Poison weapons

[Renojustin]

Says right there on the poison bow description, and I'm sure blowguns as well... anyone WOUNDED by the weapon will be struck by this effect.

EDIT: Just tried it, and it seems to me that you definitely don't need to take a wound to get affected by the effect. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that this might get looked at within the next few patches, but at the same time, there's good reasons to keep it as it is too.

[Reay]

So would this make flaming arrows less useful against high protection units? Since they would have to do 1HP damage before the fire damage is activated?

So #secondaryeffect is supposed to only be activated if they wound the target? #secondaryeffectalways seems to be activated even if they do not hit?
It would be better if there was a #secondaryeffectonhit so it can be activated if it hits but does not wound.

[calmon]

Yes it would! If this bug will be fixed in future illwinter should consider to rebalance the arrow hit calculation.

[Sombre]

Possible solution to the poison bow problem is this:

Create a new poison bow ranged weapon with poison as the damage type
Add the mundane damage weapon ie ‘shortbow’ as a secondaryeffect

This should at least allow people with shields to parry the arrows – you still have the problem of armour not helping against poison when it should though (ie when you’d expect the poison only to apply if the projectile actually causes damage). You would however if the poison damage wasn’t automatically armour negating, which could be the case. I need to test this. You could then make stuff like poison blowpipes into an armour piercing weapon with a secondaryeffect of 1 capped mundane damage, if you felt that they should be able to hit unarmoured spots more often than arrows etc

[Wrana]

As I remember, poison blowpipes just never got used in regions where medium armor was in common use... So if they'd become useless it wouldn't be far from truth. I agree they are useless enough currently but just can't see them on regular battlefield in any case. Probably should be replaced with something else?
And yes, if poison bows, etc. work regardless of armor & attack roll, it should be fixed.

[Forrest]

I like the way poison bows work. I don't think they need fixing. Just because you don't like that the fumes from the poison smeared on the shield is a enough to poison a person does not mean I don't. The fumes are not burning them to ashes just making them feel bad which is quite common in the real world.

The poison works so long as the arrow bounces off the armor and leaves a mark. Sounds a lot like the US army manual dealing with chemical warfare.

[Sombre]

But the description of poison bows and KOs reaction to this thread suggest they aren't working the way they're supposed to.

As I've said numerous times - you can explain away just about anything. If your explanation was at least reasonable I might say 'yeah ok fair point'. But it isn't. It's silly. There's a clear difference in dom3 between stuff like poison spit or ctisian poison slings which produce aoe poison gas,.. and arrows/blowpipes with poisoned tips. For one thing, if an arrow or dart works the way you describe, why don't poison melee weapons? They can be parried by shields just fine without poisoning anyone.

And what's common in the real world? Feeling bad from fumes or these gas producing poison smearing arrows you refer to? Because I've never heard of anything like that being used in warfare. The only poison arrows I've heard of would require at the very /least/ contact with the skin. Additionally if you actually check the kind of damage done by 'weak poison' you'll see it's considerably worse than 'feeling bad'. That's the reason sauromatian archers can tear apart heavy infantry.

Ultimately this discussion is pretty pointless because, again, you can explain away just about anything. The key points here are that poison arrows don't work the way they are apparently intended to, don't work in an intuitive way, don't work like their real world historical counterparts and are limiting modding to an extent because we haven't figured out how to make 'if hurt then apply poison secondary' missile weapons.

I'm sure you disagree on all these points and that's fine. You can't make a thread about a change to dom3 without someone arguing the other side because they like things the way they are :]

If I can figure out a mod to 'fix' poison missile weapons then I will. Changing them in basegame is up to KO and seems unlikely to happen.