Suggestions concerning Poison Magic

[Zagmar Oot the Ruinous]

I like Poison Mages, if they do need a change I don't think they need it desperately or that they need a sweeping change. My current naga poison mage of Sif Muna is the character I've ever come closest to winning with. That's my experience with the game and most of my info comes from the wiki.
Basically Poison Mages are great (perhaps easy)in the beginning and bad (Useless is too harsh) in the endgame. To branch out into some other school of magic is almost a "no brainer" decision. Not quite a no brainer I think: winning while still using poisonous cloud and poison Arrow is probably possible, but it's still mostly a decision about what to branch out into and when to branch out. It would be cool if continuing to train poison was a viable (though still controverseal, as there are still resistances to think about) option. As it is I don't think there is any point in training poison magic above lvl 10. The way to changing this, in my opinion, is to add some high level poison spells for Poison Mages to look forward to and work towards. Now branching out and working towards your high level poison spells are two options that can compete with eachother, offering you a meaningful decision about where to take your character. Right now poison magic stops quite abruptly at spell level 6.

I do like the idea of a school of magic that specializes in early game or a school of magic that is particularily hurt by a certain resistance type, and poison is that. But I think that some would argue that it is instead "useless in late-game", and "hampered by circumstances" rather than specializing in a certain area.

Here are some suggestions, I'm not implying one should implement all of them, they're just several possible options for late game poison spells. Food for thought.

1. Make Poison Arrow a higher level spell. Poison arrow is allready a good level 6 spell (I think. The wiki at least compares it to Lehudib's spear; a spell two levels higher than it.) It is oddly close in level to Poison Bolt and close in function too, making current Poison Arrow basically a "no brainer" upgrade of Poison Bolt.

2. A high level Poison Cloud spell. It could do something more interesting than Poison Cloud though, like maybe poisoning and confusing? Or make it Conjuration/Necromancy/Poison rather than Conjuration/Poison/Air and deal both poison and rot. Or call it poison storm and have it be analougous to fire/ice storm in strength and area of effect?

3. Olgreb's Greater Radiation. A spell that radiates stronger poison, with more negative effects such as sickening targets.

4. Olgreb's Toxic Multiplier. A spell that doubles the poison in everything within sight's system. It could possibly have a negative effect of increasing the power of poisons including ones being used on you! Or possibly rather than being cast after you've poisoned some enemies to increase the effect, it could be cast before, like Iskenderun's Battlesphere and increase the potency of your poison spells which you cast while it persists. Either way takes advantage of poison's unique ability to stack with itself.

In summation, I think making poison magic more of a contender for the late-game (though still limited) would make for a more interesting choice. Poison mages would not be pressured to abandon ship for the first other spell book they find. There would be high level spells for them to work towards and which would be worth the effort of specializing to get, the trade off being still having trouble with creatures that have immunity to poison.

Any critique on my suggestions and suggestions of your own are more than welcome. Escpecially if I have mistakenly claimed something that's false, please do correct me. I don't think poison magic is dying for a change, but maybe some improvements would be nice.

[Wahaha]

First of all, just to make sure you know and agree, poison arrow and poison cloud are always very useful in a full 3 rune game. So the issue here is poison usefulness in a 15 rune game. We don't want "lategame" spells, because parrow and pcloud are already good "lategame" spells. We want spells that work on poison resistant enemies basically. Now I never used poison arrow in a 15 rune game but I've seen it work fairly well in Pan. So it stays useful in that area at least. Anyway I also think it would be fun if higher level poison spells were added. And yes I think making higher levels of poison magic worthwhile, other than for parrow power, would add an interesting decision and more spell variety.

2. Poison cloud is already strong against non-resistant enemies and does nothing against resistant enemies. A stronger poison cloud would do the same thing, but better, but we don't need a better poison cloud because the current one is already good.
3. Olgreb's radiation is useless (except for 1 enemy type in the whole game), so it could be made useful instead of adding a better version.
4. Poison doesn't need to be stronger against things that can be poisoned (yes some poison resistant things can be poisoned with parrow but toxic multiplier still wouldn't be good in this case). This spell would only be used to make poison cloud stronger anyway.

There is a spell that some people worked on or are working on, called venom cocktail:
L7 poison spell in brainstorming stage. Gives a green halo and severe, incurable poison in exchange for all monsters in LOS losing 1 level of rpois.

