance aganist AVs and debuffs regeneration 20 times betterthan poison; that's a value of -1000% versus -50%.

• Neurotoxic Breath is nice, but its targeting geometry (the size of its cone) is not suitable to be used in close proximity to enemies-- it's just too narrow and long. Widen the cone so it could be more effectively used after dropping Poison Trap and debuffing foes with Venemous Gas. Right now, this skill can only be used at range while the only viable form of AoE alpha mitigation is toe bombing Poison Trap in melee. Notice the lack of synergy there?

• Venemous Gas absolutely needs a prolonged duration on its debuff. Hurricane does this with a 10 second duration on every debuff tick, allowing some form of protection to be granted even when the caster is mezzed and the power detoggles. I consider a similar change for Venemous Gas to be the bare minimum that needs to be done for this skill.

• Paralytic Poison is a single target hold with no secondary effects, much like Petrifying Gaze for Dark Miasma. While Dark Miasma can readily skip this power because every other skill in the set is top notch, the same can't be said of Poison. Having this skill offer nothing more than a mag 3 hold weighs heavily on a set that is filled with par or sub par powers. How is Time Stop with a suite of powerful debuffs and a mag 4 hold mechanic not the baseline for what this skill should be?

Why does the Corruptor version of Hail of Bullets seem to receive the least benefit from the Scourge inherent?

• Rain of Arrows can scourge fully on all three damage pulses.
• Blizzard checks to scourge on every single tick of damage, as do all other rain powers.
• Full Auto will Scourge for double damage if an enemy's hit points are low and the proc succeeds (it runs just one hit check though).
• All other nukes scourge for double damage with the same rules as full auto.

Meanwhile, Hail of Bullets does a paltry 41 points of damage at level 50 if it scourges-- a mere fraction of the total damage and making this the only Corruptor skill that doesn't critical.

Am I misunderstanding this, or was Hail of Bullets unfairly penalized on Corruptors? If it can't function like a rain power and check for Scourge on every tick of damage, why does it not receive a full critical like every other nuke?

Is the proc unique? If not, I could see this being worthwhile if you could stack several of them. 5 of these would potentially boost your soft cap Fury from 75 to 80, or from 80 to 85.