@Gotural Very well argued points, and I think this is the way to go. It leaves the BG2 portion of the ability largely alone, while making it less OP for lower level characters.
In BG2 and ToB mages are already the rulers of the battlefield. Don't inflate their already humongous power deposit by nerfing other classes. With Mislead, Timestop, Stoneskin, etc. being in the game in their current form, Poison Weapon doesn't even really register on the "stuff you should exploit when dual-classing" chart.
It's not an illusion. The poison does stack. If you get hit twice with it, you take two points of damage per second instead of one. (or more accurately, you take one point of damage per second, twice.)
I think his point is that, in terms of raw damage output, 1 point of damage for 6 seconds that stack on multiple hits is no different than 6 points of damage per hit. Or from the other point of view, saying that poison damage can't stack is essentially the same as saying that (e.g.) the flail of ages can only do its 5 elemental damage once per round no matter how many hits you land.
Of course, in the current incarnation of poison that's ignoring the significant advantage of the damage over time causing disruption. But if that is going away in this new version, his argument does make sense to me. Non-save poison could apply to every hit but the save could only happen once per round, which would make it act more like typical weapon elemental damage. Although such a change would again help the blackguard and his high apr without doing much of anything for the assassin.
@Dee while tweaking Poison Weapon to not be able to stack, please, don't forget about other tools to inflict Poison.
For example, Poison and Dolorous Decay spells of a druid.
If target of Poison fails save vs poison, it will recieve damage which depends on caster level: 7-9 - 2d8+2 damage per round 10-12 - 3d8+3 damage per round 13-14 - 4d8+4 damage per round 15-16 - 5d8+5 damage per round 17+ - 8d8+6 damage per round
If target of Dolorous Decay fails save vs. poison with -2 penalty it will receive 1 damage point every second until it receives 50 points of damage.
Now think about a situation when your druid casts these spells every round and an enemy fails his saving throws.
If you make so that poison doesn't stack, these spells will go to waste, and it will be completely wrong, because each spell should inflict poison.
Also, take bolts and arrows of Biting. If you make so that poison doesn't stack, using these bolts and arrows will be nerfed in times.
Okay, so let's look at it in terms of total damage and ignore the over-time aspect of it. Partly because damage over time is always going to be powerful and it's part and parcel to the way poison works. The concern here is with the damage itself.
So in the original version of the ability, it was +6 damage per hit (which is powerful), plus an additional +24 damage per hit on a failed save. This buff lasts for five rounds.
If that damage occurs on every hit, that means from this one ability you get to add between 6 and 30 points of damage to every attack you make for the next five rounds.
The current version of the ability (and these numbers are going to change) does, based on your level: 1st-level: +1 damage, plus an additional +6 damage on a failed save 8th-level: +2 damage, plus an additional +12 damage on a failed save 16th-level: +4 damage, plus an additional +24 damage on a failed save All of which happens no more than once per round. Again, the buff lasts for five rounds.
Now, the numbers need to be tweaked, and they're going to. The next update to the beta will have some new math to play with: at top-tier, for instance, the total damage will be the same between 1.3 and 2.0. It'll also happen a few levels earlier. The scaling progression, I think, isn't so much what people are concerned about here, since it primarily affects BG1.
The part people are concerned about, then, is the "once per round" clause that we're talking about adding for this one poison. There's two reasons for this clause:
First--the Poison Weapon ability is one ability that lasts for five rounds. That means that the damage it deals isn't only being applied once, as a single dose (which is what it would be if we were playing D&D around a table instead of in BG); it's being applied to every attack you make.
Second--The Poison Weapon ability deals a lot of damage, even for an x/day ability. Compare it with Lightning Bolt (Priest of Talos), which deals a maximum of 10d6 (save for half) damage to targets in a line. That's 10-60 damage, no more than once per target. Poison Weapon deals 6-30 damage every time it goes off. If you benefit from it once per round, that's a total damage potential of 30-150 over the course of five rounds.
