The Tavern

Poison Arrow seems to be incredibly difficult to find. Since it is now a level 6 spell, not as amazing as it used to be, and practically required for a poison caster to do any damage to anything immune to poison, I think it should be somewhat easier to find. I'm not sure off the top of my head which additional book(s) it should be in. Power? Something like that perhaps.

Power is already a really stacked book. It was to begin with, and the addition of Battlesphere didn't help. Adding yet another spell is probably not a good idea.

Considering the limited usability of Poison later in the game; I'd argue Poison Arrow should be rather rare.

There are very few branches where it's worth it.

Lair - Lots of Poison immunity
Snake - Entire branch is RPois
Slime - Entire thing is RPois
Swamp - Mostly RPois
Shoals - Good here
Spider - Good here; although due to numbers; Cloud/Bolt generally is better
Vaults - Pretty good
Zot - Alright; but again; you'd rather Cloud here
Orc/Elf - Works fine here

Even for a 3 rune game; you basically need to branch out of Poison magic. The unresisted part of a 6 mana; single target spell; will not carry you through Snake or Swamp. If you're lucky and got Shoals+Spider; it's better.

Thing is; by the time you get to extended; pretty much everything is immune to Poison; making Poison Arrow [And the Poison Magic school] one of the worst schools in the entire game. Do you really want to invest enough XP to get a lv6 Poison magic spell castable when it amounts to wasted XP later? Really; this is an issue with the entire Poison Magic school.

Also; while there's only one book with Poison Arrow; if you've trained Poison there's a very high chance of you getting it from Vehumet or in a book from Sif.

Many demons lost their poison immunity while back, most of them now are rpois+(up ++ or whatever monster can get) - so parrow isn't totally useless against them, just significant worse than any other level 6 spell against which a demon ins't immune.

For all other things I agree like now ins't very worth to invest in poison to get parrow, unless being something like a Na, De or whatever mage guy.

The thing is, I don't think anyone would call parrow an annihilation on par with LCS or chain lightning. It's kind of silly that poison magic:

* kind of falls off late-game
* has some rather awkward multi-school spells (including a couple three-school ones)
* has some useful spells that you probably won't find until they aren't very useful anymore (killing depths/zot monsters with pcloud is awful)

There's probably room for a second poison book (isn't Young Poisoner's the only poison-focused book there is right now?) with thing like pcloud and parrow and ignite poison or something and why isn't infestation poison instead of necro, holy hell why does necromancy keep getting more stuff

That or maybe poison could, y'know, not be a thing.

oh wait pcloud is gone anyhow

Why not just give Venom Bolt some unresistable damage, and perhaps a better return on higher spellpower, and get rid of PA?

Alternately, get rid of venom bolt and add parrow to YPH

pa ---> yph: reduce its spell level to 5? That was the main reason I was suggesting changing VB

How has nobody said remove poison magic yet?

Remove poison magic.

Here's an old idea: add an asphyxiation spell to poison magic. Thematically similar (damages the living but not constructs and undead) and has good utility in stopping dangerous casters during the midgame, though it should probably work as a kind of shallow water for spells rather than absolutely stopping all spellcasting like the current water elemental engulf. A level 6 Asphyxiating Cloud spell that both poisons and asphyxiates to gain a niche over Freezing Cloud could be used to great effect in Elf, Vaults and Depths.

I'll further repeat myself in saying that poison magic currently has the least number of support spells in the game (at a startling total of zero, being outdone by fire magic) and addressing this would go a long way in making it more viable. Poison could possibly have a mass combat/"Necromancy, but you use other enemies instead of corpses as your resource" gimmick, with a spell that heals you whenever a poisoned thing dies (HD-based so no dragging rats around), a song of slaying-like spell that gets more powerful/refunds MP/grows in AoE whenever it kills something in quick succession, an Inner Flame-like spell that passively melts dead enemies into Glaciate-esque blockades for protection (Earth/Poison cockatrice venom spell to replace the nigh-useless Petrify? Actually giving PM acid damage in the form of acid puddles, which are limited enough that the "acid damage is non-elemental damage" argument can't fully apply?), and a rethemed Infestation. Plus possibly a support spell that poisons you but gives considerable slaying/defense/spellpower bonuses while you remain poisoned (no cheating it with !curing).

