Poison Nova Necro vs. Bosses Test

Necrarch wrote: 2 years ago

Poison Nova, as far as I remember, has a small cooldown so reaching 125 FCR seems less necessary than for Bone spells, and I believe the usual target is more at 75.

However, I was surprised yesterday to watch this :


Interesting to understand the difficulty a poison necro can have against bosses.

Since Necrarch showed me this a few days ago, I've been timing how long it takes me to kill diablo with my poison necro with 2 different strategies. Thought I'd post my results here.

Strategy 1 was my old strat. In the past, knowing that Poison Necro was crap against bosses, I decided to gear my merc for boss killing with Obedience and Gface and usually make my IG out of something with CB. My usual strat was to

Revive a big pack of

Chaos Sanctuary trash including at least 3 or so Venom lords right before Diablo spawns, telestomp him, and win! The reason for the Venom lords is not scientific, but anecdotal. I've noticed that if you have 'large bodied' revives in your pack when you

Teleport, your minions won't spread out and will all stay right on top of each other until you start walking around. If there's an enemy in range, they'll all attack basically in unison.

Strategy 2 was using the revived Venom lords to lock down my army so none of them attacked Diablo. This simulated not having an army at all without me having to unsummon and kill everyone, because

Iron Golem is expensive. As reported in the video, locking my army DRAMATICALLY increased my poison damage against the boss.

However, and perhaps most interestingly, after timing a bunch of Diablo kills with each strategy, it turned out that using Strat 1, my traditional method of beefy merc +

Revive army, I was killing diablo in between 7-11 seconds. Using strat 2,

Poison Nova with a locked down army, I was killing diablo in about 16 seconds. So, even though the new knowledge behind strat 2 hugely multiplied poison damage dealt to bosses, it's not enough to be worth it. Friends that lift weights are still better.

This said, this is all only with my character's setup at P1. I would be interested in knowing what other Poison Necros have to say about this.

Hmm, can you show your gear ?

Winterkill wrote: 2 years ago

Necrarch wrote: 2 years ago

Poison Nova, as far as I remember, has a small cooldown so reaching 125 FCR seems less necessary than for Bone spells, and I believe the usual target is more at 75.

However, I was surprised yesterday to watch this :


Interesting to understand the difficulty a poison necro can have against bosses.

Since Necrarch showed me this a few days ago, I've been timing how long it takes me to kill diablo with my poison necro with 2 different strategies. Thought I'd post my results here.

Strategy 1 was my old strat. In the past, knowing that Poison Necro was crap against bosses, I decided to gear my merc for boss killing with Obedience and Gface and usually make my IG out of something with CB. My usual strat was to

Revive a big pack of

Chaos Sanctuary trash including at least 3 or so Venom lords right before Diablo spawns, telestomp him, and win! The reason for the Venom lords is not scientific, but anecdotal. I've noticed that if you have 'large bodied' revives in your pack when you

Teleport, your minions won't spread out and will all stay right on top of each other until you start walking around. If there's an enemy in range, they'll all attack basically in unison.

Strategy 2 was using the revived Venom lords to lock down my army so none of them attacked Diablo. This simulated not having an army at all without me having to unsummon and kill everyone, because

Iron Golem is expensive. As reported in the video, locking my army DRAMATICALLY increased my poison damage against the boss.

However, and perhaps most interestingly, after timing a bunch of Diablo kills with each strategy, it turned out that using Strat 1, my traditional method of beefy merc +

Revive army, I was killing diablo in between 7-11 seconds. Using strat 2,

Poison Nova with a locked down army, I was killing diablo in about 16 seconds. So, even though the new knowledge behind strat 2 hugely multiplied poison damage dealt to bosses, it's not enough to be worth it. Friends that lift weights are still better.

This said, this is all only with my character's setup at P1. I would be interested in knowing what other Poison Necros have to say about this.

Thanks for the testing Winterkill, very interesting info !

mockingbirdreal wrote: 2 years ago

Hmm, can you show your gear ?

It's pretty standard. 3 piece trangs with gloves,

Belt and shrunken head. Aldur's

Boots, Engima chest,

Shako

Helm right now, but I have a circ for fcr if I want it, +2/19fcr amulet, 2 misc rare rings with other helpful stuff, and a +1/-50

Death's Web. Web and Head are socketed with poison facets. CTA on Swap with Spirit. 3 or 4 skillers, don't remember, then mf/res charms for the rest. Like I said, nothing special.

To clarify, I'm not complaining that my poison damage is low. This necro wrecks stuff. I'm observing that even with the new knowledge about boss poison damage, using my minions and merc is better.

The result depends on how powerful your poison damage and the damage of your minions.