If you benefit from it once per hit, that damage potential doubles (throwing daggers), triples (darts), or sextuples (darts and improved haste if you have a mage friend nearby). That's not accounting for dual-classing into fighter and using Whirlwind, or playing a Blackguard and specializing in your weapon. That's the Assassin, as written, using the tools available to the class.
The "once per round" clause is only there to get rid of that previous paragraph. In all other ways, Poison Weapon remains one of the most powerful damaging abilities possessed by any class.
@Dee while tweaking Poison Weapon to not be able to stack, please, don't forget about other tools to inflict Poison.
For example, Poison and Dolorous Decay spells of a druid.
If target of Poison fails save vs poison, it will recieve damage which depends on caster level: 7-9 - 2d8+2 damage per round 10-12 - 3d8+3 damage per round 13-14 - 4d8+4 damage per round 15-16 - 5d8+5 damage per round 17+ - 8d8+6 damage per round
If target of Dolorous Decay fails save vs. poison with -2 penalty it will receive 1 damage point every second until it receives 50 points of damage.
Now think about a situation when your druid casts these spells every round and an enemy fails his saving throws.
If you make so that poison doesn't stack, these spells will go to waste, and it will be completely wrong, because each spell should inflict poison.
Also, take bolts and arrows of Biting. If you make so that poison doesn't stack, using these bolts and arrows will be nerfed in times.
@bengoshi we're not talking about making poison not stack with itself in general. If you use Poison Weapon and your druid friend uses Dolorous Decay, those poisons will stack. If you use Dolorous Decay twice, it'll stack. If you use Poison Weapon and attack the same target two rounds in a row, the poisons will stack.
@Dee So Assassin/Blackguard scripts will need to check their target for a custom Poison Weapons Immunity and spread around their attacks to poison as many targets as they can each round.
It's not an illusion. The poison does stack. If you get hit twice with it, you take two points of damage per second instead of one. (or more accurately, you take one point of damage per second, twice.)
There's also some fuzzy logic being employed here. If you apply all of Poison Weapon's damage instantly instead of over time, you still have an ability that adds +30 damage to your attack. In the current (1.3) implementation of the ability, that damage is applied every attack. That makes this ability several times more powerful than the bonus cold damage you get from wielding Varscona.
Everything else in your post is subjective so I'll leave it alone, but it's important to understand the mechanics fully when discussing them.
Poison Weapon deals 2 damage per second not 1, so two applications of the poison in a short time are going to deal 2 damage twice per second during the time the first application is still active.
If you poison an enemy, then 3 seconds later you poison it again (which means you have 2 APR) you will deal:
Because the first application will end before the second one does. Every applications of Poison Weapon is tracked independently which means that it stacks the same way that everything else in the game 'stacks'. If you hit someone multiple times in a row you benefit from the effect multiple times.
If I cast Web three times in a row, enemies are going to need to save against it three times per round, not once. If then I cast Cloudkill three times, all these enemies are going to suffer from the spell three times as well, not once per round. If then my level 9 Kensai attacks the webbed target he is going to benefit from his Kensai bonuses and his Grandmastery bonus and his Varscona in main hand for every attacks he will make, not only the first one in the round.
Overall, Cloudkill is nothing more than a 10d10 no save AoE damage, over 10 rounds. Poison Weapon is nothing more than a 12 elemental damage per hit, over 1 round.
If you reduce Poison Weapon to a 'once per round application' you could as well by the exact same logic reduce the Kensai damage bonuses to the first attack he makes every round.
A level 21 Kensai with Grandmastery using the WW HLA will benefit from his kit 10 times, dealing 7 bonus damage per hit (12 including the Grandmastery) for a total of 70 damage.
If a F/C wielding the FoA +5 uses GWW, he will benefit from the elemental damage 10 times as well, dealing 100 elemental damage in a round.
If a Blackguard uses Poison Weapon then GWW, he will deal 120 elemental damage over two rounds (the round during the attacks are made, then the round following until the last second of the second round for the final application of Poison Weapon at the end of the first round). It's definitely working as expected and I could give tons and tons of other examples while you could give me none, because everything in this game works the way I described.
