Sad, My toon is pretty much one of the only posion toons I see running around...I play a Toon named Ophite that is a Fire/Poison Corr. I think the teams that I am on value my presence though. Not only do I bring mobs to a crawl with NB+RoF+Fireball+Fire Breath I am partially healing and Rezing others! Most people out there are playing TM so I'm the only one who can rez on the team!
I finally with I21 managed to get my name for a character in-game and have been running around when I can as an Earth/Poison controller, both working up the chain and with level bumps on the beta server. Previous versions have been Earth/Rad controllers and there's definitely a noticeable difference between the two.
I don't find Poison to be a bad set by any means, but I think Oedipus_Tex's summation of the set is correct. A lot of the toys that it brings to a fight are nice, but generally get overshadowed by /Rad, which can do most of the same things to a large spawn that poison can generally manage only to a few targets.
The unique effects that poison has, such as -special and -heal, also suffer for the tiny AoEs. While they may be useful against a pesky boss, more often than not the mezzes I want shortened are the stacking ones that accompany large groups of Vampyr, ink men, and the like. Admittedly while as a controller, I can typically rely on my own mezzes to deal with such things, my earth/rad has a lot more freedom because of the ability to essentially nullify a spawn through rad toggles alone.
Poison's biggest advantage that I'm finding so far is its non-reliance upon toggles. Most of the debuffing you can put out stays effective if you become mezzed, die, run out of end, or what have you. They also have no anchor, so you don't need to worry about that. This is very nice; even though you need to pay attention, your debuffs stay up. If a Malta stun grenade hits you through your -tohit, you aren't immediately vulnerable to incoming fire assuming you managed to get the rest of the group sufficiently debuffed (admittedly, not always a safe assumption).
I think what I'm finding most frustrating about poison is the 8' radius. If it were up to a full 15', poison could probably easily hold its own against the other "competitive" sets like dark, rad, or cold. As it is, it's an "also-ran." What Poison brings to the table is almost the same as what Rad does, but the points where it's strongest (ST debuffs, in particular -res) are not valuable enough to counteract the points where it lags behind (AoE debuffs, self buffs, self heal, etc.)
This is ultimately an issue of area and time (not the new set!) The area covered by RI and EF (706.86 sqft) can be covered by both powers in roughly 5 seconds. To achieve similar coverage, Envenom and Weaken, with their mere 201.06 sqft coverage, would need to be deployed at least 4 times to cover the entirety of the same area. Now obviously it's unlikely that you'd need to cover the entire thing, but even attempting to get 2 activations off, you would be covering a mere 57% of the area of RI assuming no overlap. This will take about 18 seconds if you have both powers three slotted with recharge SOs. With a 30 second duration, you then have 12 seconds to use other powers before your first activation would be wearing off. This isn't enough to get a third activation going before the first is worn off. During the 18s cycle, of course, your character will be suffering plenty of incoming damage from the 71% or so of the spawn which you have aggroed but which are currently free of any debuffs. Assuming, of course, that you're not on a team which has slaughtered them horribly in the meantime, in which case "way to contribute a whole bunch of not a lot!"
If a 15' radius AoE is off the table, I would like at least to see Weaken's AoE to have half of the effective area of RI. This puts the radius at 10.6'. This would allow Poison to mitigate incoming damage from a decent chunk of a spawn while it recharges while also being less than RI/EF/Whatever.
Poison isn't bad, but its single target/small AoE focus is a huge detriment in a game which is all about the AoEs. The 8' radius is a nice step up from ST only, but it's still not enough to make a sizeable dent in most settings, especially since most other debuff sets get similar performance out of their powers without the same limitations. For 90% of the game, you're underperforming, and for the remaining 10%, you're roughly at par.
Poison isn't unplayable by any means. You can do just fine with it from 1 to 50 and beyond, and it's definitely a very active and different playstyle from pretty much all of the other debuff sets (outside of maybe TA). However, it's also hard from a performance point of view not to pick rad over poison based on the area of effect alone.
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I agree...do you guys thing it would be SUPER overpowered if you were able to stack it like you use to...but with the '8 radius?
I am loving the fix...my toon plays much differently now.
But now I'm comparing it to Rad. Is there a particular strength that poison has over Rad?
It seems that rad debuffs better, buffs better, similar rez, and controls similarly.
Rad does have a weak AOE heal over poison's good ST heal. I do prefer a strong ST heal, other than that, is there any other advantage Poison might have over Rad?
Please justify my eagerness to play poison!!!
From the way it looks right now, Poison has better single target -Resistance than Rad. It is also much better at dying. IMO it needs more work. They've tried to turn it into a PBAoE set with a 15ft radius toggle and there isn't a lot there to support that change. Fire/, Ice/, and Electric/Poison will probably fare okay, but mainly because they are already fairly good at PBAoE. Perhaps I'll be proven wrong but IMO Poison is one of the lower functioning support sets in the game, specializing in single target but not even being very good at that, and being forced into melee-ish range without self heals, mezz protection, or adequate defenses. The fact that the PBAoE power comes at level 38 means you spend most of your career playing one way and are then thrust to make a very large change at high levels. Maybe someone will prove me wrong though.
Right now, IMO the one situation where Poison might shine would be if you had 2 AVs eight feet away from each other and you didn't mind also standing within 15ft of both of them. I might play it anyway but I do hope they get serious about giving the set a kick in the pants.