Severus wrote:
Thanks for the advice, Blue. Just wondering, could elemental craft boots and armor be a problem, as they add additional sources of poison damage over 3 seconds? The armor has passive poison resist, and the boots provide a %damage boost, but if the 3 second duration on both affects the duration of poison from my skills, then perhaps I should switch those items out.
Ya, which really kind of sucks. The biggest culprit in my opinion though is the psn dmg on necro heads which is just a plain old screw. You still may want to use them anyways - the boots at least.
Severus wrote:
I remember reading somewhere that poison damage defaults to the shortest duration, although I wonder if bosses all have reduced poison duration.
Psn dmg works very differently depending on what skill is being used to apply the damage. Here's the basics:
No skill - if you are just using a standard attack the psn durations all average out as PureRage stated.
Venom - this skill is neat because it sets all durations to the extremely short venom duration of .4 seconds. This doesn't magically boost the damage the other items do though, it just cuts their duration down allowing you to repeatedly strike. Example - if you are using a moonstone emerald that does 800 psn over 10 seconds you don't get that full 800 dmg in .4 seconds now. Instead you get 32 psn dmg over .4 seconds (80 dmg/sec * .4 seconds). This may seem like a screw, but it is there for the fast attack rate that Assasin's use.
Psn Strike - psn strike duration stays out of the average and is just added at the end. So if you have 3 sources of psn dmg other than your psn strike that are 10 seconds, 5 seconds and 6 seconds they will all average together to make a 7 second duration. Then you take that 7 seconds and ADD the duration of your psn strike. So if you have a 6 second psn strike, your TOTAL duration will be 13 seconds. Pretty handy for attacking bosses.
Rabies - rabies plays totally different and doesn't interact with other sorts of poison. I believe that it patiently waits until other sources of psn dmg have completed, and then it applies, but I haven't ever confirmed exactly what the heck it does. The duration of rabies is completely independent of any other psn you may be using though, that much is for sure.
Oh - and to answer your question, yes I do believe that bosses have psn reduction that I believe is tied in to their poison resist. The more psn resist they have, the shorter your psn duration (again, not something I have tested, just a hunch). Generally though it seems like the duration is pretty decent towards the end game giving you time to stab and run.