Also, saying that Poison Weapon adds 30 damage to every attacks is, I think, quite an error. First, it deals a total of 36 damage on a failed save, not 30. But more importantly, enemies will make their saves. They will. Every important foes is going to be either immune to Poison Weapon (like nearly everything in ToB) or have a saving throw of 1 vs death.
Really I play a lot of Blackguards and I see this ability as an "adds 12 elemental damage per hit for 5 rounds". Nothing more. The failed save part only triggers against weak enemies that you are likely to kill without using Poison Weapon in the first place.
To conclude, Poison Weapon "stacks" the same way everything else in the game does, including weapon proficiency and even the Fireball spell.
If you benefit from it once per hit, that damage potential doubles (throwing daggers), triples (darts), or sextuples (darts and improved haste if you have a mage friend nearby). That's not accounting for dual-classing into fighter and using Whirlwind, or playing a Blackguard and specializing in your weapon. That's the Assassin, as written, using the tools available to the class.
The "once per round" clause is only there to get rid of that previous paragraph. In all other ways, Poison Weapon remains one of the most powerful damaging abilities possessed by any class.
There were 3 cases in BG2:
We can take a single class Assassin into consideration: high thac0, low ApR, very low thief skills progression. Definitely not game breaking by any means.
If we take a low level Assassin->Fighter as example (althoug I never heard of anyone saying "I dual-classed soon just to get a couple of PW uses"), we'll have a char that DOESN'T benefit from Assassin increased backstab multiplier and with VERY few thief skill points. All he has is this couple of PWs to fight hard foes.
If we take a high (enough to enjoy the x7 backstab multiplier) level Assassin->Fighter then it means the player spent a LOT of time playing it just as a plain fighter to catch up with the 1st class level. At that point he will be at middle/end of ToB and I believe it would be fair to let him play the character he worked hard for.
But now we have a 4th and 5th case with EE. - a high ApR, low thac0, end-of-SoA-whirlwinding Blackguard.
- the fact that in BG1 you don't need a really low thac0 or high ApR to kill enemies, since they have a lot less hp in comparison.
If you tell me you wanted to nerf Poison Weapon because it was broken, my answer is: you created the condition for it to be broken, but the solution is not to nerf what the Assasin was designed to do in BG2.
EDIT: Ah, the Priest of Talos is not meant to have as unique purpose of his life murdering other people, especially with his Lightning Bolt (althoug it would be funny to roleplay). Which happens to be exactly what an Assassin is trained for.
Just a note: the way that poisons stack in the Enhanced Edition is different (more reliable and consistent) than it was in vanilla. The original behavior was much less reliable; as a result, I would be very careful about assuming that certain poison effects were designed with stacking in mind. In all likelihood, they weren't.
Just a note: the way that poisons stack in the Enhanced Edition is different (more reliable and consistent) than it was in vanilla. The original behavior was much less reliable; as a result, I would be very careful about assuming that certain poison effects were designed with stacking in mind. In all likelihood, they weren't.
The 1.3 update fixed an issue where regeneration and poison effects didn't apply correctly, due to timing or other issues. Sometimes you might get two poisons affecting the same creature and they'd take damage from both, sometimes they'd only take damage from one.
As of 1.3, all poison (and regeneration) effects now apply separately. Which means, among other things, that you can have an assassin using Poison Weapon with darts to triple-stack poison effects every round and deal as much as 450 damage in a single use of the ability.
The original behavior (which could be seen as early as vanilla BG2) wasn't designed that way, but that's how it worked. It was a bug, and we fixed it. But that fix means that Poison Weapon--and every other poison in the game, really--now behaves slightly (but significantly) differently from how it worked in the original game.
So if you're opposed to this change because vanilla let you stack poisons all day long, your opposition is based on a somewhat flawed premise. It's entirely possible, and even probable, that if poisons had worked the way they do in 1.3 back in 1998, Bioware might have changed the numbers on this particular ability in much the same way we're doing now.
Of course I'm not giving proof. All I have are inferences. But there's assumptions being made about what the vanilla behavior was, and those assumptions are being used to support what people think was the original intent of the ability.
