let's talk about the venom nerf

[ovalle.4163]

the devs have said that venoms are too strong when in group play and very underwhelming while solo. i'm all for reducing that gap but their attempt to give back damage in other areas might have missed the mark somewhat.

while the buff to bleeding duration in death blossom looks very nice and might make up the difference, scepter getting only 1 extra second of torment in only the first attack of the autoattack chain doesn't seem like enough to barely break even, especially since autoattacking in scepter is something you do only very rarely, only when you have 0 initiative and cannot go into shroud, and people usually just dip in and out of shroud without camping there to make the 1s buff to the shroud autoattack relevant. and lets not forget that pistol mainhand and shortbow don't even get anything back at all.

and finally getting an extra 60 condition damage in deadly ambition might not be the right direction since not only is it a drop in the bucket, but that condition damage would help both while in a group and while solo, hell while in a group that 60 attr points are worth even more so it won't diminish the gap.

ideally to solve the problem at the root we would want to rework venoms themselves so they give more to the thief than to the allies, something like doubling the stacks or the duration of the conditions on the venom for the thief but making it so their allies only get a single venom stack, but since that would require to mess with the code too much i imagine, that might just be a pipe dream.

other suggestions i've seen that might be nice would be to make it possible for the thief to have a way to give rot wallow venom to themselves and not only to allies. that would definitely improve the situation while solo without making much of an impact in group play.

what are everyone's thoughts and ideas on the subject?

[itspomf.9523]

Did you just copy-paste this from reddit?

[Doggie.3184]

I don't really care at this point just because of how boring venoms have gotten and they're certainly not very useful solo. They're also still not built for a full venom build either due to lack of utility like stunbreaks, no fields, etc~ at this point I rather not even see them used outside of base Thief till they can be made more interesting. They're like really bland shouts with less features. I always hated the reduced radius they got too a long time ago~ we're tortured so much by lack of good AoE. 

[Vinny.7260]

Careful. They'll turn Venoms into boons.

[nopoet.2960]

2 hours ago, Vinny.7260 said:

Careful. They'll turn Venoms into boons.

It does kind of make you wonder where they draw the line between crushing unique class abilities and letting them be but I guess no one builds squads around the thief's ability to provide venom. 

[KrakenAZ.9367]

Disclaimer:  I'm a returning player who almost exclusively solos.  I have no frame of reference on how poisons work in group content.  I'm a casual scrub who plays for fun before optimality.

 

My chosen build is dagger/dagger focusing on poison.  Spider venom is a large portion of my damage, particularly on hard targets.  Losing 25% of my base duration feels like it will be a huge nerf, one not made up by the extra condition damage on deadly ambition.  This works against the stated goal of making conditions more prevalent in solo play.

[SlayerXX.7138]

11 hours ago, KrakenAZ.9367 said:

My chosen build is dagger/dagger focusing on poison.  Spider venom is a large portion of my damage, particularly on hard targets.

The DPS of your main skill got increased by 50%, you should be fine. The 3 stacks of 15(30) sec bleed on death Blossom will make up for it. They should have halved the shared stack instead of reducing the power in general. The nerf would have been contained in group content, instead of once again spilling over into OW. Your build should actually be doing better. Pistol/dagger and Scepter are the victims of the venom nerfs.

[itspomf.9523]

18 hours ago, KrakenAZ.9367 said:

Disclaimer:  I'm a returning player who almost exclusively solos.  I have no frame of reference on how poisons work in group content.  I'm a casual scrub who plays for fun before optimality.

 

My chosen build is dagger/dagger focusing on poison.  Spider venom is a large portion of my damage, particularly on hard targets.  Losing 25% of my base duration feels like it will be a huge nerf, one not made up by the extra condition damage on deadly ambition.  This works against the stated goal of making conditions more prevalent in solo play.

While I do agree, I think what we're seeing is a shift toward focusing on raw attributes than strictly linear adjustments -- hence the changes to coefficients in power builds, where it potentially allows underperforming weapons (due to low base damage) to be improved more substantially thanks to conversion rates.

So while on paper something might only see a 15% adjustment in contribution, higher attribute values will see a larger effective increase.  It's still "only" 15%, but that contribution becomes more meaningful (i.e.:  increasing a coefficient from 1.0 to 1.15 grants only +150 with 1000 Power, while that same coefficient grants +405 with 2700 Power).