Need help understanding poison
Trying to run a gas cloud Pathfinder build through the campaign, but my damage feels a little low. I don't quite understand how gas cloud works. Poison is based on attack damage, but the gas arrow doesn't usually hit anything. Additionally, most builds say to use double bows for increased projectiles, but my gas arrow pretty instantly procs the max number of poisons (3 currently) without an extra arrow. Is an extra projectile helping me at all in this case?
Overall I'm just a little lost on the best way to increase my damage.
Thanks!
Comments
Gas cloud scales on:
Attack, bow attack, projectile attack, 2 hand attack
Poison magnitude, poison deals damage faster
Crit, don't recommend trying to fit it in but the clouds "hits" can crit for crit poison dots
2x more projectiles = 2x faster stacks. Important as you get your ascendancy and 8+ stacks
Wither (can be buffed to 70% more damage on tree, it's also on jewels). Use rain of arrows or eye of winter to apply, both need to be doing chaos damage through some means.
Chaos def down- despair
Then you also benefit from skill duration and AOE. I think my cloud is at almost 7, despair is at like 12 seconds and my persistence vines at 14 or so.
Then you also probably want the skill cost reduction nodes in the area, it gets ludicrously expensive without them and inspiration is a 20%+ damage loss to run.
The other thing an extra arrow does is increase the area of the clouds by the spread. So extra projectiles make getting a big AoE easier.
The reason you’re probably having trouble is most likely a weak weapon (physical or chaos damage) or not enough poison damage nodes yet.
If you want an item to… “fill in the gaps” consider corpse Wade which will basically auto-clear for you when you get enough poison mag/count