This would make most demons lose their one level of poison resistance. This is a spell that's worth trying out I think, hopefully whoever is working or was working on it finishes it.

[Sandman25]

I agree that Poison Magic is underpowered in extended and that it is not a good idea to train Poison Magic above 10. It always makes me want convert to Ash for knowledge transfer so here is a crazy idea - create level 9 spell of poison magic which instantly transfers all Poison Magic skill points into spellcasting. The spell cannot be cast if its failure rate is above 10%. Thus Venome Mage has 2 options: 1) abandon Poision Magic as done nowadays 2) train Poison Magic to have the spell castable and transfer skill points. So Poison will be useful in clearing ZoT 1-4/Elf/Slime but will not waste any skill points for extended.

[Baldu]

The beam that's shot by yellow demons and happy eyes could be made into a level 7 conj/poison spell. It even puts pretty bits of monsters everywhere.

[headcrab0803]

what about acid storm

[roctavian]

The difficulty with this perennially-occurring topic is that breaking down the binary distinction between "poisonable" and "not poisonable" any more than we have already will ruin the gameplay distinction of "good early, bad later" and the thematic distinction of "poison works on living creatures."

It could possibly be interesting if poison were reworked so that it bestowed the status upon undead/demonic targets, but prevented poison status from hurting those enemies by default. You could have higher-level spells that interact with the poison status and affected undead/demonic targets in non-damaging ways, which makes poison useful but circumstantially so.

Poison/Ice (or Poison/Earth): Freeze a poisoned enemy at a location/slow an enemy

Poison/Translocations: Teleport away a poisoned enemy

Poison/Necromancy: Allow poison to hurt undead, but with some penalty for using it -- maybe it makes the undead creature come back to life a little bit, with some minor buff?

For what it's worth, I like the Poison school just fine as it is.

[red_kangaroo]

2. A high level Poison Cloud spell. It could do something more interesting than Poison Cloud though, like maybe poisoning and confusing? Or make it Conjuration/Necromancy/Poison rather than Conjuration/Poison/Air and deal both poison and rot. Or call it poison storm and have it be analougous to fire/ice storm in strength and area of effect?

Conjure Miasma (lvl 9, Conjuration/Necromancy/Poison) - creates 3x3 cloud of miasma, slowing and rotting even poison resistant enemies

I'd love this spell.

[Lasty]

I agree with everyone who said that poison is very effective against everything not invulnerable to it, meaning that it's plenty strong in a 3-rune game. That said, I also agree that there's currently no reason to train Poison past ~10, and I think it's worth fixing that.

It seems like the crux of the issues are these:
1: Spells that deal more poison damage won't help the issue, because anything that does take poison damage already dies fine.
2: No poison spells are higher than level 6 IIRC, much less any worth using.

Here are my two ideas for fixing that:

Level 9 Poison spell (or Level 8 Poison/Hexes?)
all monsters currently in LOS lose rPoison entirely. No drawback as per the one proposed above.

Merits: Straight-forward, gives a reason to get Poison skill to 27.
Drawbacks: OP?

Level 7 (or 8?) Transmutation/Poison spell: status effect that causes any poison damage you would deal to be converted into acid damage instead for the spell's duration.

Merits: Powerful enough to be worth learning, Transmutation second school encourages Poison conjurers to invest significantly more in Poison to avoid learning Transmutation, finally gives acid-lovers a way to get acid damage.
Drawbacks: Seems like Devs don't want Acid magic, might have power or flavor issues.

[jejorda2]

What about some kind of madness caused by poison, that worked kind of like the frenzy effect? You could cast it at your own summons or at living enemies near unliving enemies to cause them to execute fast, powerful melee attacks. The madness is contagious, spread by getting hit by a drooling bloody madman. One dose of it (received from a melee attack, not the spell) reduces rPios while the second dose induces madness. Madness comes with a few levels of regular damage-over-time poison.

[rcnr]

Not everything has to work during the entire course of the game. Hexes is basically never worth training past 10, yet SpEn is one of the easiest combinations to win with, even 15 rune. Both schools provide a set of spells that are very powerful during 3 runes, but lose effectivness as time goes on. However, you are expected to memorise spells from new books you find, and it just so happens that when you start as Venom Mage you will want to find books for an entirely different school.

If anything, Venom bolt should be refurbished and PCloud shuld be added to the starting book so it better works as a self contained school that will help early on, have very defined drawbacks, and demand branching out.

