My thoughts on rPois

[MainiacJoe]

All I'm doing here is thinking out loud about poison resistance, soliciting feedback. I'm realizing that how I view it has changed quite a bit as I've played the game, and so this is my current best practice concerning it. Please do not hesitate to raise criticism--that's what I'm hoping for here. I'm not offering a guide I'm going to get defensive about.


TL,DR: Swamp is the only place you gotta gotta have it.


Dungeon: not important. Adders are dangerous because their high EV makes it harder to kill them, giving them time to poison you repeatedly; but I rarely succumb to their poison anymore, probably because I'm choosing when and where to fight them better and can rest off even a lot of poison. Blowgun wielders by themselves are fragile and in a pack can have their LOS blocked by their buddies. Killer bees are dangerous because of their speed and numbers, so while rPois does give you more time to deal with them, it's usually not enough by itself to defeat a pack without using consumables anyway.

Lair: helpful but not essential. Especially early, it does give a healthy margin of safety against the RNG with venom melee from spiny frogs and mambas. But if you don't have rPois and are facing venom melee in part of a group, you can reset the fight.

Snake: Helpful, the moreso the fewer HP you have because of Poison Arrow and Blink Allies Surround. Nagas otherwise are slow and can be lured to fight in manageable groups, and rPois doesn't help at all against the other danger, Portal Projectile.

Spider: Quite desirable because of the speed and sheer quantity of venom melee and the open terrain helping you get surrounded.

Swamp: Essential because of confusion from swamp drake clouds and damage from swamp dragon breath, especially if you lack flying and are constrained in your ability to move out of clouds.

Orc, Elf, Shoals, Crypt, Abyss, Vaults 1-4: not important. Enemies that poison you are rare enough and/or weak enough that rPois is gravy if you have it.

Vaults 5, Depths, Zot: helpful for gold dragon breath and especially green draconian breath. Similar to Swamp, except here mobs instead of terrain are what make it hard to escape the clouds. Your character is overall more robust though so you can get by without it.

Slime: Useless

Tomb/Pan/Hell: I've never ventured into these branches so no opinion.

Overall: If you've found it and have a free slot, why not? But don't wreck a good kit just to shoehorn rPois into it.

[Midn8]

In pan, the only reason to keep RPois around are Gloorx Vloq and Green Deaths. Or you could play an undead or gargoyle and get free immunity.

[Sprucery]

Swamp is doable without rPois. You just have to be very careful around swamp drakes. Make them your first priority target and use what tools you have to not get confused. Allies are good, especially poison resistant ones (e.g. Animate Skeleton). Or have flight.

[duvessa]

my thoughts on rpois: its basically useless after like d:4

[Vajrapani]

I didn't really care too much about rPois until recently, where I lost a promising ogre to a sea snake, in shoals, because he didn't wear rPois and got screwed enough by the RNG that he only had like 3-4 curings generate in the entire game, which he had used up by that point.

So he died to poison. It was an incredibly frustrating death, and made me realise the value of rPois, especially since I even had an rPois ring on hand, but felt too lazy to swap it in for a single sea snake.

It's a luxury in Zot,Vaults and most of extended(Arguably even in Gloorx's realm if you're stealthy enough that you can just run past him and apport the rune without him noticing.), but at the 1-2 rune stage , rPois is decent enough to have, especially if you got completely shafted by the RNG.

[ohmi]

Perhaps someone might explain why rPois doesn't have 3 pips like rF and rC and why/if that's still a good idea.

[KoboldLord]

Perhaps someone might explain why rPois doesn't have 3 pips like rF and rC and why/if that's still a good idea.

RPois doesn't have three pips because each pip would be far too weak. You can't use one copy of one of the most common consumables in the game to completely undo fire or cold damage, and heavy fire or cold damage doesn't helpfully wait until after combat is over to be applied to your hit point total.

[Doesnt]

I agree with the OP except the part about Swamp; swamp drakes are trivial on their own even without rPois and swamp dragons are manageable 1v1 if you have decent offense and curing.

[stoneychips]

Maybe I'm just an amateur after a couple years (ahem?)... But I still find Swamp can surprise you sometimes. I hardly want to be led into umpteen choke points where Swamp Drakes have to be a "priority" target (because no rPois) while there are also things like Thorn Hunters, Ghost Crabs, or Shambling Mangroves (and others that are no pushovers depending if you are lower EV or AC). Not to mention you start running into Mara, Louise, or Donald in the mix occasionally. If it happens to be all around the entry stairs, slam slam and at best there go consumables while running back up or into unknown territory.

This is one example of why I still take rPois very seriously, certainly through the Lair branches. But probably I'm not an uber expert like some here who know every trick and never make a false step. And some of whom sometimes seem eager to toss half the game design cause they're tired of all the details they know anyway, and start all over from their favorite basics lately... (You know who you are.)

To be fair, I'm probably wandering in with slightly suboptimal characters at times. Wanderers, ogres, classes that didn't get any appropriate gear in particular out of the orc shops, stuff that trains some more novelty skills to sweep through the Dungeon and then gets slammed by Branch level: 5. But I think that makes the game fun, especially the early Dungeon where you're otherwise doing nothing but training a couple "optimal" skills forever while stepping very carefully with the less well-defended builds.

In short, rPois still has a lot of punch and flavor to me.

[tasonir]

It isn't required but it's really handy for things like being able to stand in swamp dragon breath and not care about having to move. You know, because I'm lazy, and I like to take it easy. I wouldn't say it's outright required for swamp (this strong of a claim is easily falsifiable by just having one person do it without, which has been done), but it is a major convenience which lets you not have to deal with each swamp drake with the care that possible instant death carries. And makes the swamp dragons a lot less deadly. I definitely do remember going to swamp without rPois and butchering a swamp dragon to get it at least once in my life, though.

It's basically a nice to have that lets you tab more things freely without paying attention to them, but with poison it's a fairly small list of things (green deaths, golden dragons, swamp dragons/drakes, some of the spiders, etc). Fire/cold have much longer lists as they're more common, especially fire.

[VeryAngryFelid]

RPois is really important for casters without flight. If you kill things primarily with spells, you never want to be confused

[stoneychips]

Unless you're very certain that you have uber defenses, rPois can also make a huge difference when you first start running into hornets, multiple mambas, sea snakes, or just a huge band of serious poisoners such as often appear too close to stairs in Spider.

I've sailed along a few times (on melee characters!) through Lair and then gotten smashed on early Swamp/Spider with poison sapping HP multiple times for lack of resist. It can really hurt not to have it in early Dungeon when you only have a few HP to lose, but the shock is not all that different if you start constantly chalking up HP drain in no time.