I'm just trying to offer some additional clarity here: If you think Poison Weapon was designed in an environment where poison effects stacked like they do now, you're incorrect.
In 1999, poison didn't stack reliably. That behavior is new in 1.3. Which means that during playtesting, BioWare didn't have a version of the ability that had the damage potential that the ability has now. If they had, they might have made different decisions about its implementation.
I guess I see your point, but this redesign is so contentious because Poison Weapon's mechanics are being radically changed.
If you have to nerf it, let each hit refresh the original duration instead of making it stack the damage or duration. I'm sure it can be done by using opcode 321 (remove effects by resource) and then re-applying the poison.
In 1999, poison didn't stack reliably. That behavior is new in 1.3. Which means that during playtesting, BioWare didn't have a version of the ability that had the damage potential that the ability has now.
I've done some vanilla BG2 Poison Weapon testing of my own, and these show poison stacks reliably in normal circumstances. Haste doubles the amount of DOT received, and this includes the Poison Weapon damage (I'm not sure if that's still the case in the EEs). If anything, to me it seems vanilla PW has a higher damage potential than the v1.3 PW.
For another wrench in the works, the vanilla description of Poison Weapon doesn't mention a duration at all. It says "The next hit". If anything, that suggests to me that this ability is only supposed to affect one attack, not every attack for five rounds. That seems pretty definitive on intent to me.
How about we just keep the Poison weapon as it is with one Application on every hit, keep it sticked to the Assassin so people can chose if they want a high assassin with Huge Backstab and Poison or a low assassin/fighter with extra APR and some poison uses (which was all possible before)
And make a New "poison weapon" for the Blackguard , Calling it "Patreons Gift" and just make it 1-5 (insert elemental damage here) for 5 Rounds on hit what has no damage over time component and save for Half dmg.
@subtledoctor@dee I think you nailed it, at least from my perspective. 5 applications of poison, rather than 5 rounds, seems exactly what I was looking for - use them up at whatever rate you care about. Done 'right', this would even appear to be a nice bonus, if the 5 applications are not also limited to 5 rounds (simplifying the implementation, less to track), but clearly balanced by vanishing after a rest/wilderness transition.
I get my multiple chances to poison a mage with my darts, just as I want, without impacting a more traditional assassin getting just one attach a round, and the Blackguard gets to similarly choose a pace of attach they prefer.
Then cue the damage scaling that Dee is already on top of, and I that looks like a really neat package to me.
It even makes the ability sound more reasonable, that the assassin can apply a dose of poison to their weapon(s), and the dosage they get from an ability, to transfer to victims, is the same - regardless of how rapidly they can strike the victim(s).
I know changing the mechanism like this would probably be more programming effort than could land in 2.0, but I would love to see the ability evolve into this for 2.1 - and I could buy into whatever tweak you make for 2.0 if we hear this is the destination
With something like that you could also scale up the number of active doses. I don't know how easy that is to implement, though, without some crazy workarounds. It's an interesting idea, though.
PnP rules would suggest no more than one dose, with an active time of one minute before the poison loses its effectiveness. So no matter what we do, we're using a massively beefed up version of the ability.
The next update alters the initial and over time damage, as well as the poison duration and the scaling progression. I'm interested to hear what people think of the differences.
Next X attacks sits better with me than the 1 per round restriction.
It makes better sense RP-wise (poisons should stack), continuity-wise (other poisons already stack), and also flavor-wise: an assassin should go in, deliver the damage, and get out, rather than attack someone continuously for an extended period of time.
I think @Flashburn might be on to something with opcode 321. Something like add an additional on-hit effect to PW that removes the PW spell effect from self, and replace it with a different identical spell effect. Keep replacing the spell effect with additional copies until there are no hits left.
One smallish issue I see with this is that the hits would only get subtracted from on a successful hit, which makes sense in melee, but doesn't make much sense with projectile weapons.
Another issue is that this would refresh the duration with every attack, which is not ideal.