[njvack]

Didn't Venom Bolt get buffed fairly recently? Fairly recently, I found it useful on stuff that could be poisoned; it definitely seemed OK for a level 5 conjuration.

Yes, Poison Arrow is better, but it's not particularly common. PCloud is better but it's up a level and three schools.

[Lasty]

Hexes is basically never worth training past 10

I disagree with that, and I'll be surprised if that turns out to be the consensus among skilled players. Raising Hexes increases spellpower, allowing Hex spells to overcome magic resistance. Hex spells are worth raising because they're very strong: both Confuse and Enslave are extremely powerful, and Invisibility makes most of the 3-rune game a cakewalk (though admittedly the latter doesn't require a ton of spellpower).

[prozacelf]

Yeah, 10 hexes would give you an unacceptably high failure rate for invisibility without some wizardry. I normally shoot for about 17, though you can get by with it lower. 17 hexes also makes mass confusion awfully hard for most monsters to resist.

[yogaFLAME]

My current naga poison mage of Sif Muna is the character I've ever come closest to winning with. That's my experience with the game and most of my info comes from the wiki.

how not to start a GDD post

[Mumcon]

In my view, the only place poison magic could serve to be more useful is in Hell and Pan (which ironically the OP shouldn't have been to yet?). It's already excellent in the early and mid-game, and decent in the late game.

My suggestion for a simple way to do that would be to make a level 8 conjuration/poison penetrating spell which does as much damage as Bolt of Fire and is only 40% resistible, and is poisoning in the same way as PArrow. Alternatively, make it like Fireball instead (3x3, perfect accuracy, Fireball's damage).

Being level 8 means it won't be used much outside of Pan and Hell, but the basic concept is that this is a strong offensive/damaging spell which is in the poison school and thus provide more of a benefit to training up poison magic. Besides being penetrating and giving the poison effect, it's basically just a conjuration spell somewhere between BoC/BoF and Crystal Spear in effectiveness.

The reason I suggested what's basically a conjuration spell is that it seems difficult to improve poison magic through its basic feature, which is to poison the enemy. Because there are two basic situations: the enemy can be poisoned so poison magic is excellent against them (better than ice or fire), and the enemy can't be poisoned so it's terrible (since the raw damage is less than ice and fire anyway). The current situation is that poison magic is allowed to dominate in the early and mid-game due to lack of rPois monsters, but it's gradually nerfed (by doing less damage per level and by having more rPois monsters) as you go more toward the late game so you can't just win games with it alone. So the way to un-nerfed it would be to either make it better with respect to being a conjuration, or to make less rPois monsters--but the latter is kind of hard to do when you have whole classes of monsters that are determined to be rPois (like, maybe having undead be unpoisonable yet not rPois would improve balance, but which dev is brave enough to try that out?).

Edit #2: minmay responded super-fast after my post so I didn't bother to say what my edit #1 was, but I made it 30%->40% resistible (kind of arbitrary though).

[mumra]

I think most people could agree the poison school is a bit lacking at the upper end. The reason nothing has ever been done about this is a lack of good original ideas. "Bigger cloud / miasma cloud / poison storm" or "Bolt of Even More Poison" just don't cut it, these are just reiterating stuff that already exists and not introducing any new mechanics.

Poison seems to limit us to a much narrower category of possible mechanics than other schools. I actually still maintain that the whole concept of the poison school should be expanded to cover acid and possibly other 'toxic' things like viral plagues, and have new high level spells based on these concepts. There have been some reasonable suggestions for acid spells now and then but there aren't enough ideas; and "acid storm" is probably the thing most often suggested for level 9 and again this just isn't different enough to interest anyone.

[prozacelf]

I'm kind of surprised that Poison doesn't have any spells that cause Stat damage or an equivalent. A cloud spell that had maybe a chance to poison and a chance to "reverse might" or whatever you want to call it would be welcome addition.

[rcnr]

Why not have a Hexes/Poison "debilitating cloud" that slows or paralyses and works if the enemy is either not resistant to poison, fails MR, OR fails HD?

There's precedent in Confusing Touch for HD to resist, Wasps already have slowing/paralysis poison, and a double school level 7/8/9 spell certainly requires investment, and would warrent it in schools that are usually underused.

[mumra]

Why not have a Hexes/Poison "debilitating cloud" that slows or paralyses and works if the enemy is either not resistant to poison, fails MR, OR fails HD?

You mean like miasma? We have corpse rot...

