Poison weapons

[Sombre]

Recently I've noticed just how powerful weapons with a poison secondary effect are, particularly missile weapons. It seems that as long as they hit they deal their poison damage, regardless of whether they penetrate armour or even get parried by a shield. So you have a case where poison bows like those used by sauromatia are actually ideally suited to killing tower shielded heavy infantry and stuff with impenetrable protection. This really doesn't make much sense to me. I modded some blowpipes with poison for my lizardman nation and they were ripping through heavily armoured guys far too fast.

Would people here support a change so certain poison damage is only inflicted if the initial mundane damage punches past armour and parry? Obviously for stuff like poison slings it doesn't need to get past the armour - fair enough. But getting poisoned by a poison arrow bouncing off your shield or a blowdart pinging off your stone skin is pretty ridiculous.

[Digress]

It also has the added bonus of stripping glamour along with the hitpoints.

Which also doesn't make alot of sense.

[Renojustin]

Screaming and writhing from the pain of the poison just isn't very glamorous.

I was pretty sure that the weapon has to deal at least 1 point of damage for the poison to take effect.

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Renojustin said:
Screaming and writhing from the pain of the poison just isn't very glamorous.

I was pretty sure that the weapon has to deal at least 1 point of damage for the poison to take effect.

No, it doesn't. The poison from arrows affects the unit even when no damage is taken.

[Renojustin]

Definitely seems like a problem to me then; doesn't make sense, and too powerful.

Poison bow archers are awesome enough as it is. If they were supposed to be this powerful, up the poison damage IF it ever gets through, but not if it boinks off your shield or armor to begin with.

[calmon]

Why doesn't make sence? Arrows with small pouches of poison which explodes in clouds after hitting the ground.

[Endoperez]

That'd be like shooting stones with crossbows or something. Slings have -3 precision, and shooting arrows like that should have at LEAST the same malus.

It's even worse for blowpipes, and I'd be willing to pay to see someone blow a water balloon through a straw.


Is the poison #secondaryeffect or #secondaryeffectalways? If it's the latter, the fix can be modded in. If it's the first, it's a bug in regards to ranged weapons and #secondaryeffect.

[Sombre]

It's secondaryeffect afaik.

The theory that the arrows are tipped with poison gas or exploding liquid or something,... well I guess you can explain anything away if you try hard enough. To me that seems really silly though. You might as well say a wizard did it. It's clear that some weapons work that way, like the Skaven poison globes, like poison spit attacks or Ctisian poison slingers,.. but blowdarts, sauromatian arrows, poison daggers etc are obviously poison tipped and logically should need to do at least a point of mundane damage to work.

In gameplay terms it's problematic mainly in terms of modded units with poison ranged weapons, but in basegame it's part of the reason the sauromatian archers are so nuts. If they were required to do at least 1 point of mundane they'd still be great but wouldn't be capable of mowing down heavy infantry like they do now.

[Kristoffer O]

I thought that 1 p dmg was needed. Does the same apply to other secondary poison effects, or is this just a mistyping on the poison bow data?

[Sombre]

I'm 90% sure this applies to all weapons with a poison as a secondaryeffect. Give me 5 minutes and I'll test it though.

-5 minutes later-

I can say for sure that weak poison as a secondaryeffect on a missile weapon works even if it's parried and even if the missile weapon does 0 actual damage. I can't imagine the other poisons are different, nor stuff like flaming arrows damage.

Regarding poison as a secondaryeffect on melee weapons,.. I'm not sure. I'll test that next and post up my findings.