Okay, so let's look at it in terms of total damage and ignore the over-time aspect of it. Partly because damage over time is always going to be powerful and it's part and parcel to the way poison works. The concern here is with the damage itself.
So in the original version of the ability, it was +6 damage per hit (which is powerful), plus an additional +24 damage per hit on a failed save. This buff lasts for five rounds.
If that damage occurs on every hit, that means from this one ability you get to add between 6 and 30 points of damage to every attack you make for the next five rounds.
The current version of the ability (and these numbers are going to change) does, based on your level: 1st-level: +1 damage, plus an additional +6 damage on a failed save 8th-level: +2 damage, plus an additional +12 damage on a failed save 16th-level: +4 damage, plus an additional +24 damage on a failed save All of which happens no more than once per round. Again, the buff lasts for five rounds.
Now, the numbers need to be tweaked, and they're going to. The next update to the beta will have some new math to play with: at top-tier, for instance, the total damage will be the same between 1.3 and 2.0. It'll also happen a few levels earlier. The scaling progression, I think, isn't so much what people are concerned about here, since it primarily affects BG1.
The part people are concerned about, then, is the "once per round" clause that we're talking about adding for this one poison. There's two reasons for this clause:
First--the Poison Weapon ability is one ability that lasts for five rounds. That means that the damage it deals isn't only being applied once, as a single dose (which is what it would be if we were playing D&D around a table instead of in BG); it's being applied to every attack you make.
Second--The Poison Weapon ability deals a lot of damage, even for an x/day ability. Compare it with Lightning Bolt (Priest of Talos), which deals a maximum of 10d6 (save for half) damage to targets in a line. That's 10-60 damage, no more than once per target. Poison Weapon deals 6-30 damage every time it goes off. If you benefit from it once per round, that's a total damage potential of 30-150 over the course of five rounds.
If you benefit from it once per hit, that damage potential doubles (throwing daggers), triples (darts), or sextuples (darts and improved haste if you have a mage friend nearby). That's not accounting for dual-classing into fighter and using Whirlwind, or playing a Blackguard and specializing in your weapon. That's the Assassin, as written, using the tools available to the class.
The "once per round" clause is only there to get rid of that previous paragraph. In all other ways, Poison Weapon remains one of the most powerful damaging abilities possessed by any class.
Given what you have posted, I still don't see why you think the Assassin and Blackguard should use the same Poison Weapon ability.
Everything you said is true about how damaging it is, but it is also true that it is more damaging in the hands of a Blackguard than an Assassin, 99 times out of 100. The Blackguard is more likely to actually hit the target due to his far superior THAC0, and also can attack more often with the majority of weapons.
It is a damaging ability, no doubt about it, but I still think it must be seen in the context of the kit in which it used. Also bear in mind that not all enemies can be affected by poison.
As a counterpart to the damage of poison, consider how much damage most mages can do in a short space of time. At high levels, no class in the game can come close to how much damage a mage can do.
The popular opinion on this board seems to be (and I agree with it) Make the Blackguard use a lesser poison ability Nerf both abilities at low levels Keep the stacking
Problem is, while I haven't specifically investigated this application, I think applying melee on-hit effects for a number of attacks instead of a duration is basically not feasible.
Applying for the first attack only is easy (remove effects by resource as part of the on hit effect). So doing this should be feasible. Having more of this ability per day could compensate for the lost damage potential. But this seems more like an idea for a mod.
The problem with only 1 attack per application is that abilities and spells can be used only once per round, so regardless of how many PW the assassin would get during level progression, this would still be an effective nerf because it would limit PW application to once per round (similar to how it already is in 2.0).
I'd rather it be 5 attacks per application so it doesn't lose any of its potential for assassins who attack once per round, could still be used as a burst damage option by high-APR assassins, but they couldn't stack it 15 or 30 times in a single use like they could with the original PW.
Yeah, I agree with that, that's why I said it was more like an idea for a mod. But I don't know if more than 1 attack per application can be done (maybe something like increment global on hit).
Maybe the wizards at Beamdog could come up with a new opcode to add a hit effect to both melee and ranged attacks, but with an added attack counter functionality that would remove the opcode after X attack attempts. New applications of the opcode would refresh the counter.
