Poison Vial Flares

[alpine yoke]

Does anyone have any information on poison vial flares?

You swing a matte black straight-bladed wakizashi at a cyclops!
  AS: +359 vs DS: +168 with AvD: +26 + d100 roll: +28 = +245
   ... and hit for 37 points of damage!
   Large gash to the left arm, several muscles torn.

**A brackish foul-smelling solution from your straight-bladed wakizashi splashes the cyclops which quickly begins to wither!**

The remaining oil drips off of your wakizashi.
Roundtime: 3 sec.```

I've found two old posts on Player's corner but nothing on the wiki. Appreciate any assistance!

One thing I've noticed is that it always says You notice that the straight-bladed wakizashi is no longer poisoned.

And then when I try to touch it, I get this message s>touch waki Are you serious? Poison a holy weapon?

[rough cliff]

Here's what i remember, it's been years since I thought about these things, so some details might be slightly off.

Look at the weapon to see if it has any poison.

Touch the weapon to apply poison, if it holds any.

Pour the poison on the weapon to fill it, if the weapon is empty.

There are 4 or 5 different flare messages and only one of them does anything different; it will knock the target down. Otherwise all other flares just have a fancy looking flare messages.

The poison doesn't cause any initial damage, but it does apply a DOT that triggers after 30 seconds (yes, that is 30 seconds). You'll kill the target before the poison DOT ever triggers. So, sadly, these poison flares are pretty pointless if you ask me.

There are different levels of poison potency from weak to strong, they apply a few points of damage to upwards of 75 (if memory serves me right). The poison, per round (remember, it's 30 seconds for the poison to tick) dissipates by 1 point to the same amount the poison DOT is at (so if by some chance the poison hits for 50 points per round, it could dissipate 50 points after the first round).

There is no way to tell how much poison damage is applied when it flares.

The weapon will not flare on a target that already has an active poison flare against it.

If you want to enchant the weapon, you can, but ONLY if the weapon has no poison on it or stored in it. I never tried to ensorcell or add other services to it, but I'd guess the same rule would apply that the weapon would have to be empty of poison.

Lastly, even if the weapon is void of poison it will still give flare messages. The only useful thing about this is the flare that knocks the target down still knocks them down when there is no poison in the weapon.

I think that sums them up.

These weapons were released during the first run of the Dhu Gillywack, not sure about any other releases, but that is where I got my vultite falcata that I still have to this day that I enchanted to 6x

I've asked numerous times over the years in the official and even on this hard to navigate disord place to see if this poison script could be updated to fix the few issues it has and bring it more in line with how other DOT based attacks work.....

Just falls on deaf ears since no one really has nor uses these weapons.

All the information I listed above was what I learned from testing my weapon to figure out how the flare damage worked.

[alpine yoke]

I really appreciate the write up @rough cliff !

The 30 seconds for the DOT to kick in is wild! Definitely shows the power creep that has occurred over the past 20 years when it comes to Gemstone armament design theory.

[rough cliff]

I don't know who created the script and it's not the only poison script out there, so to make a page on the gswiki would probably require someone to call it "Dhu Gillywack Poison Weapons" for the page name, can't call it just poison weapon - that would cause confusion with the other one or two poison scripts.

Even if this script was changed to 5 seconds for the DOT to tick it would make it somewhat useful, I asked for it to be done numerous times, but just falls on deaf ears.

As for the poison that works in these weapons, about 8 (give or take) years ago a handful of us that still have these weapons convinced the GMs to sell the poison refills and a wagon was parked in the Landing (I think in the park) for a few weeks. I stocked up on a bunch of them, probably around 150 vials and was set for a long time. I never really used the weapon much and one day I decided to test it out on the test server so I swung the weapon against another of my characters to figure out how well it worked..... And to my surprise, it was a big letdown.

As I said the only really useful aspect of these weapons is the fact that without even having poison in them they will still flare and one of the flare messages always results in a knock down of the target.

There may be a bug (it may not be a bug, could be a feature) with the script that causes the poison the dissipate at 0 each round, which means you're poisoned until you die or someone casts unpoison on you. I've only seen it happen a couple of times in all the test swings I did. I think I reported it, so it maybe got fixed? Or it's still a feature of the script?

[rough cliff]

I started playing around a bit on the test server just to verify things again and most holds true to what I remembered. A couple of things to add:

MEASURE <weapon> - you do this to see how much poison is held in the weapon

There are a couple of messages/flares that come up and imply that you or your target gets or even perhaps yourself gets poisoned, but nothing actually happens:

1. ** Afflicted by your vultite falcata, Xxxxx reels as the poison does its work! **
2. A careless movement exposes you to the poison tainting your vultite falcata, and you feel the malign substance tingling on your skin just before it takes effect!

The poison damage does tick every 30 seconds, just like you'd be taking damage from getting poisoned from forging or a creature poisoning you.

I thought you were supposed to get 10 (or maybe it was 20) flares per application (touching of the weapon to coat it in poison while there are doses in it), but it seems to be broken a bit. My testing I got 8 flares before having to reapply poison to the blade the first dose and then I got 7 flares from the next dose. I'm thinking that some of the flare messages that don't actually apply poison are eating up some of the flares.

Also, based on this quick test session it doesn't appear that any particular flare messaging dictates how powerful the poison applied to the target is or how fast it dissipates per round.

Based on everything I've seen so far I'd say that these weapons, while unique, are fundamentally broken in their current form from the flare messages triggering when they don't have any poison on them, to the loss of poison from flare messages where no poison is being applied to the target, to the fact that the DOT only triggers every 30 seconds. The script needs to be fixed on these weapons before they can be considered fully functional.

[rough cliff]

I cobbled together a page on the gswiki about these weapons. Here is the page:
https://gswiki.play.net/Dhu_Gillywack_Poison_Weapons

If anyone with more knowledge about the wiki wishes to link it somewhere useful or add to it or even clean the page up to make it flow better, feel free.