I think poison might feel better to use if it applied DoT before the enemy attacks.

[south harness]

As it stands right now, poison seems like a worse version of burn. Both do magic damage, but poison loses half stacks every turn while burn loses only one. I think some variety in the DoT types would make for more interesting builds, and personally feel like one specific change that would make the game more interesting would be to have poison apply before attacks. I’m not a game designer (yet) so I might have completely misjudged the DoT balance but at the moment I just try to avoid building poison when I can. Thoughts?

[peak kindle]

Poison, at least before Gods & Relics, was very easy to build damage with. Poison usually results in higher stacks initially while burn slowly ramps up. This means poison has a bigger payout on short fights while burn is stronger in longer fights

Problem is, G&R removed stat gain outside of vestiges and burn simply has more items aviable than poison at the moment, which is why it fells now less useful

[south harness]

Ahh ye that definitely makes sense. Would still be cool to see some variety in DoT though, even if minor. Like in Dead Cells, burn and poison work differently in that burn interacts with another status called oil and poison causes a toxic cloud if the enemy is killed near other enemies with a certain number of stacks. At the moment, DoT just sorta personally feels like “if you get stuck with it, you gotta build it” and not like something I ever actively seek out in a run.

[river glen]

Nah, poison damage is super strong on magic aspects, it also offer higher burst than the other two elementals.

Maybe some way to bypass shield might be good? Still makes it super strong though.

[south harness]

It may have some strengths, but for me personally that still doesn't outweigh the benefit of just building raw damage. At the moment, being able to hit stuff hard before it can hit you feels way better than stacking DoT effects. It feels like crap when I get killed by something in game only to have it die from poison a second later. Especially if that enemy only had like 10 hit points left.

[scenic lion]

Yeah, with any of the dots, the "apply the current dot damage using a binding" effect seems basically critical for making them feel good

[river glen]

Yeah you build raw damage from the DoT and kill stuff with it. If they don't die the DoT kills them instead.

I exclusively play magic damage characters and poison scales super well with them, for stuff I can't one shot they usually do a straight / cone / aoe attack that you are actually able to get 1 free proc of them, this usually kills them.

If it doesn't at least you got a huge chunk of their health off.

[south harness]

But I can just do the same thing with burn on the weaver

And I can avoid getting hit by the enemy if I just kill them outright. I’m not talking about waiting for the enemy to use a cone/line skillshot. I’m talking about the attacks where they just run up to you and poke you with a stick. The undogeable attacks. The fact that they have those attacks and there isn’t a way to counter them with DoT just makes it feel like a waste of resources. I could be building Vigorous or damage resistance instead of damage over time.

[snow falcon]

I think DoT is typically easier to scale tho. That's the upside

[oak flax]

My impression of the current iteration of DoTs is that you're less encouraged to solely rely on them as much as you are urged to still raise your damage with them being a supplement. This impression centers around the fact that all of them now give a mid-rank set bonus that adds % increases to your attacks based on the condition applied (burn, bleeding, poison, frost), which should not be overlooked, because you will see pretty great damage increases, so long as you are still pumping your general attack damage up.

Before, you could just not care about your actual damage and let the DoTs do the work. Now, you're expected to still hurt the enemy, letting those DoTs finish them if you can't. It's a better balance, imo.

[proven kindle]

^this. you can use the poison draft on a magic user then just shredder poison items that arent worth much for extra dmg vestige

also Toxin debuff is what you wanna go for with poison imo. thats way better than burn with it

[river glen]

Except burn does a lot less damage? Enemy spawns in a mix of both instant targets which are weaker and ones who AoE which are stronger.
The 3 element skills can straight up do a good chunk of damage before the DoT hits them.

Poison does the most DoT while having less base damage (Unless ascended for Putrify which does damage instantly)
Incendiary being the mid range of hitting on a small group. (50 Base vs Poison's 10 Base, hence scaling better for group kills and not DoT),

If we have about 50MP
Normal poison DoT
30 * 5 + (AP%+MP%) = 225 poison damage
Normal Incendiary DoT
8 * 10 + (AP%+MP%) = 120 burn damage
Clearly we can see the difference. (It's a 1.875x diff)
Weaver elemental threads does 45 damage. Rope burn does the same as above so it's overall bad. You could pair it with Incinerate but then you're better off with Strangulate.

Also, if you're playing Weaver you should not rely on the element skill to kill a group of enemies to begin with unless the bindings are ascended or you have high MP/AP.

In two turns, poison still does more damage. 225 vs 150.

[river glen]

Gotta hard disagree on this, Toxic is the worst one out of the three. In theory Purify has 10 > 30 base damage. This itself still makes it good even after the nerf. Adding your AP / MP / CD into account, this can scale to an amount that can do decent damage against smaller enemies while triggering poison on nearby tankier ones, with Precision 6, you can cast it multiple times which allows it to kill everything on the enemies' turn. Poison Dart did not change and straight up just hurts with 60 stack of poison, effectively doubling your poison DoT. The only use I can see Toxic is in group plays but then itself is pretty niche.