http://eqiiforums.station.sony.com/eq2/board/message?board.id=39&message.id=7881 In the Guide to Kiting thread, SteathMode suggests that you can indeed stack multiple damage poisons. To my knowledge, this has been examined and re-examined, and the recurring conclusion is that stacked poisons do not add additional chances to proc on a given attack, but only work sequentially - such that when the first application runs out, the second begins taking effect. Has anyone evidence to the contrary? Do we have any reason to believe this has changed?
I do stack poisons and they will stack a target, just not on the same hit (or maybe they will). I say the latter because of a recent encounter in BB. I stacked the poisons, and when it went to hit a named enemy in the mines area, it said resisted 4x...My only conclusion is that you can stack them and they each try each turn....in battles previous to this encounter, I would battle foes (discovered this accidentally in SV yesterday) with stacked poisons and notice 4 damage indicators going off. On successive rounds when I wasn't even swinging (about every 6 seconds like the timers on the poisons DOT), I noticed the opponent taking ORANGE damage multiple times (at least two-three). I assume these are the poisons as I was not attacking when the damages occurred. I will do further testing and report back with my findings (complete with screenies). If I weren't so lazy I'd demo it with fraps.
Thast interesting. Last time I ran that test was awhile ago and it came up with the first poison ran out then the second poison kicked in. Guess its time to go grab a few npc poisons and run some more tests.
It is possible that when you saw the orange damage show up, it could have been from a riposte...From, my personal experiment, the poisons don't stack and kick in when the other runs out....The resist X4 could have come from a multiple attack.
I may have to examine this myself tonight. The problem is, I don't know how to conclusively prove that multiple poison applications are directly correlated to specific sources of damage. Your combat log only says "YOUR Poison hits <enemy> for <damage amount>" (or at least that's the case last I checked), it doesn't say "Your Irrepressisible Vexation hits <enemy> for <damage amount>." But I have two different vials of damage poisons (the Vexation and Rancorous Affliction), so I'll try and apply them both and see what there is to see. I'll admit I'm skeptical - no disrespect intended, StealthMode, just would be surprised if this has changed. The results we saw from the fairly exhaustive tests that Erasmus, Shader, and others ran seemed conclusive, at least to this particular layman. But I'm not a number-cruncher and I'm not fluent in math... if I shoot stuff and it dies, I'm usually happy.
Ok a dumb question probably but how does one stack 5 poisons when you have two activatable spots???????
Use the poison, replace it in activable slot and use it, replace with a third poision and click use, etc.
I assume you drop the bottle in the slot, click Use, switch out the next bottle, click Use, etc. You don't need to have it equipped to continue receiving the benefit, you just need the vial in an equip slot for the initial application. But I've never bothered applying more than one damage poison at a time, so I could be wrong.
The behavior that's been demonstrated in the past is that while you can apply multiple damage poisons, only one of them is active at a time. Poison #1 will proc, and the rest won't, until #1 wears off. Then #2 will go proc until it wears off, etc. The easiest way to test if that's happening is to apply several poisons, and watch the times at which they wear off. Lange's Formula dictates that a player-made poison should last for right around 40 minutes of nonstop autoattack, assuming no combat arts are used. (NPC poisons should last half that, since they have half as many procs.) In real fighting, it might be more like 30 minutes or 60, depending on the type of fighting. The key factor though is that if they're used serially, like people have shown before, you'll see the first one wearing off after some long period of time, and then the next after roughly the same length of time, and so on. On the other hand, if they all have a chance to proc, they'll all wear off at roughly the same time. Another test would involve looking closely at your log files. Apply two oposite damage poisons: ideally one very-large-DD and one very-small-DD. If I'm remembering correctly, when a poison procs it always shows two lines in the log: first the DD amount, and second the first tick amount (even though it happens instantly). If your logs always show low-then-high, or always high-then-low, then only one of the poisons has a chance to proc. On the other hand, if sometimes you see low-then-high and sometimes high-then-low, that suggested that either can proc. A third test would involve looking at proc percentages from a speciallized parser (like the one Rijacki and I used for her poison tests), but the results are pretty difficult to interpret in cases like that.