And is there any reason for say, Ice Fiends to keep being poison-resistant? Even a single rank of rP is a huge detriment to poison damage, might as well take it away completely from select lategame enemies and buff Poison Arrow to be better than Iron Shot in some situations instead of invariably worse except against inconsequential enemies like orb guardians. And damn, I now realize that all my Poison Magic arguments look like they're copy/pasted from each other, sorry if that's bothersome for any of you folks.

Also, high-level poison magics could get new spells, like Curare Bolt, Acid Bolt, Corrosive Aura, Sleeping Cloud...

Removing poison magic seems like a solid plan to me. There's already a lot of items with poison effects and it makes a lot of sense for items to be the only source of poison effects. As the comment duvessa links to says, poison's damage over time gimmick pretty much guarantees bad gameplay for any spell that fits the theme of the school. There's also the point that as sixth damage flavor, poison is badly lacking in that there's a lot of overlap between the stuff it doesn't work on and stuff that most necromancy damage effects don't work on, yet unlike necromancy it's attached to a school with few other effects.

I have to think the reason poison magic exists is excessive interest in covering every possible element. I mean four elements are already too many given the set of effects available in the magic system, but five? Someone's been watching too much Captain Planet.

I'm on board with removing poison magic entirely. If a few of the spells are worth saving, and that's a rather large 'if', they can be assigned to hexes instead, which is where pretty much every other status effect is already. Kiting should probably not be the core mechanic behind an entire starting background.

I'm an oddity in that really enjoyed poison's place in the game before Pcloud was removed. Damage spell school that comboed into fire, worked well with necro, and capped at level 6 with poison arrow as a third alternative to an alternative to earth or OoD for single target caster damage. I had great characters where poison set up a character nicely to commit to level 9 magic.

Pcloud gets removed, removing a big piece of the ignite poison combo. PArrow's availability problem gets magnified, and the school simply falls off too hard. Best case scenario of Ignite + OTR + PArrow + Venom Bolt simply isn't good enough, it takes a bonus turn or two to deal with yaktaur and deep troll packs, and you have no solve for skeletal knights or undead more generally. With PCloud + Ignite, you had poor solve for skele knights, but it was a solve, something you could at least try to play around.

There was a time when the poison school was enough to deal with most of vaults and depths allowing for some form of outside utility to solve the rest. Poison school would guarantee that you could get plenty of XP through U5, enough to work out a viable plan to assault zot with.

OTR also doesn't affect monster movement, something that PCloud did.

PArrow and Kiting
I never felt that poison kiting was problematic after the early game. I have never found PArrow kiting to be relevant. If i'm going to kite something with PArrow, I'm going to lure the same mob if I have access to a similar non-poison spell kit. I also can nuke that mob down with PArrow if it is sufficiently alone. The end result is basically the same. The edge case of taking advantage of the full poison damage from a Parrow before recasting Parrow to poison a single mob is something I have never seen.

OTR and Kiting
It has been my experience that OTR ends up tempting the player to get overly committed to fights. I find this makes using the spell interesting, but I am not dismissive of arguments OTR leading to degenerate play like I am of PArrow.

Early game poison and kiting are definitely a thing, however.

If poison school is dropped, the only two spells I will lament are ignite poison and PArrow.

I still believe spider form should be in YPH.

The thing I keep coming back to is that there are already SO MANY DAMAGE SPELLS in this game. If poison were gone that would still leave air, earth, fire, ice, pure conj, and the occasional transmutation, hex and charm to do damage. There's also missile combat which is pretty similar to most damage spells, too.

The only poison spells I can think of that might want saving would be ignite poison (which could just lose the poison school, it's not in a starting book anyhow) and spider form (which could be changed to, say, an Air/Tmut spell that swaps venom attacks with low-damage elec attacks).

Everything else in the school is either a damage spell or a hex with a bunch of weird mechanics tacked on.

Remove poison magic, replace with a new skill - Alchemy. Make potions and other consumable evocables that have spell like effects from enemy corpses, so that poisonous and mutagenic corpses can make more damaging and interesting effects.

http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Fulsome_Distillation
http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Evaporate
Wasn't very interesting.

Problem with fulsome distillation and evaporate is more the fiddliness of the thing. Packs corpse interaction and inventory management into a single awkward package. If you had something that just generates the clouds when you kill things it might work.