Wasps already have slowing/paralysis poison

You mean like curare? We have blowguns...

As stated in my previous post I don't think we really want more "cloud of foo" spells, even if that cloud has a totally new effect (which in this case it doesn't), I guess unless that effect is incredibly incredibly interesting and there is no conceivable way it could be delivered other than via a cloud...

[Sandman25]

Is it possible to create some defensive "skin" with Poison like Stone Skin or Ozocubu's Armour? It could be called Poisonous Slime or something and could grant rPois+++, some minor AC, some average EV (weapons/bolts tend to slip/slide). Also it could make adjacent monsters who hit player unable to flee (monster is sticked to player via the slime) or decrease their weapon accuracy (similar to corrosion but affects plus1 instead of plus2: the weapon becomes covered with slime and is harder to hit with).

[yogaFLAME]

Is it possible to create some defensive "skin" with Poison like Stone Skin or Ozocubu's Armour? It could be called Poisonous Slime or something and could grant rPois+++, some minor AC, some average EV (weapons/bolts tend to slip/slide). Also it could make adjacent monsters who hit player unable to flee (monster is sticked to player via the slime) or decrease their weapon accuracy (similar to corrosion but affects plus1 instead of plus2: the weapon becomes covered with slime and is harder to hit with).

We're brainstorming ideas for a high-level spell to make poison relevant in extended. Is this seriously your idea.

I swear to-

okay look. Gonna be as nice as I can, we'll see how it goes. How about we all stop and think before we post. Here look, I'll take 2 seconds and run through a thought experiment, then make a post.

Q: What are poison's defining characteristics?

A: Spells that trade off punctuality for efficiency.

--> Okay, then how about a beam-targeted "corruption" spell. Does corrosion damage over time to target and will spread to an adjacent dude. Adjacent dude can spread it to another dude. Ta-da.

Is this good? --> I HAVE NO CLUE but it's at least halfway consistent within the poison archetype.

Now for the most important part of the post process, I reread what I've written and made sure I'm not an idiot.

I'm not an idiot, check. Okay cleared to post.

[Sandman25]

Q: What are poison's defining characteristics?

A: Spells that trade off punctuality for efficiency.

Excluding Poison Arrow (Conjuration), Summon Scorpions (Summoning), Spider Form (Transmutation), Mephitic Cloud (really should be Hexes instead of Air/Conjuration)...

[mumra]

We're brainstorming ideas for a high-level spell to make poison relevant in extended. Is this seriously your idea.

To be fair, the thread title is "Suggestions concerning Poison Magic" so I don't see any harm in a general brainstorm. The idea in question does have a number of problems though.

Q: What are poison's defining characteristics?

A: Spells that trade off punctuality for efficiency.

I actually think herein lies the problem; this is all that poison has. Other schools also have damage-over-time in a variety of forms, even if the delivery is different; but usually a whole host of other interesting tactical effects and considerations to go along with that. Poison as it stands is something of a one-trick pony. I don't see how we can make the school more interesting and have high level spells without broadening the scope in some direction at least.

Having said that...

--> Okay, then how about a beam-targeted "corruption" spell. Does corrosion damage over time to target and will spread to an adjacent dude. Adjacent dude can spread it to another dude. Ta-da.

This is very similar to what I was thinking about when I mentioned "viral plague". We don't seem to have a spell that actually spreads from one monster to another so this could be a new mechanic worth exploring. I prefer the concept of Plague for this (this was actually suggested on irc by someone else).

[Bim]

As has been mentioned, we already have most variations on poisoning things but the problem is that there are quite a few things which are completely invulnerable to it - something which doesn't happen in any other spell school.

I propose a high level, single smite targeted 'weakness to poison' spell which causes any monster to lose a level of rpois. This could still not work on undead and could be limited to taking off only one level. This makes it useful to take out difficult poison resistant enemies, whilst being of high enough cost (as well as taking time to cast that and then damage them) to offset the straight boost. It also adds a bit of tactical thinking, as you can't just spam everything with it, and you still need the MP to finish off the job.

I know it isn't the most exciting spell, but it would get over the situation of not being able to damage late game stuff at all with poison. However, to make it more exciting, it could have a 'parasite' like ability (which was recently suggested in a god proposal) in that the parasites causing the poison vulnerability could jump from close by monsters.