Or, even better, create an opcode that adds an attack effect (not a hit effect) that would only fire on every Xth attack. This could be used along with opcode 321 to remove all the PW effects (including the status icon) from self after the fifth attack. Of course, new applications should refresh the attack counter.
Comments
In BG2 and ToB mages are already the rulers of the battlefield. Don't inflate their already humongous power deposit by nerfing other classes. With Mislead, Timestop, Stoneskin, etc. being in the game in their current form, Poison Weapon doesn't even really register on the "stuff you should exploit when dual-classing" chart.
Of course, in the current incarnation of poison that's ignoring the significant advantage of the damage over time causing disruption. But if that is going away in this new version, his argument does make sense to me. Non-save poison could apply to every hit but the save could only happen once per round, which would make it act more like typical weapon elemental damage. Although such a change would again help the blackguard and his high apr without doing much of anything for the assassin.
For example, Poison and Dolorous Decay spells of a druid.
If target of Poison fails save vs poison, it will recieve damage which depends on caster level:
7-9 - 2d8+2 damage per round
10-12 - 3d8+3 damage per round
13-14 - 4d8+4 damage per round
15-16 - 5d8+5 damage per round
17+ - 8d8+6 damage per round
If target of Dolorous Decay fails save vs. poison with -2 penalty it will receive 1 damage point every second until it receives 50 points of damage.
Now think about a situation when your druid casts these spells every round and an enemy fails his saving throws.
If you make so that poison doesn't stack, these spells will go to waste, and it will be completely wrong, because each spell should inflict poison.
Also, take bolts and arrows of Biting. If you make so that poison doesn't stack, using these bolts and arrows will be nerfed in times.
So in the original version of the ability, it was +6 damage per hit (which is powerful), plus an additional +24 damage per hit on a failed save. This buff lasts for five rounds.
If that damage occurs on every hit, that means from this one ability you get to add between 6 and 30 points of damage to every attack you make for the next five rounds.
The current version of the ability (and these numbers are going to change) does, based on your level:
1st-level: +1 damage, plus an additional +6 damage on a failed save
8th-level: +2 damage, plus an additional +12 damage on a failed save
16th-level: +4 damage, plus an additional +24 damage on a failed save
All of which happens no more than once per round. Again, the buff lasts for five rounds.
Now, the numbers need to be tweaked, and they're going to. The next update to the beta will have some new math to play with: at top-tier, for instance, the total damage will be the same between 1.3 and 2.0. It'll also happen a few levels earlier. The scaling progression, I think, isn't so much what people are concerned about here, since it primarily affects BG1.
The part people are concerned about, then, is the "once per round" clause that we're talking about adding for this one poison. There's two reasons for this clause:
First--the Poison Weapon ability is one ability that lasts for five rounds. That means that the damage it deals isn't only being applied once, as a single dose (which is what it would be if we were playing D&D around a table instead of in BG); it's being applied to every attack you make.
Second--The Poison Weapon ability deals a lot of damage, even for an x/day ability. Compare it with Lightning Bolt (Priest of Talos), which deals a maximum of 10d6 (save for half) damage to targets in a line. That's 10-60 damage, no more than once per target. Poison Weapon deals 6-30 damage every time it goes off. If you benefit from it once per round, that's a total damage potential of 30-150 over the course of five rounds.
If you benefit from it once per hit, that damage potential doubles (throwing daggers), triples (darts), or sextuples (darts and improved haste if you have a mage friend nearby). That's not accounting for dual-classing into fighter and using Whirlwind, or playing a Blackguard and specializing in your weapon. That's the Assassin, as written, using the tools available to the class.
The "once per round" clause is only there to get rid of that previous paragraph. In all other ways, Poison Weapon remains one of the most powerful damaging abilities possessed by any class.
So Assassin/Blackguard scripts will need to check their target for a custom Poison Weapons Immunity and spread around their attacks to poison as many targets as they can each round.