If your poison damage is high and your minions are weak, you kill boss faster without minions.
If your poison damage is not high and your revives have high damage, you kill boss faster with minions.

I am not surprised when you don't get the same result as the guy in the video.

Next set of results:
Necro Vs

Mephisto

With my diablo test, relying on Strat 1 - Obedience+Gface merc + army was clearly better than using

Poison Nova with no minion contact.

Here, with

Mephisto, it is much closer, but once again, strat 1 wins out.

Average kill time with Strat 1 was 13 seconds.

Average kill time with Strat 2 was 16 seconds.

So, here, it's much closer, but once again, physical merc beats

Poison Nova even when knowing about the bug.

I did find it very strange that the strat 1 time was as long as it is though. For both my

Mephisto and diablo tests, I just used whatever trash I encountered on the way to them. For Diablo, that meant I never had Urdar s, with their crushing blow.

Mephisto regularly has Urdar s on the way down to him though. I really would have expected his kill time to be lower than Diablo's with strat 1. Regardless, so far it remains true that a decent merc is more useful than locking your army down and using

Poison Nova for bosses.

Next will be

Baal and then some concluding thoughts.

Next set of results:
Poison necro vs.

Baal.

Average kill time with strat 1 was 30 seconds

Average kill time with strat 2 was a whopping 1 minute 3 seconds. Absolutely awful.

I poked at Andy a few times, but didn't find there was much point. She falls apart very easily and always has corpses around her for

Corpse Explosion to set off. Next post will be overall thoughts.

Winterkill wrote: 2 years ago

[..] Strategy 2 [..] locking my army DRAMATICALLY increased my poison damage against the boss.

[..] using Strat 1, [..] I was killing diablo in between 7-11 seconds. Using strat 2, [..] I was killing diablo in about 16 seconds. [..]

Out of curiosity, how did you reliably differentiate between poison and non-poison damage when looking at the health bar? Because if you only look at it ticking down and notice it goes faster with strat 1 (i.e. minions) then that can still mean either of two things:

1) Your gear is a bit sub-par, making your poison damage significantly less than the combined minion damage. As a result, even with a bug locking out your poison damage, you kill him faster because your minions > your poison.

2) The noted bug doesn't actually exist/apply. You still have the same poison damage but now you're adding minions on top, resulting in poison + minions = faster kill.

Unless you somehow managed to reliably and clearly differentiate between poison damage and non-poison damage while all of it was thrown at dia simultaneously, it'd be kinda hard to differentiate between case #1 and case #2 above.

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

Winterkill wrote: 2 years ago

[..] Strategy 2 [..] locking my army DRAMATICALLY increased my poison damage against the boss.

[..] using Strat 1, [..] I was killing diablo in between 7-11 seconds. Using strat 2, [..] I was killing diablo in about 16 seconds. [..]

Out of curiosity, how did you reliably differentiate between poison and non-poison damage when looking at the health bar? Because if you only look at it ticking down and notice it goes faster with strat 1 (i.e. minions) then that can still mean either of two things:

1) Your gear is a bit sub-par, making your poison damage significantly less than the combined minion damage. As a result, even with a bug locking out your poison damage, you kill him faster because your minions > your poison.

2) The noted bug doesn't actually exist/apply. You still have the same poison damage but now you're adding minions on top, resulting in poison + minions = faster kill.

Unless you somehow managed to reliably and clearly differentiate between poison damage and non-poison damage while all of it was thrown at dia simultaneously, it'd be kinda hard to differentiate between case #1 and case #2 above.

This is an issue of explanation on my part then.

In Strat 1, ONLY my minions and merc are dealing damage.

In Strat 2, ONLY my

Poison Nova is dealing damage. I use the revived Venom lords (or other trash in the other boss tests) to prevent my army from moving around so I can

Poison Nova the boss without them engaging.

Winterkill wrote: 2 years ago

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

Winterkill wrote: 2 years ago

[..] Strategy 2 [..] locking my army DRAMATICALLY increased my poison damage against the boss.

[..] using Strat 1, [..] I was killing diablo in between 7-11 seconds. Using strat 2, [..] I was killing diablo in about 16 seconds. [..]

Out of curiosity, how did you reliably differentiate between poison and non-poison damage when looking at the health bar? Because if you only look at it ticking down and notice it goes faster with strat 1 (i.e. minions) then that can still mean either of two things:

1) Your gear is a bit sub-par, making your poison damage significantly less than the combined minion damage. As a result, even with a bug locking out your poison damage, you kill him faster because your minions > your poison.

2) The noted bug doesn't actually exist/apply. You still have the same poison damage but now you're adding minions on top, resulting in poison + minions = faster kill.