[roctavian]

If going along the acid route, what about a level 9 acidic sort of spell that creates a flood of acid that covers the floor, spreads further down corridors like a cloud, etc. but is also hazardous for the player? I'm not sure how it should interact with other liquids in the game, if it should harm items on the floor, or if it should let off acid fumes here and there to affect flying creatures (otherwise it's a bit like a damage-over-time shatter). Thoughts?

[pratamawirya]

Lv 7 Poison: Steroid Charge

Makes the target much stronger (functions like a combination of might, agility, and brilliance potions) but with a drawback (permanent max HP loss a la Borgnjor, or something else).

[njvack]

Didn't Venom Bolt get buffed fairly recently?

It got more damage, but undead have rPois+++ now, so there are very few things left that it is useful against if you are a VM (if something doesn't have rPois, you have meph and sting), and if you're not a VM I don't know what you're doing going anywhere near venom bolt.

I use it as a VM (and yes, only as a VM) because:

* I have it
* stinging yaks to death takes friggin' forever

[Lasty]

Poison seems to limit us to a much narrower category of possible mechanics than other schools. I actually still maintain that the whole concept of the poison school should be expanded to cover acid and possibly other 'toxic' things like viral plagues, and have new high level spells based on these concepts. There have been some reasonable suggestions for acid spells now and then but there aren't enough ideas; and "acid storm" is probably the thing most often suggested for level 9 and again this just isn't different enough to interest anyone.

I'd like to suggest that my poison -> acid spell proposal meets some of the needs you're expressing here. It adds a new mechanic (changing damage types), makes acid viable without adding a bunch of new spells, and gives an incentive to get high Poison skill.

Admittedly, it doesn't add much in terms of totally-not-conjurations effects to Poison. For that, I have a couple proposals:

Acid Blob Form, a high-level Transmutation/Poison spell that would be structured not to only reward unarmed combat. Perhaps something like: monsters that attack you take acid damage, moving off an item on the floor eats that item and heals you, large HP bonus, resistance to poison/acid/earth (shatter, LRD, petrify), powerful throw acid ranged attack? Probably needs decent defense to be viable.

Slime Coating, high-level Transmutation/Poison: Makes all walls in LOS into Slime walls, and you become immune to Slime Wall damage (or resist it?). The level of Slime Wall damage would depend on spellpower.

[khalil]

I think acid would be a good move.
Acid spells would still deal damage over time, (Fluffed out as the acid melting the target or something) but the target would need rCorr instead of rPois, which I think only appears on draconian cloaks in Zot.
Also, one other idea:
Three levels of rPois, with +++ fully resisting but only being on undead. Fighting a monster who has rF++ via fire is possible, if a waste of mana, but as it is now posion kills everything that isn't resistant and is harmless to everything that is. A sliding scale would help aleviate this problem.

[Speleothing]

The way I see it, Poison magic is the best/earliest way to kill beyond LoS or while running away. This is particularly true now that Summons don't attack if you can't see them and the target. Meph Cloud is a great way to get debilitating magic without investing in Hexes, and I think everyone who finds it early enough memorizes it. Unless I'm wrong, P Cloud is the earliest smite-targeted conjuration.

In this vein, how about Toxic Glue (Poison/Conj): Any enemy that it hits, regardless of rpois, gets entangled like a throwing net*. Every turn they're entangled has a chance (based on Poison skill, around 60 at max skill) of causing a level of poison. Maybe a small amount of impact-damage, depending on what level the spell ends up being. I see this as being LOS, or LOS-1 range, to disable dangerous enemies as they appear.

This ends up being an escape spell, or lets you attack with more confidence. It's partially effective against poison-immune enemies, and would pair well (too well?) with stabbing. It duplicates the effect of something already in the game, but builds on it and frees the caster from a weapon skill. I'm just not sure what level it should be, probably 6. It wouldn't stop enemy casting, needs to actually hit high EV/SH enemies, is ineffective against incorporeal monsters, and doesn't cause much damage on its own.


*Could be a good idea to change the escape mechanism slightly.

Edit: Seems like a nastier Ensnare, could be given a chance at AoE (like the current IMB) if it needs buffing or you want to make it high-level. Shorten the range if it needs nerfing.

[siprus]

Book of Acid.

Bolt of Acid poison 3-5 level spell which does acid damage and damages equipment of the target.

Acid floor 6th level Earth Poison spell, which turns Floor into acid damaging stuff walking across, also equipment damage.

