Do you want a balance patch?

[Munderbunny]

Originally Posted by nemhauser

i suppose a frustration that the female is the stronger one in this relationship might be an issue, but in the beginning she did die a lot like you said - be glad that the roles are now not fully reversed as you are alive.

maybe she is protecting you better than you tried to protect her earlier :-)

Yeah, at first, I was like, "Awesome, now she can hold her own." And when she first started pwning, I was happy, because we were kicking so much ***. IT'S WHEN THE GAME GOT BORING THAT'S THE PROBLEM! This isn't a gender role problem--I'm not upset that a woman has a better character than me, I mean, I knew a poison archer was going to be weaker in many regards--I just wanted an opportunity to KILL something, and now there's nothing to kill! That's the problem--not that my playing partner has a vagina.

jokes aside - you should wipe the floor with your brigand so something might be off with your character - post titancal of your skills and screens of your char so we could debate

You're welcome to debate all you want. http://www.titancalc.com/TitanCalc.a...-0-6-0-1-1-1-0

That's pretty much the character, give or take.

I'm not saying my character couldn't be powerful enough with those two masteries, I'm saying that stupid ice shard is TOO powerful. But, if we're going to get into the problem of poison.... With my character, with the ability to slow and trap enemies, with flash powder, and with the trickle poison damage (even before modding it), I could easily get through the first two acts on epic difficulty with no problem with my brigand (haven't gotten to 3rd act with it yet) but it would take me about twice as long as playing any other class. In fact, even if the difficulty was adjusted for two players, and I played by myself, I would still never die, but man, would I be running in circles a lot. I know I was warned that playing a rogue isn't suited for playing with others, but the only reason I can see that that is, is that it's underpowered and requires a ridiculous amount of hit and running. I want to hit and run, don't get me wrong--I want to be a sneaky, can't-touch-this killer. I don't mind that while my dream basher can run into the middle of 20 enemies, cast distort reality and giggle while everything dies, my brigand has to run into the middle of 20 enemies, cast flash powder, cast study prey, drop a poison bomb, lethal strike the largest with my spear, spear-lunge the largest with my spear, and then run away and shoot them with my bow and arrow from a distance. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind the Mortal-Combat-like combo sequences I have to do to kill enemies, I just don't like that I need 2-3 rounds of that to kill enemies without anything to reduce enemy poison resistance. If I put the number of points I've put in poison, into any other offensive skill from pretty much any other mastery, I would be doing mad damage. Even if I took all those points, and put them into archery, my bow would be pwning.

I mean, come ON, with every other game in the world, the only advantage to choosing DoT over instant damage is HIGHER DAMAGE! That's the point!!!! You have to pick, "You can do 100 damage instantly, oooooor you could do 300 damage, but it's over 10 seconds, survive if you can, bwahaha blah blah blah." Hell, look at the damage on distort reality. If you put 12 into distort and 12 into rift, you have a base damage of 389 with 796 electrical burn over 4 seconds. Forgue the base damage, actually, let's just look at the electrical damage. In fact, let's omit the fact that temporal rift also does energy leech damage (because it's a variable amount), and petrifies enemies for up to 7 seconds. If you put 8 points into lucid dream, your electrical damage jumps to 1154 damage over 4 seconds. That's 32 skill points invested, 8 of which (lucid dream) benefit all other dream skills that do electrical burn, which is pretty much all of them. If I drop 32 points into envenom weapon/nightshade/toxin distillation, I do 978 poison damage over 10 seconds. See the diff? Rift does 289 a second, and poison does 98. Does that make sense? Distort reality can do 1154 electrical burn over 4 seconds to every enemy in an 8 meter radius, and you can do it every 12 seconds, and compare that to the 32 points I put into envenom weapon so I can do 978 over 10 seconds to one enemy at a time. I'm sorry, that's just dumb--less damage and it takes more than twice as long. I'm ok with the added time of poison damage, but it should do more ******* damage. I'd much rather see the mastery fixed instead of this stupid disclaimer the designers put on the game, "Playing a rogue is not suited to playing with other people because they'll get impatient waiting for you to kill **** and none of them will appreciate your trivial blade honing contribution."

i'm not using my bow avenger while playing with melee friends because they would be bored

Yeah, probably--you'd be owning everything with your firey-bow. That's not my point. My point is that there's all this room to invest in poison, but it does not pay out like nearly every other offensive damage type, nor does it benefit from collaboration like other damage types. There are far more skills that lower elemental or physical damage resistance, and none that reduce poison. The only 2 skills that reduce poison resistance are squall and trance of wrath, both of which do so only as a consequence of reducing all resistances.

In my opinion, poison is not well implemented--it's just not expansive. Nature and Hunting both have ways of lowering elemental resistance, yet both only have 1 skill that indirectly does a minor amount of elemental damage. Rogue mastery has 6 poison-related skills, and lacks a single way of lowering poison resist. And, let's be honest, the biggest problem with poison isn't the fact that it does too little damage--it's that there isn't a single rogue skill that lowers enemy poison resistance. [Lowering enemy resistance by a percentage pays out much better than raising your damage by that same percentage, which is why poison fares so poorly in legendary. (I apologize if you didn't need this explained) but if an enemy has 80% resist of a damage type and you do 100 damage of that type per hit, the enemy only takes 20 damage per hit. If you add 50% damage to that damage type you now do 150 damage per hit, which means the enemy takes only 30 damage per hit after its 80% resist. But, if you lower the enemy's resist by 50% instead of raising your damage, then you still only do 100 damage a hit, but the enemy now only resists 30% of it, meaning the enemy takes 70 damage a hit.]

