Poison Set Revamp thread

I love threads like these. They are filled with and give so much hope. I'd sure like to see Poison brought up to at least average.

With a new powers person, who knows?

I don't see the huge problems with poison everyone else does. It's a single target debuff set and it really shines at that. Especially with hard-to-kill targets.

That being said (and I love poison, my first MM was a Necro/Poison) Poison Trap is an awful power. My only suggestion is to switch it with the Traps version. That alone would improve the set greatly.

My second wish is that Noxious Gas be castable on any ally, not just pets. The rest of the set is pretty rocking IMHO. Evenom + Weaken = the nastiest ST debuff in the game. The debuffing numbers are insane. In any type of AV/GM/EB fight a Poison MM is very nice to have around.

Unfortunately for while the -Special is only available to MMs in /Poison, Cold Domination also has it in Benumb. Yes Poison does have good debuffs, but if you compare Envenom/Weaken to its AoE counterparts, the AoE versions are going to come out on top for the simple fact that they are AoE and have slightly below, equal, or higher debuff values than what Poison offers.

Cloning the Traps version of Poison Trap isn't the solution, either. Traps works because you can 'turtle up' with all of your traps and just destroy things. Poison is a ranged debuffing set and therefore should remain that way. Now if you want to propose that you take the values of the Traps version, cut them in half, and make it a LAoE, that's another story. I think the solution for Poison Trap, however, is to buff the power to make it useful, but also skippable. Making it similar to Static Field accomplishes this, I think.

After Poison Trap is fixed to be more useful, then attention can be turned to the other powers in the set. Since there have been comparisons to AoE vs ST, look at it this way. A ST attack does way more damage than an AoE attack (except nukes, of course), so applying that to this issue would mean that not just Poison's ST debuffs, but all ST debuffs should be considerably stronger than their AoE counterparts.

Until a Redname chimes in on the subject, I can only assume that the debuff values of Envenom and Weaken are as they are is because they do so many things simultaneously.

Saw in the dev chat thread in the General forums that they mentioned looking at Kheldians and other sets. Hopefully Poison will be one of them!

The sad thing is that poison trap isn't even that great a power. Its situationally useful.

Its just poison sucks so bad people are grasping at anything that seems plausible to implement.

Honestly, poison is a total loss, I doubt it'll be fixed ever, its just going to have to live on as a highly niche secondary thats rarely seen for good reason. Sure, it has its special little place where it works almost as good as traps or dark, but for most content its pretty awful.

Us poor suckers who actually took this set to fifty can be proud that we can endure!

Mercs/Poison FTW! After that, all the other sets seem awesome

@PatternWalker:

I agree with making Poison Trap like Static Field. The re-applying sleep would be a big control, and the -end is consistent with the original power. Two things need to be fixed is the trigger mechanism, which almost never goes off as is, and make this power uninterruptible. A targeted AoE like static field or tar patch would be classy.

Well, there was a hint at possible power proliferation in issue 21. If corruptors get poison, it will just bring more people to our cause.

I should probably mention, that I realize there are other problems with other sets in the game, specifically some powers.

Now, I still have a PM from Castle stating that he had ideas about changes to phase shift powers to make them more useful, but nothing happened with that. I also had talks with him about a bug I found that he stated they were trying to reproduce that I caught on video, where I could train my thugs, dismiss them, summon them, and then summon a FFG which would cause duffel bags to be thrown to all my newly summoned thugs and train them all for the cost of an FFG summon, and that never was fixed either (it is great for the player but it is still a bug) from over a year ago.

I understand the issue with animations, though the spitting animations are the first thing that made me look at Poison. I'd never even considered playing a mastermind until I saw someone use Envenom and then I was sold!

I kinda wish they'd offer some alternate animations that were *all* spitting.

I just wanted to let everyone know that I started a guide looking at MM secondary powerset debuffs. I was prompted by this discussion here. I've already gotten some great feedback and suggestions. Additional eyes on it and more feedback would be great. You can find the draft guide in my signature.

Yes I think becoming a power like static field would fit poison trap well in the set. It seems to be the consensus of the more active posters in this thread. Only questions would be how strong should it be and what the animation should be like.

Just a thought: Make Poison Trap sleep/drain endurance while not alerting the mob. That way it could be placed ahead of the group and the mob would be slept and drained of endurance by the time the group got to it. Then it would be very useful, but not necessarily overpowered (because it would be resisted by AVs, and wouldn't be as effective during a fight)