Unless you somehow managed to reliably and clearly differentiate between poison damage and non-poison damage while all of it was thrown at dia simultaneously, it'd be kinda hard to differentiate between case #1 and case #2 above.

This is an issue of explanation on my part then.

In Strat 1, ONLY my minions and merc are dealing damage.

In Strat 2, ONLY my

Poison Nova is dealing damage. I use the revived Venom lords (or other trash in the other boss tests) to prevent my army from moving around so I can

Poison Nova the boss without them engaging.

So you don't even use

Poison Nova in strat 1? I.e. you're basically comparing a summoner vs. a poison nec then and not a poison nec with minions vs. a poison nec without minions?

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

So you don't even use

Poison Nova in strat 1? I.e. you're basically comparing a summoner vs. a poison nec then and not a poison nec with minions vs. a poison nec without minions?

I think to answer this, I should restate my purpose in running these tests at all, because it looks like that's been lost.

I watched the video at the start of this thread about the poison damage bug. I personally played around to see if I could find evidence that the bug is real. After determining that it was, to the best of my understanding, I observed that the only way to prevent the bug from interfering with my kills was to prevent my minions from engaging the boss at all. That would constitute a major change of strategy and potentially even build.

With that in mind, I set up the two strats here to be intentionally extreme cases on either end. A more moderate case for strat 2 might be merc and golem, but no skellies and revives, just like a more moderate case for strat 1 would be to use

Poison Nova with minions. That wasn’t my point. I specifically wanted to create the extremes of, on one side, the poison necro is using ONLY

Poison Nova and avoiding the bug at all costs, on the other end, the

Poison Nova is submitting to the bug and not using

Poison Nova AT ALL. I figured that if I established these poles, going forward would be easier. I was also under the original impression that the only

Poison Nova strat was going to be so good that tinkering with middle cases wasn’t worth it, which I considered that it might be after watching the video. With that in mind, setting up the strat 1 to be so antithetical to the poison necromancer's build, but still possible within it, made sense to me.

So, to answer you question, no, this is not a build comparison test. This poison necromancer does not have maxed

Skeleton Mastery, does not have any Summoning Skillers, is not using

Arm of King Leoric or related wands to summon, is not using Beast, was not intentionally bringing Urdars into the fight, and was not using

Clay Golem with

Amplify Damage or some other similar combo. This is not a fair build comparison test. An actual, geared summon necro would crush the strat 1 numbers I posted. I am not comparing a poison necro with a summon necro. I am comparing two very different strategies with the same poison necro build to find out whether burying my army and using

Poison Nova only was effective. It turned out that the answer was no. Discovering the most effective way to kill bosses given knowledge of the bug was not the design here. I am interested in finding that out later, but given how tremendously effective even the extreme strat 1 was, I now know to start looking on that side of the spectrum for my final conclusion.

Ah, ok.
Thought you were still looking into the bug itself but that makes more sense.

Might I propose a strat #3 for you to consider then?

Assuming that the bug still exists and continues to apply, it is only applicable on frames where dia takes damage other than your poison. With a ton of revives and minions, that's obviously going to be just about every frame (which is why it hurts

Poison Nova so much). However, if you limit yourself to only your merc, it'll only be a fraction of the total frames meaning very little of your

Poison Nova gets lost for it but you gain the full benefit from your merc.

The underlying reasoning is that a decently geared poison necro should do a fair bit more damage than random low level minions. A decently geared merc however does quite respectable damage himself and is likely worth keeping around. Adding to that, said merc (unlike

Poison Nova) can bring crushing blow which in itself significantly speeds up boss kills.

A golem could be kept around as well (if you want IG for an aura for example) with very little impact as their attack rate is slow af anyways.

So basically, strat 3 =

Poison Nova + merc + golem if using IG for an aura, no other minions.
I wouldn't be surprised if that ends up beating both your prior strats.

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

So basically, strat 3 =

Poison Nova + merc + golem if using IG for an aura, no other minions.
I wouldn't be surprised if that ends up beating both your prior strats.

That's a great idea and very close to what I was going to try next as well. I'll give this a go.

Alright, I have my next batch of results! There are actually 3 strategies here, all based on Schnorki’s suggestion, since I realized that which curse I used for it might be relevant. For all 3 strategies, I had no minions, only my merc and an

Iron Golem running Insight because I wanted the mana regen for these fast moving tests and didn’t feel like chugging. I will number these strategies 3 – 5 so I don’t cause confusion between my first 2 strategies in the thread.

Results:
Strat 3 Using

Lower Resist Curse – Average

Mephisto kill - 13 seconds. Average Diablo kill – 13 seconds. Average

Baal kill 44 seconds.