*insert name here*'s acid armor: Every time enemy attacks you there is chance that you splash some acid on them + chance they damage their weapons, probably level 6 poison spell

Summon jelly (probably royal jelly or other high level jelly, pretty high level summoning/poison spell
*
insert name here*'s Blast of corrosion Corrodes every equipment on target by 1 and does some acid damage, And does some acid damage.

*insert name here*'s Wall of jelly. Creates wall of jelly which can be destroyed by attacking it, corrodes weapon when you/monsters attack it.

Also naked enemies get more damage from acid since they don't have armor protecting their skin. Maybe Some Uniques need to gain resist corrosion, but not all ofc.


Book of Sickness:

Flesh rot. Poison/necromancy level 3. Through control of necromancy and poision corrupts what ever stuff undeads are made of decreasing their stats. Might be good idea for this to deal poison stat damage.

Rot living level 6 poison necromancy spell: Rots away living destroying their max hp and maybe stats.

Plague of rot level 7 necromancy/poison spell, rot which does rots enemies and does 1 stat damage on each stat, spreads as enemies come into contact with each other.

+ 3 other rot/poison related spells.

[nicolae]

I don't think there's any willingness on the part of the devs to expand Poison Magic into acidic attacks, and jelly summoning is Jiyva's deal. Corrosion, ultimately, isn't a super interesting mechanic.

[khalil]

I don't think there's any willingness on the part of the devs to expand Poison Magic into acidic attacks.

...

I actually still maintain that the whole concept of the poison school should be expanded to cover acid and possibly other 'toxic' things like viral plagues.

[nicolae]

I don't think there's any willingness on the part of the devs to expand Poison Magic into acidic attacks.

...

I actually still maintain that the whole concept of the poison school should be expanded to cover acid and possibly other 'toxic' things like viral plagues.

Then mumra is a minority in that regard -- AFAIK there's still no widespread support among People Whose Opinions Actually Matter to expand Poison into including acid.

[Mumcon]

I went and looked for an older thread on this issue. viewtopic.php?f=8&t=4697 is basically the same type of thread as this one, and was posted 1 year ago. Some good points were made in that thread (overall it's a lot more analytic than this one).

The main reason that poison "could use improvement" in the eyes of some people (like me) is that it's far less useful for spellcasters to train up in extended than many other spells schools. One poster in that thread addressed this by saying that there are already other skills that aren't good in extended or aren't worth training to a high level in extended.

My response to that would be... Take charms. It isn't worth training up high in extended, but it's as good in extended as it is in the late game because the usefulness of spells like Haste and Deflect Missiles is unrelated to the enemy's MR, HD, resistances, etc. In contrast, poison does not remain as good in extended as it was in the late game--it's suddenly nerfed by massive #s of demons.

Also, if there are features other than poison which are good in the late game but not good in extended, then rather than think "this shows that it's okay for poison to not be good in extended" I would prefer to think "this shows that there are multiple features which are not as good in extended and could serve to be made more appealing to players there". A fallacy I see people make frequently is the idea that balance shouldn't be improved where it can be, because something somewhere in some other part of the game is unbalanced too so why does it matter.

Also a nice point was made here:

There isn't really a lot of space for high-level poison spells. Almost anything that could reasonably be called a poison spell has to be resisted by rPois, because poison is poison. And if a monster or group of monsters lacks rPois, well, there's no point in casting a level 8 poison spell because the level 6 poison spells will kill them as fast as you could possibly want to anyway.

This seems to encapsulate the reason why some people may be unsatisfied with any new poison spell. The scope of poison itself is really limited, essentially being a negative effect over time which is transmitted via cloud/beam/smite, and poison already has spells which are like that, so the only way to acceptably differentiate a spell is to alter its accuracy/damage/etc. or provide it with characteristics of other spells schools, but once you do that people just say it's just a more powerful PArrow or it's too much like some other spell and/or it doesn't belong in the poison branch. In other words, my impression is that people are determined to make poison be all about a simple confusion/damage over time/etc. effect which practically the entirety of extended doesn't care about, and refuse to provide it with any other aspects which could allow it to be more competitive in extended.

[dassem]

I think the answer to this topic does depend on whether you think all spell schools should be useful at all points in the game.
IMO poison is a little overpowered early and so the fall off for the post-game makes it nicely balanced.