If you poison an enemy, then 3 seconds later you poison it again (which means you have 2 APR) you will deal:
2 poison damage
2 poison damage
2 poison damage
2+2 poison damage
2+2 poison damage
2+2 poison damage
2 poison damage
2 poison damage
2 poison damage
Because the first application will end before the second one does. Every applications of Poison Weapon is tracked independently which means that it stacks the same way that everything else in the game 'stacks'. If you hit someone multiple times in a row you benefit from the effect multiple times.
If I cast Web three times in a row, enemies are going to need to save against it three times per round, not once.
If then I cast Cloudkill three times, all these enemies are going to suffer from the spell three times as well, not once per round.
If then my level 9 Kensai attacks the webbed target he is going to benefit from his Kensai bonuses and his Grandmastery bonus and his Varscona in main hand for every attacks he will make, not only the first one in the round.
Overall, Cloudkill is nothing more than a 10d10 no save AoE damage, over 10 rounds.
Poison Weapon is nothing more than a 12 elemental damage per hit, over 1 round.
If you reduce Poison Weapon to a 'once per round application' you could as well by the exact same logic reduce the Kensai damage bonuses to the first attack he makes every round.
A level 21 Kensai with Grandmastery using the WW HLA will benefit from his kit 10 times, dealing 7 bonus damage per hit (12 including the Grandmastery) for a total of 70 damage.
If a F/C wielding the FoA +5 uses GWW, he will benefit from the elemental damage 10 times as well, dealing 100 elemental damage in a round.
If a Blackguard uses Poison Weapon then GWW, he will deal 120 elemental damage over two rounds (the round during the attacks are made, then the round following until the last second of the second round for the final application of Poison Weapon at the end of the first round).
It's definitely working as expected and I could give tons and tons of other examples while you could give me none, because everything in this game works the way I described.
Also, saying that Poison Weapon adds 30 damage to every attacks is, I think, quite an error.
First, it deals a total of 36 damage on a failed save, not 30.
But more importantly, enemies will make their saves. They will. Every important foes is going to be either immune to Poison Weapon (like nearly everything in ToB) or have a saving throw of 1 vs death.
Really I play a lot of Blackguards and I see this ability as an "adds 12 elemental damage per hit for 5 rounds". Nothing more.
The failed save part only triggers against weak enemies that you are likely to kill without using Poison Weapon in the first place.
To conclude, Poison Weapon "stacks" the same way everything else in the game does, including weapon proficiency and even the Fireball spell.
We can take a single class Assassin into consideration: high thac0, low ApR, very low thief skills progression. Definitely not game breaking by any means.
If we take a low level Assassin->Fighter as example (althoug I never heard of anyone saying "I dual-classed soon just to get a couple of PW uses"), we'll have a char that DOESN'T benefit from Assassin increased backstab multiplier and with VERY few thief skill points. All he has is this couple of PWs to fight hard foes.
If we take a high (enough to enjoy the x7 backstab multiplier) level Assassin->Fighter then it means the player spent a LOT of time playing it just as a plain fighter to catch up with the 1st class level.
At that point he will be at middle/end of ToB and I believe it would be fair to let him play the character he worked hard for.
But now we have a 4th and 5th case with EE.
- a high ApR, low thac0, end-of-SoA-whirlwinding Blackguard.
- the fact that in BG1 you don't need a really low thac0 or high ApR to kill enemies, since they have a lot less hp in comparison.
If you tell me you wanted to nerf Poison Weapon because it was broken, my answer is: you created the condition for it to be broken, but the solution is not to nerf what the Assasin was designed to do in BG2.
EDIT: Ah, the Priest of Talos is not meant to have as unique purpose of his life murdering other people, especially with his Lightning Bolt (althoug it would be funny to roleplay). Which happens to be exactly what an Assassin is trained for.
As of 1.3, all poison (and regeneration) effects now apply separately. Which means, among other things, that you can have an assassin using Poison Weapon with darts to triple-stack poison effects every round and deal as much as 450 damage in a single use of the ability.
