Poison causes status ailments

[Derakon]

Boosting white worm damage from an average of 2.5 to an average of 9 is pretty dang significant considering they're one of the first enemies you encounter in the game. Do we really want newbies to be losing to worm masses?

Making damage scale with the counter is trivial. Currently the game says "If the counter is greater than zero, deal 1 damage to the player". You can just change that to be "Deal counter / 50 damage to the player" et voila, scaling damage.

What I meant by 1% odds not happening is not that they never happen, but that they happen so rarely that we can't make rational risk assessments for them.

[Hariolor]

Boosting white worm damage from an average of 2.5 to an average of 9 is pretty dang significant considering they're one of the first enemies you encounter in the game. Do we really want newbies to be losing to worm masses?

Yes? ...but point taken.

Making damage scale with the counter is trivial. Currently the game says "If the counter is greater than zero, deal 1 damage to the player". You can just change that to be "Deal counter / 50 damage to the player" et voila, scaling damage.

Not that I agree with counter/50, but I see what you mean. I had taken your previous example as indicating tiers of damage based on the initial amount dealt - such that drolem poison always deals more dam/turn than worm poison. If this is what you meant then yes, that would seem to work nicely.

What I meant by 1% odds not happening is not that they never happen, but that they happen so rarely that we can't make rational risk assessments for them.

I am not certain about this - we perhaps cannot make rational assessments based on running simulations. However I think playtesting would reveal what "feels" like a good occurence rate. It may well be much higher than what I suggest - but this whole thread implies some pretty radical changes that sort of all have to happen at once (damage, status effects, adjust effects of cures/resists, etc), so I just threw some numbers out there to reflect the relative scales of danger and apparent frequency I was going for.

[macaddict0]

I'm new to these boards, but I've been playing for a long time. I've always thought that it was strange to give poison a massive initial blast of damage, and a nearly ignorable secondary effect, at least it's insignificant after the first few levels.

From an ideal stand point, I think shards should take up poison's role as as the first mid-game, "instadeath" attack. The resists for shards start showing up on gear at around the same time, and it just seems more natural that having your body sliced up by a bunch of sharp flying projectiles would cause both instant damage and long term damage. Poison on the other hand makes more sense as a slow, insidious form of death.

I like the ideas of having poison damage over time scale up with the counter, and I like having random status effects pop-up with poison. If I were designing it, I'd leave the resistible status effects resistible though. You'd still have things like slowing and stat drops to contend with, and would give you all the more incentive to have blind resist and free action. An extra tick of damage per status effect trigger would make sense as well, even if the effect itself is resisted: i.e. "The poison makes your eyes burn! You resist the effects." would still cause X additional damage where X is the fraction of the poison counter you use for the per turn damage (but these bits of extra damage don't cause any extra decrementing of the poison counter.) Then just scale back the poison cap. This would have very little effect on new players other than having a low chance of becoming blind or confused for a single turn here or there. At higher levels though, it would make poison not some massive hammer of damage, but something that has the potential to be equally deadly if you aren't prepared. High per turn damage, hallucination, slowing, etc., would make a mess of things if you're not carrying some method of curing.

Of course, I understand that moving shards into it's place might be too much of a mess, but the changes to poison themselves don't seem like they'd be too terribly difficult. Admittedly the changes aren't necessary for good game play, but it would sure make things make more sense.