If one did add something high level to this school, I'd say that it should affect some poison resistant creatures in some way - so acid would be good. Secondly, the mechanic should be interesting. I don't like the idea of just duplicating bolt spells, and corroding equipment is tedious.
For example: I like the splash mechanic. Maybe something like an "Acid Splash" that, if it hits one opponent, will splash onto adjacent foes, maybe with a very large radius at high levels. That way it would be an expensive way to deal with single enemies but quite effective for crowd control.
Or: it could form a puddle that deals lots of damage over time, but which any smart creature would want to step out of, thus clearing an escape route...

[Tiber]

It's hard to come up poison spells that aren't completely negated by rPois but are also thematic and interesting. But an idea did come to me. Besides acid, another "element" occasionally associated with poison is radiation. So I was thinking, what about spells that create a monster version of contamination? There's already the wretched star's effect on monsters; we could give that to players as a high level spell and possibly expand upon it.

[galehar]

A fallacy I see people make frequently is the idea that balance shouldn't be improved where it can be, because something somewhere in some other part of the game is unbalanced too so why does it matter.

This has nothing to do with balance. The fact that poison has varying level of usefulness at different stages of the game doesn't make it unbalanced. I see it as differentiation.

I think the answer to this topic does depend on whether you think all spell schools should be useful at all points in the game.
IMO poison is a little overpowered early and so the fall off for the post-game makes it nicely balanced.

I totally agree with this. Why people insist that the same skill must be usable for the entirety of a 15 rune game? We had the same argument when we discussed summoning nerf. People complained that they wouldn't be able to allrune a pure summoner. So what? Can you allrune a pure melee? If something isn't good enough for allruning, just learn something else. Supporting all "pure playstyle" (as far as they really exist) isn't a design goal. Especially in extended.

If acid spells were added to the poison school, it would need to be renamed (probably alchemy). I don't think it's necessary, and I don't like much the idea. I think the poison school is fine as it is and I don't think acid has a lot of potential for interesting new spells. If the new spells just duplicate existing conjuration spells and only add corrosion, we don't need them.

[crate]

Can you allrune a pure melee?

in case this is actually a question, the answer is definitely yes

[rebthor]

High level 8/9 smite targeted, 1 target spell. Ignores poison resistance entirely. So if you want to kill Cerebov with poison I guess you can.

[Bim]

The main problem is that no other schools become completely useless later against a good proportion of the enemies.

It's fine not being equal, but you can't really play a 'venom mage' in the way you can pretty much play every other class without having to branch out as much. I know some devs don't see this as a problem (the old 'we never designed it to be like that') but a lot of people seem to want to be able to play more heavily in the class.

[crate]

It's fine not being equal, but you can't really play a 'venom mage' in the way you can pretty much play every other class without having to branch out as much.

have you played necromancer?

[khalil]

It's fine not being equal, but you can't really play a 'venom mage' in the way you can pretty much play every other class without having to branch out as much.

have you played necromancer?

I think I asked this question in a thread a while ago.
The general agreement was that I was wrong, as with proper use of vampiric draining and twisted resurection, it was possible to have a pure necromancer take the orb and get out alive.

[mumra]

I think the issue has been muddied by bringing the extended game into it; of course not everything has to be viable there.

The issue as I see it with Poison is that it doesn't offer anything new in the mid-late game; it's not so much about usefulness, it's that there seems to be kind of a gap in the content, and there's almost no point training it beyond a certain level (I guess an exception would be heavy armour casters?) All other skills have a reason to train to the top levels, even if the returns are vastly diminishing. Note that even Traps was changed recently to not have a cutoff like this. It doesn't matter if poison doesn't work on everything in Zot, you would still want to use your high-level poison on the things that were susceptible, and pick up some other tools to deal with everything else ...

[nicolae]

I think the issue has been muddied by bringing the extended game into it; of course not everything has to be viable there.

The issue as I see it with Poison is that it doesn't offer anything new in the mid-late game; it's not so much about usefulness, it's that there seems to be kind of a gap in the content, and there's almost no point training it beyond a certain level (I guess an exception would be heavy armour casters?) All other skills have a reason to train to the top levels, even if the returns are vastly diminishing. Note that even Traps was changed recently to not have a cutoff like this. It doesn't matter if poison doesn't work on everything in Zot, you would still want to use your high-level poison on the things that were susceptible, and pick up some other tools to deal with everything else ...

To what extent does skill level/spell power affect the strength of the poison damage?

[mumra]

To what extent does skill level/spell power affect the strength of the poison damage?

Skill level has no effect beyond reaching max spell power.