The original behavior (which could be seen as early as vanilla BG2) wasn't designed that way, but that's how it worked. It was a bug, and we fixed it. But that fix means that Poison Weapon--and every other poison in the game, really--now behaves slightly (but significantly) differently from how it worked in the original game.
So if you're opposed to this change because vanilla let you stack poisons all day long, your opposition is based on a somewhat flawed premise. It's entirely possible, and even probable, that if poisons had worked the way they do in 1.3 back in 1998, Bioware might have changed the numbers on this particular ability in much the same way we're doing now.
You haven't given proof whether Bioware designed poison to stack with itself or not, just inferences.
I'm just trying to offer some additional clarity here: If you think Poison Weapon was designed in an environment where poison effects stacked like they do now, you're incorrect.
In 1999, poison didn't stack reliably. That behavior is new in 1.3. Which means that during playtesting, BioWare didn't have a version of the ability that had the damage potential that the ability has now. If they had, they might have made different decisions about its implementation.
If you have to nerf it, let each hit refresh the original duration instead of making it stack the damage or duration. I'm sure it can be done by using opcode 321 (remove effects by resource) and then re-applying the poison.
For another wrench in the works, the vanilla description of Poison Weapon doesn't mention a duration at all. It says "The next hit". If anything, that suggests to me that this ability is only supposed to affect one attack, not every attack for five rounds. That seems pretty definitive on intent to me.
And make a New "poison weapon" for the Blackguard , Calling it "Patreons Gift" and just make it 1-5 (insert elemental damage here) for 5 Rounds on hit what has no damage over time component and save for Half dmg.
shouldn't be rocket science.
I get my multiple chances to poison a mage with my darts, just as I want, without impacting a more traditional assassin getting just one attach a round, and the Blackguard gets to similarly choose a pace of attach they prefer.
Then cue the damage scaling that Dee is already on top of, and I that looks like a really neat package to me.
It even makes the ability sound more reasonable, that the assassin can apply a dose of poison to their weapon(s), and the dosage they get from an ability, to transfer to victims, is the same - regardless of how rapidly they can strike the victim(s).
I know changing the mechanism like this would probably be more programming effort than could land in 2.0, but I would love to see the ability evolve into this for 2.1 - and I could buy into whatever tweak you make for 2.0 if we hear this is the destination
PnP rules would suggest no more than one dose, with an active time of one minute before the poison loses its effectiveness. So no matter what we do, we're using a massively beefed up version of the ability.
The next update alters the initial and over time damage, as well as the poison duration and the scaling progression. I'm interested to hear what people think of the differences.
It makes better sense RP-wise (poisons should stack), continuity-wise (other poisons already stack), and also flavor-wise: an assassin should go in, deliver the damage, and get out, rather than attack someone continuously for an extended period of time.
One smallish issue I see with this is that the hits would only get subtracted from on a successful hit, which makes sense in melee, but doesn't make much sense with projectile weapons.
Another issue is that this would refresh the duration with every attack, which is not ideal.
Everything you said is true about how damaging it is, but it is also true that it is more damaging in the hands of a Blackguard than an Assassin, 99 times out of 100. The Blackguard is more likely to actually hit the target due to his far superior THAC0, and also can attack more often with the majority of weapons.
It is a damaging ability, no doubt about it, but I still think it must be seen in the context of the kit in which it used. Also bear in mind that not all enemies can be affected by poison.
As a counterpart to the damage of poison, consider how much damage most mages can do in a short space of time. At high levels, no class in the game can come close to how much damage a mage can do.
The popular opinion on this board seems to be (and I agree with it)
Make the Blackguard use a lesser poison ability
Nerf both abilities at low levels
Keep the stacking
I'd rather it be 5 attacks per application so it doesn't lose any of its potential for assassins who attack once per round, could still be used as a burst damage option by high-APR assassins, but they couldn't stack it 15 or 30 times in a single use like they could with the original PW.
Or, even better, create an opcode that adds an attack effect (not a hit effect) that would only fire on every Xth attack. This could be used along with opcode 321 to remove all the PW effects (including the status icon) from self after the fifth attack. Of course, new applications should refresh the attack counter.