Strat 4 Using

Decrepify – Average

Mephisto kill – 12 seconds. Average Diablo kill – 11 seconds. Average

Baal kill – 32 seconds.

Strat 5 Using

Amplify Damage – Average

Mephisto kill – 12 seconds. Average Diablo kill – 14 seconds. Average

Baal kill 35 seconds.

So, of these three starts, using Strat 4

Decrepify was the best, but not by a ton. The

Mephisto kills are all so close that I would say the strat was irrelevant. For the Diablo kills, it is hard to measure exactly what the significance of the 2-3 second difference is, considering that my merc does not have 100% Crushing Blow. They’re close, but

Decrepify is best. For

Baal,

Decrepify was fairly impactful compared to

Lower Resist.

However, by far, the reason why Decrep was the most impactful for Diablo and

Baal was its slowing effect. While Decrepified,

Baal wasn’t knocking my merc back, teleporting, summoning fingers, summoning his effigy nearly as often, and that greatly benefitted average kill times. Diablo wasn't slowing my merc (since he's running dps and doesn't have CBF) and wasn't running around the arena. It was also safest in terms of merc and golem life. So, overall, not only was

Decrepify the best in terms of killing time, it was also the easiest.

The interesting thing to me is comparing these numbers to the first 2 strats. The

Mephisto numbers are almost identical, with Pure

Poison Nova s2 being the only outlier and the worst. The Diablo numbers show Strat 1 being the best with an average of 9 seconds, which is ahead of all 3 of these new strats, with Strat 4 being the closest. Likewise,

Baal with Strat 1 was slightly better than Strat 4

Decrepify, a bit better than Strat 5, and way better than

Lower Resist.

So, at the end of this wave of testing, it still looks like Strat 1 with full army and revives is the best, even for a poison necro.

Thank you for these interesting and enlightening share. Very useful indeed.

A question: Does it matter which bases for IG about CB?, other than Insight?

basicnecromancy wrote: 2 years ago

Thank you for these interesting and enlightening share. Very useful indeed.

A question: Does it matter which bases for IG about CB?, other than Insight?

Thanks! I'm trying to get some good info out there in the end at least.

I'm not sure I understand the question. Insight does not have CB on it; it's just for the mana regen. There are plenty of items with CB that you could make a golem out of, though, such as

Windhammer,

Bonesnap,

The Minotaur, G-Face, and more. Iron Golems also can benefit from runewords, so theoretically making one out of an Obedience or something similar would also give high CB. Not sure it would be worth the cost, but I suppose it depends how good you are at keeping IG alive.

If you're asking if Insight had an impact on my tests, though, I just realized that the answer is 'maybe.' Insight has a

Tal rune in it. Means poison damage. Different sources of poison damage always interact in weird ways. And minion damage is what supposedly triggers the

Poison Nova bug. I wonder if my golem was screwing up my

Nova damage on Strats 3-5. Hmmmm....

I might re-run them when I get the chance without the golem and see if it makes a difference.

My question is that does it matter if IG is made with a high CB weapon instead of Insight.

basicnecromancy wrote: 2 years ago

My question is that does it matter if IG is made with a high CB weapon instead of Insight.

It might. I don't know yet. CB is always very helpful, but IG has a relatively low attack speed and you can't give him too much CB with him being a single item and all. But any CB is big health off a boss like

Baal. So it would be worth finding out.

Out of curiosity, what's your actual

Poison Nova level and base psn -res? And how much poison dmg are you getting from facets/trang gloves in total?

I'm starting to think your times are jaded towards minions due to lack of poison gear/performance still, considering how much longer they are as compared to what you'd mathematically expect for a geared psn necro.

Poison Nova = level 39

Base minus poison res = -82%

+35% to poison skill damage

Rich players I'm sure will say this is bad, just because they're rich enough for full BIS, but I've got all the basics for a poison necro. Torch, Anni, +2 skills

Helm either

Shako for MF or

Circlet for FCR, Enigma, +2/19%fcr amulet, 3 piece trangs, +1/-50 dweb, poison facets, 3 skillers, CTA, and rings to hit 75% fcr for teleporting.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if a full BIS Poison Necro throws different numbers, but then I say just let my test be considered an 'average

Poison Nova necro's experience.' I won't believe for a moment that you have to have too much more than this to be considered 'mid-tier.' And I think the numbers seem useful to know either way, especially with Ladder S2 starting soon. I certainly know I'll benefit from knowing that--at least until my current gear point--minions are better against bosses than avoiding the bug. I also welcome any full BIS poison necro to run these tests. It would be really insightful if it turned out that, say,

Poison Nova Level 43 the poison starts outperforming or something like that.