Poison/venom rework + discussion

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TL;DR I propose poison/venom center around an anti heal mechanic rather than flat damage, but also want to talk about any solutions people think of

At the moment, poison and venom are in a bit of an awkward spot where it's very strong and doesn't scale at all with gear/strength/prayers at all, making it pretty much a no brainer wherever it is useable. Due to it's "set and forget" nature, the meta is just whack the monster until it applies and then switch to a better weapon, and because it is a static value, it's especially OP for lower level accounts. As a result, most bosses have been made immune entirely to both venom and poison with some exceptions.

My goal is to create discussion with the community here and try to find a way to rework this mechanic to something that is more interesting and useable. Please share your thoughts or solutions below.

Possible solution: Poison/venom anti heal
My idea is using poison to negate healing mechanics. This would include both natural regeneration as well as boss specific healing such as p3 warden enrage or verzik red crabs, which would make it useful at both regular monster slaying and bossing.

My proposed solution is to have poison procs generate "anti heal stacks" on the monsters instead of damaging them (or, a lower amt damage from poison as well as creating stacks). This would persist indefinitely or until they are cleansed by leaving combat or through boss specific mechanics/phase changes. Then, when they go to heal through any means, they would instead have to eat through their stacks, preventing all or some portion of it. I saw a lot of proposals talk about adding a "poison resistance" stat for bosses, which I think here would just affect the potency of the anti heal (50% resistance means a 10 heal would need 20 stacks instead of 10).

Possible issues:
Doesnt solve the "set and forget" nature of poison
Proposal: for regular monsters, I think set and forget is fine since usually fighting them meant to be less interactive and afk. But for bossing, the use of vulnerability windows would be the key. Allow bosses to only be vulnerable to poison at specific parts of the fight, as well as making poison fall off faster. That way, coordination is key to success. I imagine a scenario where warden p3 is susceptible to poison as he is taking damage from skulls, and everyone takes out a DDS and tries to proc on him on the same tick so his enrage heal is lower.

Poison is still a flat value, making it very strong on low levels and weaker on high levels
Proposal: the strength of poison could scale with combat level Currently combat level doesn't really do anything besides display a general measure of power. Having the potency scale with combat level should solve the issue of it being too strong at lower levels while also not complicating it much. Additionally, pure accounts wouldn't be hit as hard as if another level such as HP or attack level was used.
One other issue I see here though its the effrct on lvl3/snowflake accounts that rely on poison/venom to get boss/mob KC. Perhaps keep the old mechanics with some setup involved?

Poison is still significantly weaker than venom while at its core functions essentially the same way
Proposal: this one I'm definitely less certain about, but my thought would be to have them interact differently with poison resistance. The numbers will probably need tuning, but in the example of a 50% resistance and a 20 HP heal, poison would take 40 stacks off to reduce 20 HP of healing, while venom would take 20 stacks off instead but only reduce the healing by 10. As a compensation venom would stack faster and ramp up to a cap (and then be cleansed) and as a result would be better against bosses that have consistent healing vs burst healing

[crisp valve]

A while ago, Mod JagexGoblin explained the real reason why the majority of bosses are immune to venom/poison. What he had to say might surprise you.

It has nothing to do with poison/venom being “OP” as you stated. It’s due to a limitation in the way NPCs are coded.

An OSRS NPC is only able to have one timer assigned to it at a time. So having a timer assigned to it restricts that NPC from being poisoned.

You might notice that cows are immune to poison. That’s because they have a timer built into them that causes them to “moo” every so often.

Most bosses have timers built into them for similar reasons. Like how the godwars bosses have unique dialogue messages that they send every so often.

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While that's true, the reason I bring up the poison rework is because Jagex arcane has specifically commented on poison and venom in a reddit thread and that he was interested in looking into solutions to be able to introduce the mechanic more broadly. He specifically called it "incredibly powerful" and requiring zero interaction, which I agree with. So while what you mentioned may be the programming reason for why it's limited at the moment, what I want to address is how moving forward the mechanic can be reworked to make it more interesting and add flavor to pvm

[idle plover]

While true for cows and chickens, I can't find any evidence about it applying to any other boss. What has been stated several times by JMods is that venom is extremely strong and allows for essentially set and forget boss kills, which they aren't fond of.
I think a rework of it that allowed it to actual be useful in pvm without being outright OP is a cool idea.

Also, a majority of bosses aren't immune to poison, just venom.

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@idle plover Most new bosses nowadays are immune to both poison and venom:

-Huey
-Nex
-all moons
-all new wildy bosses (Callisto, Vetion, etc)
-Obor
-Amoxliatl
-royal titans
-zulrah
-Vorkath
-Muspah
-Nightmare
-Yama
-Whisperer + vard (surprisingly duke and Levi are not though)
-GGs
-Sire
-Cerb
-Araxxor
-Thermy
-Hydra
-Zuk
-Sol
-All CoX bosses
-All ToB bosses
-All ToA bosses

Notable exceptions are doom which is only immune to venom, as well as duke, whisperer, and a lot of the older pre 2007scape bosses like KQ and Chaos Ele are also vulnerable to poison

[idle plover]

Seems both things are correct, Venom is as he says broken on any long fight, whereas poison is for technical reasons + you'd want to always use it when you can

What with burn damage being made to not rely on timers since there's very few monsters immune to burn, I feel like a rework of both poison and venom to make them actually good and useable in more places would be neat.

[thin stream]

Yeah venom in its current state cannot be allowed to be as strong as it is. It NEEDS to be reworked if we want to see it used at all. Poison not really, but still could be nice to see it have a use in bossing

I think at the moment if venom is fully stacked it's nearly 2x the DPS of a thrall, which is insane

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Another possible suggestion is maybe poison can deal damage to monsters as they walk? So that way you have to kite them around the room to get the most effectiveness out of it