I tested this most of the afternoon. Heres what I found out.... You can only double stack. Anything past two and it doesn't see it I dont think. But I can definitely verify two poisons can hit at the same time. I have seen it in the message window, I hit two poison damage messages. The other three I guess are a waste, I will try to do more testing this evening to see if their is any way to stack the other poisons up. One thing to note about stacking 5....After a few encounters (like 1-2) some poisons will wear out. I found this out today in testing. I swapped out my 2-3 poisons for my 4-5 poions and the first poison I applied wore off within 5 minutes (12 hour duration normally). So possibly there is a check in there somewhere that will attempt to kill multiple poison applications. I have only seen this occur ONCE with FIVE poisons loaded. Screenie below of two poisons doing damage at the same time.... Warning this image is at a large resolution, it will probably expand the tables of this thread dramatically... As you can see although I had 5 poisons loaded, only two were causing any damage... Message Edited by StealthM0de on 05-25-2005 09:08 PM
Stealthmode, all that looks like is one initial proc. When poisons go off, they do a DD and the first round of DoT dmg. You will always get 2 hits from a poison intial. Obviously debuffs poisons and a couple of the rare poisons are different. But on a 100 count npc poison or a 200 player made poison, the intial proc will alwasy do 2 hits, one DD and one DoT dmg. It is not two different poisons going off. It appears you had a poison proc off of that last hit and you were using a low DD/High DoT dmg poison.
That doesn't show two poisons hitting at once. It's normal, with only one poison applied, for a proc to generate two damage lines in a row. The first is the DD portion of the poison, and the second is an over-time tick (even though no time has elapsed).
These were dots, the 6 second timer ones. If you notice this was after the battle. Those last two entries about poison were not the initial damage, but the 6s dots. About 24 seconds after the poisons initially hit. I will try to document this better. I'll turn /log on and parse it after some adventuring later this evening. I should have just fraps'd it, that way you could see that the initial DD was TWO seperate entries, while the recurring was also TWO seperate entries. Hopefully when I parse the logs later it will help shed some light on the subject.... Message Edited by StealthM0de on 05-25-2005 09:45 PM
I doubt it. Mainly due to all the testing that went on right after realease. Here are a couple suggestions for your next test. Only use two dmg poisons this time. Use ones that are not close in dmg, on both DD and DoT side. As well, please expand your melee combat window to help show more of the log. Might be able to catch the intial proc on each that way. Lastly, please keep an examine window open on both, so we can see the stats of the poisons.
Why can't the game makers include in the games manual explanations as to what can and can't be done. Someone there in software writing land knows the answer to these questions and must me sat there reading these forums with a smirk on his face whilst we all struggle to find out as to what is supose to be happening.
then the game wouldn't be any fun... i love figuring stuff out and how it works, it would be foolish to explain EVERY point of this game,
Well....we could just decompile the engine and figure it out real easily....but we'd get in trouble with SOE. Would be nice of them to provide better documentation. So that we don't have to waste our time doing tests on things that should already be documented. But hey, when someone does decompile the engine and someone gets the idea to make a similar game....well, what can I say, it all started because someone wanted a better understanding of the game.
Very little of the game's mechanics take place on the player's computer; nearly all of it, wisely, is done on the server. For the most part, the player's computer only deals with movement/position, and user-interface. If, indeed, details like damage amounts were dictated by the player's computer, hackers would cripple the game by writing cheats that always hit, and always hit for 100,000 points of damage. You see that sort of thing in peer-to-peer networked games, but usually server-driven games are smarter these days. (Most of the hacks or exploits you see in server-based games involve things that the client needs to have control or knowlege of, like boosting the player's movement speed, or displaying what's nearby that the player might potentially see.)
....it can be done. The server farms themselves aren't as secure as people think. Well....little thing called a packet sniffer...I've seen other games server farms hacked that have standalone servers seperate from a client. Example: Client Alpha logs into the game...his packet sniffer is on, and he now has the ips of the servers as well as actual packet data. Hacker/client Alpha runs a security scan on the network for vulnerabilities (easily obtained trialware can do this). Hacker/client Alpha now modifies a malformed packet that exploits vulnerabilities in ANY portion of the servers software (operating system, ftp, etc.). Hacker/Client Alpha now has root access to the server. Client a downloads or remote decompiles at his/her convienence. Now the tricky part here is the hacker/client can and usually will infect another system (hijack it with worms, malformed packets, etc.) and use that system (as well as others) to do their dirty work, leaving a very difficult trail to backtrace. And making other people look like the culprits. Only reason I posted about it is because even the most inexperienced "hacker" has access to these tools/knowledge. And well to be honest, I don't think Sonys network is as secure as people think. Message Edited by StealthM0de on 05-26-2005 10:47 AM