This means if you wanted to play poison past normal, you'd need a number of specific game items, many of which are hard to get, or you'd have to pair your rogue mastery with either dream or storm, which sort of defeats the point of playing a poison rogue to begin with. And, because the game calculates the effect of poison resist when the poison is applied, and not every second, that means you can't poison something and then lower it's resistance--it won't take any more damage from the poison. You have to lower its resistance first, and then apply the poison damage. Could you imagine having to cast ******* squall in order to throw a poison bomb? Or, having to run up to an enemy to get them in range of your trance of wrath, and then run away from them to hit them with a poison arrow? LOL, WOULDN'T THAT BE AWESOMESAUCE?!?

[BeaverusIV]

http://www.titancalc.com/TitanCalc.a...1-0-0-12-1-0-0

Max Marksmanship first, you could pwn the whole game with only that skill, I swear (And Study Prey for bosses).

The thing is that most people do when they see it (as I did) they think 'cool poison archer; hit once then watch it die ' but you should be thinking 'Hunting mastery can beat game by itself, but what useful effects does Rogue have?'

Poison doesn't do ANYTHING in this game, mainly because as you said everything dies well before it can kick in, but the slowing/confusion is good and Lethal Strike can be good (I've never had need, Marksmanship is so powerful already).

The good thing about TQ is that you can chop and change your skills, so try it out and see what its like, you can always try something different.

Edit: There is a lovely thread on the forums by the name of 'poison builds for legendary' or something, it has possiblities on using poison as a main damager.... but I love it the way it is, poison is for skill and cunning etc, etc. Something nice for veterans to try out, the people who already have 2 of everything needed

[Galefury]

About that build: Blade Honing doesn't work with a Bow equipped IIRC.

[Munderbunny]

Originally Posted by BeaverusIV

http://www.titancalc.com/TitanCalc.a...1-0-0-12-1-0-0

Max Marksmanship first, you could pwn the whole game with only that skill, I swear (And Study Prey for bosses).

That looks like a great build, but I sort of wanted to use poison, with archery as a vehicle for the poison.

The thing is that most people do when they see it (as I did) they think 'cool poison archer; hit once then watch it die ' but you should be thinking 'Hunting mastery can beat game by itself, but what useful effects does Rogue have?'

Yeah, being able to put 64 skill points in poison skills sure is misleading as to it's efficacy.

Poison doesn't do ANYTHING in this game, mainly because as you said everything dies well before it can kick in, but the slowing/confusion is good and Lethal Strike can be good (I've never had need, Marksmanship is so powerful already).

Yeah, but why bother with archery when you could just use ultra-fast ice shards? The problem I had was that poison is terribly weak. It's actually decent on normal, but in epic it's depressingly weak. With it maxxed out, and with relics and items that give me a total of -24% to enemy resist, I still don't see any significant improvement, and I still do zero (no, seriously--ZERO) poison damage to undead of any kind.

Edit: There is a lovely thread on the forums by the name of 'poison builds for legendary' or something, it has possiblities on using poison as a main damager.... but I love it the way it is, poison is for skill and cunning etc, etc. Something nice for veterans to try out, the people who already have 2 of everything needed

Yeah, I saw that--you need a combination of extremely rare gear to eek out enough damage to make it playableish.

[Narcolepcy]

I have an easy suggestion to make posion more powerful, possibly even overpowered. First make envenom weapon an aura, that affects your allies weapons and your summons, second make the plague subskill susceptibility lower poison resistance like it says it does. Everyone affected by your aura should be considered a unique source, so this is a considerable damage increase, and this also fixes briar ward. It might be necessary to make mandrake self only as i'd imagine it to be the overpowered part, and all this balancing doesnt even touch any of the damage numbers, because you shouldnt need to.

[Munderbunny]

Originally Posted by Galefury

About that build: Blade Honing doesn't work with a Bow equipped IIRC.

Yeah, it's annoying as hell. I switch from my spear to my bow, and the skill disappears. It wouldn't bother me, but when I reequip my spear, the skill icon doesn't reappear, but the energy is still reserved. It doesn't do enough extra damage for me to tell if it's still working when I switch back to spear, but I'm not exactly committed to the skill yet anyway.

[Galefury]

If you want to be effective just screw poison and use the build BeaverusIV posted, minus Blade Honing. Seriously. Poison is currently very underpowered, and it will be a while until a balance patch is even going to be worked on. Solution: just shoot stuff like any good archer. With a nice bow an archer can actually match or even outdo Ice Shards damage easily.

[Narcolepcy]

Considering that one day poison might be patched, anyone care to share their opinion of my suggestion?

[BeaverusIV]

Don't like the aura idea, but I wouldn't mind the Nymph having poison...

As I said, like poison the way it is kinda, it means that there are avenues of damage that won't be powerful, but iirc Bleeding is a different story and needs a good dealing to, it could have been good if it was kinda like Open Wounds in Diablo II where nothing resisted it and there was no way of you resisting, making it good for pvp.

[nemhauser]

like some already said - max marksmanship tree and volley and you'll see a big difference (probably you might even not be too concerned about ice shards)